Can any institution be on iTunes U and can the course be restricted somehow?

Hello all,

I'm working with a client and we're pretty interested in using iPads as a learning platform in our course that we're putting together. iTunes U seems to be a great tool and we're looking at using that as well as an optional tool to add to our workflow.

Firstly, I'm curious to know if any instituion that offers a course is able to get onto iTunes U. I suppose you could even think of it as an internal company course.

I've looked around for answers and I'm still a bit confused. Some say you have to be an accredited education institution, and others say you don't have to be accredited and it's just a matter of Apple approving your institution to be on iTunes U via this page https://eduapp.apple.com/

Secondly, is there a way to restrict access to the courses you provide? The reason is that the iTunes U tools look great for managing materials and teaching a course, but we don't want just anyone being able to access the materials since the course is a paid course. We want to be able to use the tools, but somehow have only the people that actually take the course be able to access the materials on iTunes U.

As a side note, we're looking at iBooks Author to create our textbooks. We won't be selling them on the iBooks store, but we're curious if the only way to get them on the student's (institution-provided) iPads is to manually upload them through iTunes via the Books tab in the iPad sync window. Can iTunes U store textbooks?

Furthermore, we're looking at using Apple Configurator to manage the class iPads that we hand out. Does this also support loading our textbooks onto it? Or would we have to manually do them one-by-one?

Thanks for your time and any answers are appreciated!