If you are planning on making your iTunes U course public through the iTunes U storefront,
there are a couple things that you should consider.
The first thing you should consider, and I'm just going to go into one of my courses here,
is the organization of your materials section.
So I'm in iTunes U course manager now, I'm going to click on materials.
And here is my list of materials for this sample course.
For iTunes users on a desktop or Mac computer, what they see when they click on a course
in iTunes is a raw of list of your materials, so it is very important that you have good
labeling practices, the list of your materials matches your course icon, they have some meta
data in the description field, as much as you can fill in as possible, is the best thing.
So if I'm here and I'm the materials section, if I want to clean up what some of this looks
like, I can go down here for example in this document, this PDF.
I can click on the i and click the edit button and I can change the data that is in here,
I can change what the title looks like, the author, and the description field.
The description field is important because that is this field that shows up here for
the desktop user of iTunes.
Now the app optimized for the iPad, so some of these considerations you don't have to
take for iPad users, but again if you are making your course public and it is going
to be available for desktops, mac computers, and iPads and iPhones, then you should really
consider making sure it looks as clean as possible.
So after you have cleaned the sort of labeling process for your materials, the next thing
that you can do is organize your materials.
And all you do to do that is click a material, drag and drop it wherever you want it to be
in the list.
So I'm just dragging and dropping my materials in the order that I want my students to look
at them at.
There is a bit of a glitch right at the moment where it is not saving or does not have a
save button here on the materials page, so easiest sort of force this to save in the
order that you wanted is to click on the log out under your name here, under Sign Out and
that will force it save in the order that you want.
If you don't do that there is a chance that it will revert back to whatever list it was
in before.
The other thing that you need to consider before making your course public, is your
web links.
Currently in the desktop version of iTunes, web links do not come through.
You can have web links in your description and those will be active, but if you have
put in your posts section or materials section any web links, they don't show up in here.
So one thing that I recommend is creating a PDF that, say just like in this course here,
that says external course links.
So that your desktop users can go in here and find that external course links PDF, download
it and will have all the links available to them.
Unfortunately, this is an issue right now with public courses, because there is a lot
of great materials that you want to link to from the internet, but right now you sort
of have to capture those and put them in a PDF and share them with your students that
way.
And again the easiest way to do that is as you are creating your posts is to copy and
paste them into a word or pages documents, then save that as a PDF and upload it to your
course.
If not, the end user that is using iTunes on a desktop will not receive all of the links
that you have put in your course.
So those are a few big things that I would consider before making your course public,
sort of as final to-dos, again make sure your materials section is in the order you want
and your web links are in a PDF somewhere in your course so that desktop users can get
to them.
Thank you.