A prototype (reduced in size) of the OnCourse home page welcomes
Jay, an elementary-school teacher, in the top left corner and offers a
variety of language arts materials he might want to use in class. The
page is co-branded with UNC-TV, North Carolina's public TV network.OnCourse
Public TV’s e-learning start-up
to begin beta tests this fallOriginally published in Current, May 13, 2002
By Karen EverhartPublic TV's next-generation online educational service plans to roll out its beta version by September, aimed initially at elementary and middle schools.
OnCourse, an e-learning start-up backed by a founding group of public TV stations, edtech distributors and universities, plans to unveil its product concept and business plans to stations, schools and potential funders this summer. A videoconference for public TV stations is tentatively scheduled for early June.
The stakes are high for public TV to establish the service as an indispensable resource for educators. Public TV's reps in Washington and several states have pledged a quarter of the system's digital TV capacity to formal education, and OnCourse could become a major source of educational media sent to teachers on demand through datacasting on stations' DTV signals.
But OnCourse enters an education market that's skittish after many e-learning startups crashed along with the dot-coms, said Richard Hezel, president of the Syracuse-based edtech research firm, Hezel Associates. Several university-backed ventures have closed or scaled back ambitious plans to rake in money from e-learning.
"We don't feel the market is going to grow as rapidly as some of the early prognosticators predicted," Hezel said. "We don't feel it's dead; we feel that it's evolving." OnCourse may benefit from its later-than-expected launch because it's had "the benefit of watching others rise and fall."
For-profit ventures have been making rapid inroads into the K-12 market, he noted, but some may fall by the wayside. "There very definitely was such a euphoria about e-learning that they jumped into the market without a clear sense of what was needed."
Last year when the e-learning shakeout had already begun, CPB and 20 founding members invested a total of $2.5 million to establish and develop OnCourse. The nonprofit service was envisioned as a national/local entity parallel to PBS that would revitalize public TV's commitment to formal learning. The extensive educational resources of stations and other educational partners would be served up via digital connections and strengthen relationships between stations and local schools.
OnCourse has "enormous potential to really create and support a valuable role in education for local public TV stations," said Michele Korf, director of education and outreach at WGBH in Boston, a founding member station. The service will be identified with local stations and "provide incredible resources in a way that's truly useful."
"OnCourse is probably the most exciting thing to happen since we started PBS," said Rod Bates, executive director of Nebraska ETV and chairman of the OnCourse Board's executive committee. OnCourse knits the various educational services of public TV stations and other partners "into one comprehensive but hopefully intelligent and coordinated service that we all can deliver." Small stations can participate in OnCourse simply by sharing information about it with local schools, he said.
Raising startup capital
OnCourse moves into its test phase later than originally planned, and still has lots of ground to cover before it becomes operational. "We spent a longer period trying to find the right chief executive than we'd hoped--which is understandable because we're venturing into unknowns," said Ward Chamberlin, chairman of the OnCourse Board and v.p. at WNET in New York. Lou Pugliese, who initially signed on as interim c.e.o., agreed to take the top job on a permanent basis in January.
The launch of the beta test coincides with a major fundraising push. "The next six months will be critical," said Chamberlin. "We have to raise some real money"--the immediate goal approaches $4 million.
Foundations, corporations and venture philanthropists are among prospective funders identified for the service. OnCourse has already sought grants from CPB's digital distribution fund and the National Science Foundation, according to Pugliese. OnCourse also retained Jim Kohlenberger, a former aide to Vice President Gore, to solicit other federal grantmakers.
"This is where the rubber hits the road, and you have to get everybody behind you and make it work on a service level," said Pugliese, a veteran of education dot-com businesses who was a consultant to the venture capital firm Novak Biddle when he joined OnCourse last fall.
OnCourse's existing members reach 47 percent of the public TV viewing audience and about 10 million students; Pugliese's goal is to enlist 100 participating stations within the next 24 months. After testing OnCourse through this year, he plans to release the complete service in 2003.
