UK university offers lectures for free in iTunes

University College London becomes the first European university to offer free lessons through iTunes. It will offer video and audio lectures from leading academics.

Currently Apple in collaboration with major U.S. universities like UC Berkeley, Yale, Harvard, MIT, Stanford and others, offer free lessons via podcasts and videos in iTunes. You can access them by clicking the categories tab “iTunes U” in iTunes. It is free for the students and for the public.

Starting today, University College London will distribute lectures free through iTunes U. They will offer both audio and video materials and students can download it directly to their iPods or any music/video player. If you don’t have any music player then you can listen in at the iTunes player itself.

It will include lectures from leading academics. To begin with, they will offer lectures on neuroscience, the university’s “Lunch time lectures” and an audio news round-up.

Professor Peter Mobbs at University College London told BBC:

"Our students will be able to revisit materials presented to them in lectures, so they can learn anywhere and anytime,"

University College London will become the first European university to make its content free in iTunes. Previously they provided free podcasts of lectures for their students, but now they make it available for everyone.

A spokesperson for University College London said that the service would appeal to "techno-literate students" and "reach new audiences around the world".

You can find a wide variety of of topics in iTunes U such as business, engineering, health and medicine, fine arts, history, humanities, science, social science, language, literature, mathematics, teaching and education and more. More than 60 universities are participating so you will find a wealth of knowledge there.

To see how iTunes U works, click the demo here.