education

A new service and free iPhone application is set to bring e-textbooks for students right to their fingertips. CourseSmart is a service that allows students to "rent" ebook editions of over 7,000 textbooks. The application allows them to view these textbooks on their iPhone or iPod touch, and could have a significant impact on the textbook industry as a whole.

The University of Florida will be requiring students to own either an iPhone or iPod touch to enroll in their PharmD curriculum this fall, the school announced recently. "All entering PharmD students must have a iPod touch (or iPhone) and a computer meeting minimum UF and College of Pharmacy (COP) requirements," they said in an announcement on their website.

Classes on developing for the iPhone in one way or another have been popping up around the US, even though the strict NDA attached to the iPhone SDK remains in place. The NDA indirectly prohibits the sharing of information on how to write code for the iPhone, but that's not stopping North London's Qantm College from introducing their own iPhone Game Development course.

Abilene Christian University, the school that promised all of their new freshmen this fall would be getting either an iPhone 3G or an iPod touch as part of their tuition, is getting ready to make good on their promise this weekend. New students will be starting what they call their "mobile learning experience" on August 16, using the device for maps, real-time in-class surveys and quizzes, and probably a lot of Facebook and Super Monkey Ball.

With all of the buzz around developing for the iPhone, it's understandable that those preparing to enter the software development industry will want to prepare for developing on the new platform. Stanford seem to be trying to meet the demand. TUAW discovered that they're offering an entire computer science course starting this fall devoted solely to programming on the iPhone platform. Given that Apple has yet to lift the NDA for app development, we're not sure how they're going to pull it off.