Objects on subjects
Two years ago, CPB, Booz Allen Hamilton consultants and a group of stations worked up a business plan for public TV's digital education service--then known generically as the Online Education Service. They described an education portal with streamed audio and video, lesson plans and other resources.
That concept--which had encompassed K-12 education, higher ed and lifelong learning--will debut with a narrower audience, K-8 plus teachers' professional development.
The portal exists today only as a prototype. When built out, the OnCourse Knowledge Network will have an "elaborate profiling capability" that remembers teachers' subject specialties, states and what grades they teach, among other things, Pugliese said. The web interface allows them to tailor their media searches by subject areas and state curriculum standards.
The service will be co-branded, featuring the logos of both OnCourse and the local station. Educators will come to OnCourse through the station's education home page.
Content will be served up from the OnCourse Discovery Server, which initially will offer short segments of "simple, easy-to-use streamed media," said Pugliese. He described the subjects as general, but other sources predicted an early emphasis on math and science.
The grand design for OnCourse is to become a repository for "learning objects"-- edu-jargon for pieces of digital media that can be used for instruction, such as a two-minute video about photosynthesis or an animated map of colonial America. In its second-phase roll-out, OnCourse plans to offer a rich media database of such learning objects. The content will be drawn from the archives of pubcasters and member institutions.
"A lot of people are looking at this as a new way to publish," Pugliese elaborated, one that improves on the one-size-fits-all approach of textbook learning, and helps teachers accommodate the different learning styles of their students.
Through metadata--uniformly formatted electronic tags that tell users what's in a file--OnCourse also will identify which learning objects align with curriculum standards for specific grades in specific states (article, page B1). This will enable educators to assemble media collections for their lesson plans that meet specific curriculum goals.
Teachers can store these collections, call them up in the classroom, and share them with other educators. This capability, along with the quality of the content available from member stations and institutions, will differentiate OnCourse from other K-12 e-learning services, according to several sources familiar with the business plan.
"Other products out there are analog products that have been digitized and put into shorter segments in a conceptually appropriate way, but their ability to correlate it to specific concepts is lacking," said Michael Connet, director of innovation for the Agency for Instructional Technology, Bloomington, Ind.
For the first phase of its roll-out, OnCourse will focus on media for K-8 learning, largely because content for those grades is readily available. "For us to get the inventory ready quickly we're in better shape with K-8," explained Bates. "We'd like to see this ramped up fairly quickly, and that's where we can move the fastest."
Complement to the e-rate
The library of content that public TV can bring to OnCourse is the service's best asset, in Hezel's view. "Public broadcasting has a wonderfully rich array of product that's already developed that's mostly video," he said, whereas most web-based learning is oriented around text and graphics. "Many organizations would kill to have that material."
But this rich library isn't catalogued well. "It's going to take a lot of work to catalog, digitize, meta-tag it and make it available from one or many servers," he continued. Some of this content is outdated and not worth digitizing, so decisions have to be made about what's worthwhile.
"Understanding the real needs of teachers is going to be a challenge for public broadcasting stations," Hezel continued. Developing OnCourse as a resource for learning objects will not be enough. "There will need to be some effort on the part of public broadcasters and OnCourse to try to integrate it and bring it together for educators, so it's not just out there as little objects." Educators need to be comfortable with the technology on which OnCourse is delivered, and must be able to retrieve and assemble what they want easily.
"One of the most essential keys is the relationship that's developed with teachers in the schools," said Ted Krichels, g.m. of WPSX in University Park, which joined OnCourse through its licensee, Pennsylvania State University. "If this just shows up as something on a website, it's not going to work. That's where public TV stations can make that connection." Federal e-rate discounts for schools' telecom services have enabled schools to gear up with hardware and broadband wiring, and now they're looking for good content to make good use of that equipment, he said.
"The challenge is having the content there, and to get the teacher to really take it on and become literate in the technology," Krichels added.
Web page posted Oct. 7, 2002
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