In case you haven’t been watch­ing … Apple’s iTune­sU has start­ed strik­ing out in new direc­tions. When it launched a lit­tle more than a year ago, iTune­sU served up free edu­ca­tion­al con­tent exclu­sive­ly from uni­ver­si­ties. Now, it has gone “beyond the cam­pus.”

With this move, Apple is now fea­tur­ing edi­fy­ing mate­r­i­al from such insti­tu­tions as The New York Pub­lic Library, the 92nd Street Y (nice look­ing col­lec­tion here), the Nation­al Sci­ence Dig­i­tal Library, and the Cen­ter for Strate­gic and Inter­na­tion­al Stud­ies. Also in the mix, you’ll find pod­casts from the ResearchChan­nel. Based out of the Uni­ver­si­ty of Wash­ing­ton, the ResearchChan­nel brings togeth­er con­tent from lead­ing research and aca­d­e­m­ic insti­tu­tions (see mem­ber list here), and then dis­trib­utes it to con­sumers most­ly through satel­lite and cable, but also via the web. iTune­sU is a fair­ly new dis­tri­b­u­tion chan­nel. And even new­er is YouTube. (See their chan­nel here.)

What kind of con­tent does the ResearchChan­nel serve up? Here’s a sam­pling of the pro­grams you’ll find: Dark Ener­gy, or Worse: Was Ein­stein Wrong?; Bioen­er­gy and Bio­fu­els: An Overview; The Psy­chol­o­gy of Blink: Under­stand­ing How the Mind Works Uncon­scious­ly; The Teen Brain; and Mesopotamia to Iraq: Per­spec­tives on the Mid­dle East.

The ResearchChan­nel, I should men­tion, is not the only ven­ture in this line of busi­ness. The UChan­nel (for­mer­ly the Uni­ver­si­ty Chan­nel), com­ing out of Prince­ton Uni­ver­si­ty, offers a rather sim­i­lar prod­uct: Web site — iTunes — Rss feed — YouTube . Like­wise, FORA.TV does a good job of aggre­gat­ing smart video: Web site — iTunes — Rss feeds — YouTube.

For more smart audio con­tent, check our Ideas & Cul­ture Pod­cast Col­lec­tion.

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