The music, videos and mobile applications available through Apple’s iTunes Store get all the attention, but it might be time to acknowledge the increasingly varied and popular offerings of iTunes U, Apple’s catalog of lectures from colleges and universities around the world.

More than 600 schools post lectures to the two-year-old service, which recently got some added visibility when Apple rolled out iTunes 9 this fall: its own prominent category next to music, movies and podcasts.

Apple now says it has about 250,000 individual classes available to the public. That’s everything from the “The Biology of Autism” from the Stanford School of Medicine to “A Global History of Architecture” from M.I.T. Tuition may be sky-high on those campuses, but on iTunes, the lectures are free.

Near the head of the class, with more than 375,000 downloads a week, is Open University, a distance-learning institution based in Britain. The school said that last weekend its lectures on iTunes U crossed the 10-million-downloads mark.

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Tags: distance learning, free classes via itunes, itunes, itunes free classes, learning institution, mobile applications, virtual classrooms

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