Instructional TV migrates to teachers’ desktops
Public TV stations in at least 11 states have formed alliances that allow them to offer desktop-based content to teachers this school year.
Even though their next-generation distribution methods and service plans are works in progress, edtech specialists say the traditional videocassette-based ITV business is drying up and they must begin offering on-demand content to meet educators' demands for new technologies in the classroom.
Chalkwaves, the Midwestern e-learning service based at KCPT in Kansas City, is about to test a new setup that gives teachers instant access to 200 hours of content through a school's internal network. The service negotiated agreements with nine ITV program distributors this summer to share revenues from licensing of their instructional programs. In December, Chalkwaves will begin delivering 120-gigabyte hard drives loaded with secondary-level content to participating schools.
Stations in nine other states have inked deals with United Streaming, an Internet-based digital video application owned by United Learning in Evanston, Ill. The privately held company is an established educational publisher that began offering streamed content on the Web in 2001.
The search capabilities and user-friendly navigational features of the United Streaming web interface, along with its extended library of digitized video content, are spurring demand among educators, according to pubcasters who have introduced the service in New York and Georgia.
"Broadcast-based content is looked at as less and less high-tech" by educators, explained Pete Headd, director of educational services at WCNY, Syracuse, one of nine public TV stations in New York state that offer United Learning's video library through customized, co-branded web portals. Administrators are asking teachers to infuse more technology into their lesson plans and are shifting money from their audio-visual budgets — which often includes traditional ITV — to technology and new media.
"We need viability now," said Michael Zeller, executive director of Chalkwaves. "I see this as a stepping stone that keeps us above water until OnCourse arrives with the next-generation content and meta-data system."
OnCourse, the e-learning start-up founded nearly two years ago by public TV stations and educational institutions, is developing a second prototype and business plans for a portal-like service delivered through datacasts (earlier article). The OnCourse Board meets in Dallas Oct. 7, and announcements of new partnerships are pending, according to spokesman Robb Deigh.
Different paths to the desktop
Chalkwaves and the stations working with United Learning chose different ways to bring their ITV services up to speed.
Chalkwaves is attempting to build a service that offers content from many different educational publishers — "the best of the best," as Zeller describes it. Initially, teachers will have instant access to 200 hours of content for secondary grade levels, but they can access it only through school networks, not from their homes. Programs will be correlated with state standards, and teachers will be able to view them in their entirety or in segments relevant to their lessons plans.
"We basically selected the content based on what we'd been using and what teachers told us they want," said Amy Shaw, director of education at WSIU in Carbondale, Ill., a founding member of the Chalkwaves group with Kansas station KOOD and Kansas City's KCPT. Participating ITV publishers include TV Ontario, Great Plains National, the Agency for Instructional Technology and E-Bio Media.
If the one-year pilot is successful, Zeller intends to add to the library and price it in tiered packages. Down the road, he wants to develop the capability to update the content through digital datacasts.
Chalkwaves devised the plan using hard drives for loading media on school networks after testing Internet-based delivery of instructional media last year. The CPB-funded study found schools didn't have sufficient broadband connections to deliver on-demand video to classrooms over the Internet (article at right).
During industrywide talks of worrisome trends in the ITV market early this year, Chalkwaves reps and educational publishers began negotiating licensing agreements that moved plans for "Chalkwaves Plus" forward.
"This really came out of some open discussions facilitated by NETA [National Educational Telecommunications Association] about how we can take the very good [ITV] assets that we have and make them available and do it now," said Zeller. "We all see the handwriting on the wall with videocassette-based instructional media."
"We're aiming to try and evolve an existing market," he said, which is easier than inventing "a new system, new content and customers all at once."
The revenue-sharing agreement that Chalkwaves struck with the nine educational publishers was key to the agreement. Chalkwaves will put a sizable portion of revenue from each sale into a royalty pool from which content providers will be compensated based on the volume of content they contribute to the library. The deal also set $2.10 per student as the lowest annual price Chalkwaves can charge. Joann Flick, acquisitions manager for the Agency for Instructional Technology, helped craft the contract. She describes the revenue split as generous.
"It's a bit of a coup that we were able to get so many interests who are competitors even to agree to this," commented Zeller. "They recognize that their content is stronger if it's sitting shoulder to shoulder with other content.
"Teachers are not looking for one-off solutions, but a library of solutions, and none of [the ITV providers] can provide that credibly," he added.
Easy interface
Last year, public TV education directors in New York state were looking to supplement traditional ITV broadcasts with on-demand content that would help them prepare teachers for the eventual rollout of digital educational services.
They looked at various services and found that United Learning offered "the best of all worlds," said Headd of WCNY. The service in New York includes a large library of 1,400 programs and 15,000 video clips, an easy-to-navigate web portal and "nice features that weren't overwhelming to teachers or to us in terms of implementing."
New York's Department of Education reviewed how well the library was aligned to state curriculum standards and licensed it for use by K-12 educators statewide. "We were able to hit the ground running without having to do a lot of prep work," Headd explained. Edtech specialists at all nine New York stations don't have to select or schedule content or respond to technical problems--their role is to facilitate rollout of the service.
"I've been nicely surprised at how key people within districts have taken it on and done internal district training," said Marion French, assistant v.p. for education services at WXXI in Rochester. When she assigns accounts to media specialists and invites them to try the service, they call back and say, "'This isn't hard. I can show people how to do this.'"
The interface allows educators to search for clips by subject, topic and grade level; titles that come up are correlated to state standards. Teachers can access an entire program or chapters within it, and view it via video streaming or downloading.
