The OU’s 52 courses on the app add to the OU’s extensive material on iTunes U which has now seen more than 50 million international downloads, with over 40,000 new downloads each day – another European first.
The most popular course on the iTunes U iPad app The New Entrepreneurs has more than 100,000 active subscribers with another six courses having over 50,000 subscribers each.
Last week a new course was released Moons: An Introduction which incorporates the OU’s first Multi-Touch iBook Moon Rocks: An Introduction to the Geology of the Moon, created using Apple’s iBooks Author.
The Moon Rocks iBook features moon rocks collected by Apollo astronaut and is available now on the iBookstore.
Geology students can view full screen interactive diagrams, photos and videos, panoramas and more on the iPad.
Included are features from the Open University Virtual Microscope with thin sections of moon rocks that can be explored under different light conditions, zoomed in on and rotated.
Martin Bean, Vice-Chancellor of The Open University, said “With more than 50 million downloads to date we know that students value our high-quality learning materials and that is really underlined by the speed with which we have reached one million iTunes U app course subscribers.
“The sheer versatility of our new iBook thinking presents a really exciting development for students, letting them jump though the page and into the rocks, to explore extra- terrestrial mineral structure.
“We plan to expand our brand new format library with highly interactive iBooks very soon.
“If you think that a slice of moon rock under a microscope looks fabulous in an iBook, just wait until you see what we can do with Art History!” he said.
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