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   (c) 1998-2005 by Ken Freed. Based on the book, Financial Opportunities in Educational Television, by Ken Freed. Financial Times Media & Telecoms, London, 1998. (ISBN 1-84073-016-1) .

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."

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