The first university to offer public access to lectures, concerts and courses on iTunes U in 2005, Stanford recently hit another milestone with free online education.

As of March 14, over 50 million audio and video files have been downloaded from Stanford’s iTunes U page, the Stanford Report announced Monday.

This new benchmark means that Stanford lectures have been accessed 10 million times since the start of the current academic year, when the University reached its 40 millionth download mark.

Stanford claimed one of the larger shares of downloads from iTunes U, which had 600 million total downloads in September and which shows current estimates of 700 million visits.

Stanford has been offering free access to select course lectures for seven years now, with over 300,000 subscribers and current full course offerings in Colonial and Revolutionary America; Programming Abstractions, Methodology and Paradigms; and Developing Apps for iOS.

Lectures from the collection on iPad and iPhone Application Development boast all but two of the top 25 downloads from the Stanford page.

-Kristian Davis Bailey