Stanford Launches iPhone/iPad App Course on iTunesU (with New Peer-to-Peer Learning Features)

Just about every­body these days is devel­op­ing an app, right? A few lucky coders might see their work up in lights if they act fast.

Apps designed by the first 1,000 devel­op­ers to reg­is­ter for Stanford’s new online course on iTune­sU will be con­sid­ered for show­cas­ing on the university’s iTunes site.

The course, Cod­ing Togeth­er, is based on the pop­u­lar class­room ver­sion taught by Paul Hegar­ty at Stan­ford. It cov­ers iOS 5 and focus­es on apps for the iPhone and iPad plat­form. Sign-up ends on July 6 and the course runs until August 27. Lec­tures from ear­li­er ver­sions of the iTune­sU course were incred­i­bly pop­u­lar. Some were down­loaded more than 10 mil­lion times. But the new iTune­sU course offers some new social net­work­ing and learn­ing tools.

Stan­ford has teamed up with the social learn­ing plat­form Piaz­za to enable stu­dents to pose ques­tions to course instruc­tors, oth­er stu­dents and app devel­op­ers around the world 24 hours a day. It’s a fea­ture that on-cam­pus Stan­ford stu­dents already have access to, but it’s a first for iTune­sU. And it adds a whole new degree of inter­ac­tiv­i­ty to the iTune­sU course expe­ri­ence.

As of Thurs­day after­noon, 11,065 stu­dents enrolled in the course, with signups con­tin­u­ing in the hun­dreds per day. And, col­lab­o­ra­tive study groups have spon­ta­neous­ly popped up all around the world — from Sil­i­con Val­ley, to Brazil and Ger­many, to India, Chi­na and Bangladesh.

Again, you can find the Cod­ing Togeth­er lec­tures on iTune­sU here, and sign up for Piaz­za­’s peer-to-peer learn­ing groups here. We also have 50 more Free Com­put­er Sci­ence cours­es in our col­lec­tion of 500 Free Cours­es Online.

Kate Rix is an Oak­land-based free­lance writer. Check out her work at .