CPB will propose service for formal education
CPB executives will brief their board of directors next month about a new national initiative to help stations build their multimedia services for formal education, both K-12 and postsecondary.
The report, researched in the last few months with the help of Booz Allen educational and new-media consultants, will be distributed confidentially to public TV stations after the CPB Board sees it Sept. 11 [2000], according to Doug Weiss, CPB's v.p. for strategic development. [The board later approved spending $1 million to help develop a proposal for the project.]
Research indicates that the project is doable by the public TV system, says Weiss.
"This is a wonderful system, if we can harness it, for this purpose. All the ingredients are there. The question is not whether we can, but whether we have the will to do it."
He says the report will scope out the education marketplace, learners' unmet needs, services that pubcasters could provide and how they could organize and pay for them—"most of the nuts and bolts that would constitute a business plan."
CPB brought together about 35 public TV leaders, educational specialists and university execs July 24-26 in Washington to talk over options.
Rod Bates, g.m. of Nebraska Educational Telecommunications, said he came out of the meeting thinking "it will be up to each station how we organize this effort," he says. "It's not going to be imposed on us by CPB."
"It won't be CPB coming up with the model, and we take out our arrows and shoot at it," says Michael Connet, senior analyst for strategic planning and next media at KCPT, Kansas City.
Weiss will be pleased not to wear the bull's-eye. "The next step remains to be seen," he says. If a group of stations active with formal education are interested in pursuing the idea, they will organize a way to move ahead.
He convened the meeting to discuss the idea of an "education portal," but he says that was just a provocative phrase or "straw man" to get discussion going.
"What we have come up with is not in any sense a portal," Weiss says. "It's an education service that . . . in some sense is not unlike the NPS [PBS National Program Service]—a set of content and services that we could make available to the stations that they could add to and further localize and brand in their communities. . . . We've taken to describing it as a learning community." To a great extent, the public TV system will be distributing programming and services that were developed within public TV, Weiss notes.
Stations would not have to pay for the new service--unlike PBS's main service, the NPS--according to Weiss, though the service would need to support itself by collecting some tuition and other fees from schools, colleges and students.
The service would use a mix of media, including streaming audio and video but probably not Ken Burns marathons, Weiss supposes. What teachers want, says Nebraska's Rod Bates, is nonbroadcast teaching materials that can be used at any time, like videocassettes, CD-ROM discs and on-demand video from the Internet. And they want immediate assurance that materials meet their own state curricular standards. "If I can tell Texas teachers that it meets their standards, they'll grab it in a heartbeat."
Participants in the July meeting heard reports from Booz Allen consultants who, like Weiss, have been visiting stations in the last four or five months, looking at what they do now and what they could do in the future to meet the country's educational needs. One day of the meeting was devoted to K-12 education and the other day to postsecondary.
The initiative led by Weiss responds to the CPB Board's oft-stated priorities—education, diversity and the future—and also follows up on a major piece of pubcasting's unfinished business.
Rod Bates, g.m. of Nebraska ETV, says he agrees with Weiss's analysis that public TV "has done a remarkably good job" of serving the general audience and "has not done the same job for education with a capital 'E.'" While public TV has built PBS into a successful "engine" for backing production of general-audience programs, it doesn't have a business model to do the same for formal educational programming, Weiss says. An observer "might fairly say that the national organizations have had an on-again, off-again commitment to education," Weiss acknowledges.
The advance of digital media now gives public TV the chance to deliver services to schools and colleges that it couldn't provide with its single analog channel, says Weiss.
Moreover, educational services are a good fit for public TV's decentralized structure—local and statewide stations that can deal directly with local and state school systems and colleges, with their specific curricular standards and needs for teacher training and classroom media.
There's also the necessary possibility that educational services can be self-supporting through fees for service. The highly fragmented school/college/training market is so staggeringly large that swarms of multimedia and Internet-related companies are angling for pieces of it.
Education, broadly defined, has an annual financial heft in this country five times the size of the entertainment industry, Weiss says. Revenues amount to $740 billion, or 10 percent of the economy.
"No one at this point is making a lot of money providing web-based formal education," he says, but several kinds of businesses are trying, including textbook publishers and other firms with sales forces eager to sell a range of goods and services to schools and colleges. Weiss finds that many of the web-based "e-education" services are "very thin," including "painfully simplistic" lesson plans and material of widely varying quality.
"We don't see anyone in the New Education Economy getting it right," says Connet, who wonders whether many companies will keep trying when they realize that education isn't "a windfall market opportunity."
But public TV's efforts will benefit from working with the private sector to launch services and produce materials, in Bates' view. He contends that educators will trust Nebraska ETV, which has been an educational provider for decades, more than they trust newcomers from the private sector. But the private sector has the capital to launch projects. "My problem is money; their problem is social capital and trust."
"It's fascinating to me how it's been difficult for people like Microsoft or Disney to break into the educational market," Bates says. "It's far easier if we were to partner with them."
Later news
Universities, pubcasters will back Online Education Service
Twenty-one organizations have signed on as founding members of public television's newest start-up, the Online Education Service. By agreeing to invest $50,000 apiece in OES, founding members will participate in early decisions about the organization's governance.
As envisioned in a planning process facilitated by CPB, OES will connect educational services of public TV stations and other institutions, creating a "learning portal" that's accessible over the Internet and other digital connections. As a nonprofit, OES will need to raise $50-75 million to keep going during its first six years of operation before it breaks even, according to initial plans.
Among higher ed institutions, the 26-campus California State University System and Pennsylvania State University are taking high-profile roles in shaping OES. State-wide university licensees, such as North Carolina's UNC-TV, New Hampshire PTV, Nebraska ETV and Wisconsin PTV, are also among the founding members.
Several public TV networks and ed-tech groups are participating, including PBS, the Pennsylvania Public Television Network, the National Educational Telecommunications Association, the Satellite Educational Resources Consortium and the Agency for Instructional Technology.
In January participants in the CPB talks began working through committees to move forward on start-up plans, according to two key participants. OES has retained Korn/Ferry International to recruit executives to lead the company. Razorfish Inc., the design firm that developed PBS's latest branding campaign, is devising a name and brand identity for the service. OES also has applied for a grant from CPB's Future Fund.
Web page posted Feb. 7, 2001
Copyright 2000 by Current Publishing Committee