Educational
Television
in the Schools
Challenges
and case studies in deploying
ETV for schools, colleges and
universities.
by
Ken
Freed
Part 1 of
2
All
educational institutions, from kindergarten through
university, are markets for ventures involved in
the production, distribution and display of
educational TV content. In this chapter, we will
examine the leading trends and challenges in the
development and deployment of educational
television aimed at schools, colleges and
universities. We also will identify valuable
business opportunities arising from the delivery of
educational video content in learning
institutions.
THE
CHANGING ROLE OF TELEVISION IN THE
SCHOOLS
The
market for educational TV content in schools must
be viewed with an eye to where television fits into
the learning process. The traditional pedagogical
method in western society followed the Aristotelian
model a teacher in front of the classroom
expounding on a subject, perhaps with the
assistance of textbooks laying open on the
students' desks, followed with quizzes and tests by
which students demonstrate their memorization. In
more enlightened schools, the teacher might employ
the Socratic method of asking leading and probing
questions that guide and inspire the students to
reach their own conclusions. The conflict is
between teaching students what to think versus how
to think.
More modern understandings
of educational process, however, significantly
expand the range of possibilities. Research by
scholars like Howard Gardner at Harvard has shown
that people learn through a wide range of
modalities, visual, auditory, kinesthetic, and that
we have multiple intelligences. A student who has
trouble with algebraic equations, for instance, may
have a talent for spatial geometry. Students
without a natural physical "intelligence" for
sports could possess a natural intelligence for
medicine, music, writing, painting, or developing
virtual worlds on a computer, or comprehending
subtle subatomic transmutations occurring in the
center of a distant star about to go nova. Given so
many different kinds of intelligence, educational
research now theorize, the modern teacher must be
willing to use as many different learning
modalities as there are students. Teachers now must
adjust to students instead of the more traditional
approach where the students must adjust to the
teachers... or else!
In the midst of this
revolution in educational theory and practice, the
television no longer fills the same niche in the
classroom that has become familiar since the
"babble box" replaced the filmstrip and movie
projector. Instead of being a substitute "talking
head" that the substitute teacher can use instead
of talking to the class about a topic that the
surrogate instructor is ill-equipped to teach, the
TV today is an integral part of the entire
educational process. Courses are designed with an
educational video component built into the
curriculum along with books, lectures, discussions,
demonstrations, projects, field trips, and all of
the other modes of learning being used so students
can master a subject.
While a television may
still be the focus of attention by all students
within a classroom, what technically is called
"point-to-multipoint," increasing levels of
personalization and interactivity possible with
advanced television systems now allows the TV to
serve for multipoint-to-point,
multipoint-to-multipoint, and point-to-point
communications. A multipoint-to-point example is
when a secondary school student with access to a
multichannel system uses content from several TV
sources (The Open University, Discovery, Knowledge
TV) to write a report. A multipoint-to-multipoint
example is when students at a dozen colleges uses
video cameras for a live teleconference via
satellite with the scientists at the south pole.
And an example of point-to-point communication
would be the community cable system where the
primary school teacher posts a password-protected
video or teletext message for a student's parents
about the homework assignment for their child, who
was home that day with the flu.
These examples also
suggest that the video employed in education can be
live or recorded, transmitted by a broadcaster or
pay TV service, and the video can be pre-packaged
as a tape or disk for replay whenever a student
wants. In fact, the desire for control over the
educational content displayed on the screen may be
the strongest psychological factor driving
educational TV today. Influenced by the high-degree
of control over content on the computer screen made
possible by the Internet and CD-ROMs, students of
all ages are seeking that same degree of control
over the contents of television screen as delivered
from broadcasters, pay TV operators, videotapes,
and interactive digital video disks. The more
control students exert over the contents of the
screens from which they learn, the more sense of
ownership they feel for their learning outcomes.
When students feel motivated to learn, nothing can
stop their education.
To better understand the
issues at hand, here are four case studies:
CASE STUDY
1: THE EBU EDUCATIONAL TV UNIT
With
270 million Europeans having an interest in the
quality of education at 175,000 local schools, a
major hurdle facing educational facilities is
finding high-quality educational TV content to
display. One international organization working
toward this goal is the Geneva-based Educational
Television Unit of the European Broadcast Union
(EBU) headed by Robert Winter. Created in October
1996, the ETV Unit of EBU is self-funded through
subscriptions from 12 member countries &emdash; the
United Kingdom, Switzerland, Sweden, Spain,
Slovenia, the Netherlands, Italy, Ireland, Germany,
Finland, Denmark and the Czech Republic. Their
mission is developing and then delivering
high-quality educational content to diverse
learners in schools, workplaces and at home.
EBU now operates 13
satellite transponder channels, yet in autumn 1998
they will begin MPEG-2 compression, greatly
expanding the number of channels that EBU
subscribers are broadcasting to the 270 million
viewers in more than 100 million households across
Europe. Presently, the largest EBU audiences are
the 70 million viewers attracted to the annual
Eurovision song contest and the annual
international summer game show, "It's a Knockout."
Most recently EBU applied to the European Space
Agency for a bouquet of 50 to 58 digital channels
dedicated to niche programming, including
educational services.
Five school-related ETV
Unit projects merit special attention
here.
Educational
Video-On-Demand Project -- The Unit has
formed a partnership with the ICL corporation to
propose to the European Union in Brussels the
establishment of an educational video-on-demand
network serving schools and colleges. ICL would
provide the high-capacity digital video server and
related network services to deliver educational
content produced by the members states of the ETV
Unit. In the early phase of the project, once
approved, each member would upload two to three
houses of educational video material in its own
national language. Offering multilingual and
multicultural programming is one of the mandates
for the ETV Unit, and this VOD project would serve
as a showcase for the best educational TV
programming in Europe.
