Apple Wants to Reinvent Education (and Sell iPads)

Yesterday, Apple announced a series of related initiatives designed to modernize learning based around its iPad tablet. Apple is hoping to "reinvent textbooks" and change the way students learn with an updated iBooks 2 app, which works in tandem with interactive textbooks built with the iBooks Author desktop app, and an expansion of iTunes U that offers course materials and K-12 access. According to many this initiative will be revolutionary for textbooks and education.

For Apple “Reinventing the textbook,” is their number one initiative said SVP of Worldwide Marketing, Phil Schiller.

Apple announced iBooks 2, a free app for the iPad and iPhone that will replace the first version, which was announced alongside the original iPad in early 2010. The newest version of iBooks features iPad-specific textbooks from publishers McGraw-Hill and Pearson; titles from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt “are coming soon,” says Apple.

Apple also rolled out a Mac application called iBooks Author, which is similar in fit and finish to the company’s line of iWork programs and allows teachers to easily create their own interactive textbooks for use in class. Rosner demonstrated the program, dragging a video file onto a page and pulling in text from a word processing document.

The program features a library of pre-built interactive widgets, and you can drag in your own 3D models, Keynote presentations, pictures and other assorted media, all of which gets automatically formatted before being assembled and transferred to an iPad.

iBooks 2 authors can create engaging content for students in multiple ways, including multiple-choice questions with immediate feedback within the text, the ability to make notes and highlights that can be found in a single location as note cards or sprinkled throughout the text, ways to explore embedded graphics and 3D animations, and full-motion movies.

Still, adopting iPads for every student gives rise to cost concerns. Schools may negotiate bulk deals with Apple to provide iPads to every student, though tight budgets often rule out the iPad, even with an education discount as low as $420 US. Those costs may shift to parents as students may be expected to bring their own device.