Stanford’s latest iPhone and iPad apps course now free on iTunes U

Stanford’s popular iPhone and iPad app development course for Apple’s iOS 5 is now available to the world through iTunes U.

Online learners hear the same lectures as classroom students, but do not get Stanford credit or access to instructors.

Instructor Paul Hegarty attributes the course popularity to the appeal of Apple products and the instant gratification of creating apps for mobile devices. "There’s something about developing for the iOS platform that’s really exciting and fun because it runs on devices that everybody has in their purses or pockets, " he said.

"There aren’t a lot of courses you can take that when you get to the end, to your final project, you can take it out of your pocket and show your friends."

Hegarty said that his students develop a wide array of applications for the iPhone and iPad, including many that improve or automate their daily lives. Those include apps that manage laboratory experiments, keep track of food choices at campus eateries, or access the works of Shakespeare. Games and social networking applications are also popular.

John Cast, an electrical engineering student who is taking the class in a Stanford classroom, said that he learned about the course by watching earlier versions on iTunes U. Cast is working on applications that archive historical memorabilia and improve FM radio tuning.

"One of the coolest things about teaching this class is just seeing the creativity that gets applied," Hegarty said. "It’s really quite amazing."

Developers unfamiliar with Apple’s operating systems must learn a new programming language, Objective-C, if they hope to master the apps course. Stanford students take a year of computer science classes and learn the technique of object-oriented programming before tackling the iOS development class.

Two Stanford prerequisite courses, Programming Methodology and Programming Abstractions , are available on iTunes You.

Nikil Viswanathan, a computer science student, said that the class is "really, really, good" in large part because Hegarty doesn’t just teach students a new language, he teaches the "philosophy of how we program in Objective-C" and "puts it into the context of entire computer science program."

Most introductory computer science classes are abstract, but Objective-C is used to build applications for mobile devices, so students learn the programming basics and apply them right away. "I don’t think that what I’m doing is just teaching them programming," Hegarty said. "It’s an opportunity to teach them some computing fundamentals in a real world environment."

Hegarty said he enjoys that so many people benefit from the work he puts into preparing the course. "You really feel like as an instructor that the work gets leveraged," he said. "It’s really rewarding."

Sarah Jane Keller is a science-writing intern at the Stanford News Service

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Dan Stober, Stanford News Service: (650) 721-6965, dstober [a] stanford (p) edu