Taking Steve Jobs’ dream of making paper textbooks obsolete forward, Apple on Tuesday announced expansion of iBooks textbooks and the iTunes U Course Manager into new markets across Asia, Latin America, and Europe.
This expansion brings the total number of countries with access to iBooks Author to 51 now including India, Brazil, Italy and Japan and iTunes U to 70 now including Russia, Thailand and Malaysia.
The tools and content available for iPad will provide teachers with new ways to customise learning for their students. Apple’s senior vice president of Internet Software and Services, Eddy Cue, said “We can’t wait to see how teachers in even more countries will create their new lesson plans with interactive textbooks, apps and rich digital content.”
iBooks was launched in 2012 with an aim to make iPads the primary classroom tool. The company’s iBooks Textbooks service offers full screen textbooks with interactive animations, rotating 3D diagrams, quizzes, flick-through photo galleries and tap-to-play videos for iPad users.
The iPad maker has confirmed that it has published almost 25,000 educational iBooks Author titles, covering 100 percent of the U.S. high school core curriculum and secondary education in the UK, including content from publishers like Cambridge University Press, Oxford University Press and Hodder Education.
iTunes U, too, in the last two years, has done quite well for itself by offering teachers over 750,000 free resources with which to build a course. This Apple service gives teachers the ability to create their own courses for the iPad, including video and audio lectures, books, presentations, and a list of assignments using their own documents as well as content from the Internet, iBooks, iTunes U collections, or iOS apps.
Amazon, Boundless, Inkling, Coursera, and Chegg are some of the rival companies that are working to replace the textbook with their own same as Apple.
