In the School of Computing, Electronics and Mathematics we give each a student an Ipad mini, to help with their learning. The Itunes University is one way to deliver content to the students in format that is suited to the ipad mini. Last week, Dr Nick Outram presented a tutorial on using the ItunesU course manager. to create courses.
It looked like a convenient way to deliver notes to the students. I don't like the way pdf documents are displayed on the Ipad. It looked like a good way to combine video and text in a more coherent way than the Moodle system we use to store all of our teaching material.
There was a way to input mathematics into the Ibooks system using standard latex format. Looking online afterwards, it is not clear how complete the coverage of latex syntax is. Also there is a lot of material in latex format. It looks difficult to convert a big latex document to Itunes format. I believe that the students could annotate the documents.
Nick had used the Itunes course manager for a number of courses. It had been popular with the students.
I think I might use this course in the new mathematical programming module, which I am teaching next year. One of my tutorial students told me he was disappointed that the Ipads were not used more.
