Online classes are a hit at iTunes U

Harvard, Yale, Oxford and Stanford were all in the top 10 - and, no, we are not talking about this year's world university rankings. Lectures posted by those leading universities were among the 10 most popular items in November on Apple's iTunes U - the latest technology fad to sweep campuses around the world.

Number one on the chart was Oxford's Critical Reasoning for Beginners, Part 1, followed by Stanford's Developing Apps for iOS and Yale's How to Write a Business Plan. All are available for downloading from iTunes U, on Apple's iTunes Store.

More than 800 universities around the world distribute their learning materials through the iTunes U website, and some seem to take its list of most popular downloads almost as seriously as university league tables.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology was moved to issue a press release when a lecture on electricity and magnetism by its renowned physics professor Walter Lewin bagged the top spot ahead of a talk by Apple co-founder Steve Jobs at Stanford, shortly after the launch of iTunes U.

Among the most recent institutions to sign up are Chinese University (CUHK) and the Open University of Hong Kong.

'Like our other teaching and learning support tools, our link with iTunes U has been welcomed by students and teachers at CUHK,' said Philip Leung, the university's director of information technology services.

'In September, our tracks or individual content items on iTunes U were accessed 57,718 times by local and global users. We believe we can further improve that access by continually promoting the service to our teachers and students, and producing more and higher-quality content.'