Hi Ken, thanks for the feedback. Your tip will hopefully help others, but our situation is different, I figured it out from the above webcast, which is probably available on-demand now. BTW, I did not check the defective help web form again, and did log into iTunes to try to get into the Course Manager web page. I have had an AppleID/iTunes Store Account for a long time, associated with our iTunesU site as its admin, and I can log into the site fine through iTunes.
I believe the problem is that we don't have a public site. We have copyrighted content in our podcasts, and some of the faculty don't want their course material public. So, the only way to get to it is through our local authetication process. High level oveview:
http://deimos.apple.com/rsrc/doc/iTunesUAdministrationGuide/AdministeringSiteAcc ess/chapter_7_section_3.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/AdminGuide-CH4-SW13
Course Manager works only on public sites. An additional future complication for us will probably be that, when and if we ever go public, we will have to change the way we manage the public side, there was also an Apple transition a couple of years ago to Public Site Manager, which we have never used.
Now, with Course Manager, you can have a public course with a "secret" or unpublished URL, this helps with limiting access to copyrighted or private material. You can distribute the URL only to selected individuals, and request they don't share it. However, that is not good enough for us, nor, I believe, for most institutions that want to limit access to content to students enrolled in a course.
Reading the tea leaves for the future, it seems to me that eventually when the "new" iTunes U matures they will provide some type of authentication, it seems to be a big missing feature for course materials. Not all on-line courses are "open" nor should they all be. Whether authentication will be based on Apple IDs, something else, or the current authentication system is also an unknown. Hopefully they will not depreciate the current one, but there are very few people skilled enough to implement it, imho, which severely limits its use. We were luck enough to find one.
Thanks for your insights,
Frank
