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The iTunes U app will be shut down at the end of 2021, Apple announced this week.
The app, founded in 2007, is credited with playing a central role in opening up higher education to the public. Institutions such as Stanford University; the University of California, Berkeley; Duke University; and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology all shared free educational content on the app in audio, video or ebook format.
Some university courses shared on the app were so popular that they were downloaded millions of times. Stanford’s iPhone Application Programming course, for example, reached one million downloads in under seven weeks in 2009.
In recent years, however, the app was not regularly updated by Apple, leading some users to theorize that it would soon be shut down. This week that theory was confirmed.
Access to the app and all its content will continue until the end of 2021. The company has provided detailed instructions on how users can save their materials or transfer them over to the Schoolwork app, which is used predominantly by teachers in K-12 and has been a focus of recent investment in education apps from Apple, alongside the Classroom app for iPads and Apple School Manager.
Apple also announced this week that its publishing platform iBooks Author will no longer be updated and won’t be available to new users after July 1. Users are encouraged to transition to newer publishing platform Pages.
