ITunes U RSS Feeds

Question

I am an Admin at a Community College in VA that is part of a system of 23 Community Colleges. Our Systems Office also has an iTunes U instance and I am using RSS feeds from smart groups to give them dynamic content from our instance.
However every month or so the RSS feeds magically stop working. Here's the error message
iTunes U encountered the following error while trying to access the podcast RSS feed: iTunes U could not update the content in this group because iTunes U could not reach the specified RSS feed.
Any ideas?

Answer 1

Apple allows you to interact with iTunes U as an administrator through an XML-based web service. It's described in the iTunes U administrators guide:
http://tinyurl.com/5nm73n
In particular, you're looking for the UpdateGroup web service directive:
http://tinyurl.com/bmh2xw
If you send Apple an UpdateGroup directive, referring to a specific group (tab) within a course that feeds from one of your RSS servers, you're asking Apple to process the feed "now" (where "now" is defined to be "as soon as possible") as opposed to having to wait for an overnight feed refresh.
Have a look at the documentation ... if you're a little bit of a developer, it should make some sense. If not, I owe someone from Apple a favor and might give you a simpler way of using the directive ... without requiring you to write code yourself.