Welcome to the University of iTunes

Via CNN.com:

The wisdom of business professors, once only available to MBAs and business students, can now be accessed by anybody with an Internet connection.

Hundreds of universities, and a growing number of business schools, are making recordings of lectures, seminars and conferences available to the general public via Web sites such as iTunes and YouTube.

Leading business schools including University of Cambridge Judge Business School, Fuqua School of Business, and Yale School of Management make course content available for download through iTunes University (iTunes U), part of the of the iTunes online store.

That means those whose budget won’t stretch to a two-year MBA can simulate the experience at home — or at work, in the gym or anywhere else they choose. And even better for money-conscious learners, the iTunes U content can all be downloaded free of charge.

Begun as an experiment in partnership with Apple, all new MBAs at HEC are provided with an iPod Touch. Around half of the MBA lectures are filmed using an automatic camera system and the footage is made available for students to download and view on their iPhones.

YouTube EDU was launched in March this year and hosts the YouTube channels of hundreds of universities. Earlier this month it added content from 45 universities in Europe and Israel and now holds videos of lectures and discussions provided by business schools including INSEAD, ESCP Europe and University of California Haas School of Business.

Launched at the same time as YouTube EDU, Academic Earth hosts videos from U.S. universities including Harvard, Yale and Princeton, although the business content is provided almost exclusively by Stanford University.

Offering less audio/visual content, but still full of business school information, MIT’s Open Course Ware site gives free access to almost all MIT course content, including extensive lecture notes, assignments and exams from MIT’s Sloan School of Management.

Interested in the “Advanced Topics in Real Estate Finance?” You can download the complete lecture notes from Sloan’s 2007 course on the subject at MIT’s Open Course Ware site.

Other universities have their own Open Course Ware sites and the Open Course Ware Consortium has been set up as an agglomerator site, providing content from more over 200 higher education institutions.

But it’s iTunes U that’s generating the most interest. The University of Oxford says there have been more than one million downloads from its iTunes U site, while Stanford University says its course on creating iPhone applications was downloaded more than one million times in just seven weeks.

This week’s most popular business download on iTunes U is a University of Oxford lecture called “Entrepreneurship and the Ideal Business Plan.”