Digital Shakespeare
Project -- The Unit has acquired worldwide
distribution rights to "Digital Shakespeare," a
multimedia creation from 110 Productions in the UK.
They plan on developing a television series,
producing videotapes (and perhaps DVDs) from the
series, publishing a CD-ROM with a textbook, and
posting a website supporting the Digital
Shakespeare project. While the general public
certainly is an audience for this venture,
educational institutions are the chief target
market, especially secondary schools and
colleges.
Science Bank
-- The ETV Unit is the exclusive distributor of the
new EBU co-production, "Science Bank," a series of
short programmes for students aged 14-16 years.
Available for broadcast starting in April 1998, the
programmes features graphical explanations of
scientific concepts along with practical
demonstrations and investigations of scientific
principles, like the experiments conducted in
students' classroom. The series also promotes
student interest in science careers. Programmes
ready for preview include "Motion of Particles,"
"Electrochemistry," "Patterns of Reactivity," and
"Raw Materials."
EC Private &
Public Partnerships -- As one of the
founding members of the Private & Public
Partnerships group of the European Commission, part
of the pan-European SchoolsNet project, the Unit is
working to create links between private enterprise
and such entities as public service broadcasters,
schools, universities, public libraries, and
community service organizations. The aim is to
bolster funding for wiring educational institutions
for high-speed Internet access by pan-European
NetDays, and to create "knowledge resource centers"
with educational video components. Private players
involved in this effort so far include France
Telecom, Cisco Systems, , America Online,
Compuserve, ICL, IBM, and Apple Computers (Apple's
eMate is the #1 European leader, a marked contrast
to Apple's weak position behind Microsoft in the
USA). This association, formed in 1996, was the
model for the Public Private Partnership created in
the USA during 1997 to support the Public
Broadcasting Service.
European Education
Partnership ( EEP) -- Slated to begin in
1998 under the auspices of the European Commission,
EEP is a follow-on to the Public & Private
Partnership created as a response to the pressures
of local and national financial deprivation in the
educational sector, coupled with a need to exploit
the opportunities and benefits offered by
interactive digital media. Promoting pan-European
cooperation though the common cause of education,
EEP is an association of commercial companies that
includes France Telecom, Deutche Telecom, British
Telecom, Belgecom, ICL, Apple, IBM, Cisco, and Sun.
The Educational Television Unit of the EBU and BBC
Education have joined as "observers," and they are
the only representatives of ETV content providers.
According to Winter, "EEP could signal a potential
major sea change in the responsibilities for the
delivery of educational television in Europe."
Beyond these activities,
the Educational TV Unit also works with diverse
print publishers to develop video or multimedia
products for distribution to schools and colleges
and universities. The unit also advocates inclusion
of educational content in the trials of interactive
cable television services around Europe.
CASE STUDY
2: RMI, AN EDUCATIONAL VIDEO
DISTRIBUTOR
The
American company RMI started in 1966 as a venture
capital company capital. After president and CEO
Dave Little took over in 1976, a series of
transactions gave RMI copyright control over a
library of video programmes from a vocational
technical school in Wisconsin specializing in
welding and car repair. A default loan next gave
RMI the control over the library of a video company
in Seattle that produced how-to tapes about such
varied topics as skiing and interior decoration.
This in the early Eighties, when schools were
starting to make the transition from expensive 3/4
inch U-matic machines to the much-less expensive
1/2 inch VCR. Already the 1/2 inch Beta tape format
was being replaced by VHS (despite the fact Beta
video was better), but video producers still had to
manufacturer tapes in all three formats.
Through the remainder of
the Eighties, RMI underwent a transition of their
own and emerged in the early Nineties as a leading
royalty-paying distributor (and sometimes producer)
of educational video tapes for elementary schools,
secondary schools and colleges. Today RMI rents
3500 titles priced per tape from $14.95 up to $125.
With an average production budget of $60,000 per
video, Little observes, recovering costs requires
very effective marketing.
RMI also offers 26
complete telecourses at $55 per course, which means
13 one-hour tapes or 26 half-hour tapes. RMI only
sells telecourses to educational institutions, not
individuals. When schools order a telecourse from
the catalogue, RMI duplicates and ships the
requisite tapes, which the school loans to the
student for the semester. At the end of the term,
the tapes are returned to the school and then to
RMI. Since RMI entered the telecourse business in
1991, this activity has grown to comprise 35
percent of their total annual revenues. Other
revenues come from single tape sales to curriculum
dealers (40 percent) plus direct sales to schools
and libraries (25 percent). RMI annually does
business with an average of 75,000 US educational
institutions.
Dave Little voices
concerns about the quality of the instructional
design in the videos offered to his company for
distribution. He prefers "edutainment" over
informative but didactic presentations. The big
push now is make educational videos "interactive"
by posting a collateral website on the Internet, he
notes, but most of this content appears to be very
weak, often more promotional than educational
despite the sociological allure of an interaction
with the material. "There's always a learning curve
as we get into designing new formats for learning
materials," he says, and the quality of the
interactivity in educational video already is
getting better with each generation of technology
as we move from analog video tapes into digital
video disks. "The problem lies with the educational
institutions that can't afford to change out
technology every 18 months. Educators must be
cautious with their assets."
Go
to Part 2
For
More Information on Distance Learning:
Visit the: Online
Resources Page at ADEC
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(c)
1998-2005
by
Ken
Freed.
Based on the book, Financial
Opportunities in Educational
Television, by Judah Ken Freed.
Financial Times Media & Telecoms,
London, 1998.
(ISBN 1-84073-016-1)
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