[Larry French]

Is anyone having a problem with their iTunes U feeds failing to update reliably?

Every day we have several feeds (iTunes U course page groups) that fail to update, with an error ": XML document structures must start and end within the same entity. Verify that the feed specified in the feed URL field is valid, and then try again."

We can always update the feed manually in iTunes, but sometimes it takes multiple attempts.

This problem came to our attention during the Fall 2011 semester, but there may have been some failures before that. Since iTunes tries to update the feed daily, it could easily fail once and work the next day, without anyone reporting the problem. We have started paying more attention to the email generated by iTunes when the update fails. We have been running ESS 4.0 since Summer 2011.

There were not many failures at the start of this semester. I thought the problem may have gone away, but it has gotten worse as the semester progressed. There were 14 failures today.

We have been using iTunes with Echo since 2009, and this was not a problem until recently.