In April 2009 Stanford University announced that its iPhone Application Programming course had broken the 1 million download mark from the Apple iTunes site. And it did it in record time - less than seven weeks.

The course is nothing more than a series of classroom videos being taught by a team of Apple engineers. But the price was set at that very attractive price point of "free." One catch though, only people who were enrolled at Stanford University received credits for the course.

With over 200,000 courses from over 200 different institutions to pick from on iTunes U, and all of them free to anyone who wants to take them, Apple is quickly becoming the world leader in courseware aggregation. The obvious question to ask is "what is Apple's motivation for doing this?" and "how do they intend to make money?"

History of iTunes U

Shortly after Apple opened its iTunes Store in April 2003, the company started receiving requests from colleges to post courses on the site. Initially the requests were directed to the podcast section, but as the numbers grew, Apple devised a strategy for adding an entirely new division.

iTunes U was formally in May 2007. The service was created to manage, distribute, and control access to educational audio and video content for students within a college or university as well as the broader Internet.