Bandwidth limits that led Chalkwaves to put its library on a plug-in hard drive are also a problem for the United Streaming system, Headd acknowledged. But he's found that teachers simply download programs for classroom use. "It requires a little extra prep work for the teacher, but they're so enthused about it they're willing to do it."
Georgia Public Broadcasting began offering United Streaming throughout the state last year and found that most schools that use it don't have bandwidth problems, according to C. Blaine Carpenter, director of educational services. Those that do download the programs ahead of time.
During the 2001-02 academic year, educators in 175 of the state's 180 school systems logged on to the customized Georgia website at least once, Carpenter reported. The site served 149,102 page views and moved 1.1 terabytes of information.
Earlier article: Chalkwaves scouts new pathways to classrooms
Figuring out how to deliver on public TV's big promise of enhanced educational services via digital technologies is a giant puzzle with several missing pieces--among them a de-bugged means of distribution and a workable business model. Specialists within the field continue to refine their services as they prepare to launch new demonstrations within the next few months.
Chalkwaves — an online education service first established by KCPT in Kansas City as the MoKan Kids Network — is laying the groundwork for its next video streaming experiment. KCPT and Chalkwaves partner WSIU/WUSI in Carbondale, Ill., are looking to school-based servers as the means to deliver rich video content into classrooms.
The regional experiment moves along as national public TV reps and stations in several states have committed a quarter of their digital TV capacity to formal education. At the same time, public TV and educational institutions are starting to develop a national system for distributing instructional media — OnCourse, originally named the Online Education Service.
OnCourse plans major announcements of its service plan, leadership, and corporate partners by January. The OnCourse Board recently met in Atlanta to review plans developed under interim Executive Director Lou Pugliese. Participants in the meeting declined to discuss details of the service plans.
Public TV education specialists express hopes that OnCourse will breathe new life into a contracting market for instructional television (ITV).
"We realize we've got to move quickly, because ITV is challenged by the perception that it's yesterday's media," says Michael Zeller, executive director of Chalkwaves. School budgets for video-based instructional media are shrinking while schools are "spending huge sums on wires and chips."
The challenge for public TV stations is to determine the best ways to serve up ITV material that once aired on their open channels and is now largely distributed on videotape. Through a CPB-funded pilot test of video streaming, which concluded last spring, Chalkwaves demonstrated that significant technical barriers stand in the way of on-demand delivery of video content via the Internet.
The pilot — known by the unwieldy acronyms AITOL and E-TOOLS [America's Instructional Television Online/Educator Tools Online Opening Links to Standards] — was a collaboration of KCPT and WSIU. The project offered teacher training, lesson plans and technical support as well as video materials.
In the pilot, teachers at 24 schools in Illinois, Kansas and Missouri could call up the instructional materials through the Internet from Chalkwaves' website located on a regional server. But bandwidth was a big problem.
Although most participating schools had Internet access through high-capacity T-1 lines, they found the lines lacked the bandwidth to accommodate demand for video content — largely because too many end-users shared the lines. Sending video through such connections was like trying to put "five pounds of flour into a one-pound sack," comments Amy Shaw, who managed the project for WSIU.
"If six kids are streaming video simultaneously, the superintendent can't retrieve his e-mail," explains Zeller.
"To make rich media ubiquitous in the classroom, you've got to find a way to localize it," he adds. The other option, for schools to spend even more on broadband connections, is not practical.
During the last AITOL trial, schools that encountered problems with Internet access were allowed to transfer some files to their internal networks. "They preferred that level of control," said Karen Mel, KCPT's director of broadband and Internet.
Now Chalkwaves is looking to localize video storage in all schools for its next test. A 75-100 gigabyte hard drive, installed in a school or district technical center, can store about 150 hours of video and costs between $200 and $400, Zeller estimates. Content can be "refreshed" through digital broadcasts or overnight Internet downloads. By sending updated materials over the air, Chalkwaves could jump over firewalls and connectivity barriers that impeded the first trial.
"The goal is to have a something one of our staff members describes as a pizza box that arrives pre-loaded with the package they've ordered, and it's plug and play," Zeller says. The pizza box would include the hard drive, an operating system and modem, and eventually a video card for downloading wireless data updates. "We want the lowest-cost solution that is reliable — so that a school administrator could plug it into their local area network with confidence that it will not disrupt their system."
Chalkwaves is "working rapidly" toward its next demonstration, Zeller says, but still has to resolve licensing issues, run some trials and "put it in front of teachers and media people." He also hopes to experiment with a new licensing system and "maybe a tiered approach to program packaging" that's similar to cable TV pricing.
"We are totally on board with this next demo," says Joann Flick, acquisitions manager for the Agency for Instructional Technology (AIT), a major ITV producer and distributor based in Bloomington, Ind. KCPT has taken a leadership role through its tests of new distribution technologies. "They've been willing to try new things, even if they didn't work the first time."
AIT supports and participates in these efforts with the hope that more public TV stations will get back into the business of distributing educational media. "The idea is to preserve this market and to make it grow," she adds. "It's too small a market right now."
This summer, AIT and two of its competitors in ITV distribution, TVOntario and Great Plains National, formed a partnership to promote digital media use in the schools. The Classroom Content Association recently staged its first joint exhibition at a technology and learning conference convened by the National School Boards Association, according to Michael Connet, AIT director of innovation, a former leader in development of KCPT's instructional media systems.
Chalkwaves was founded by WSIU in southern Illinois, KOOD in Kansas and KCPT in Kansas City.
Web page posted Oct. 7,
2002, revised Oct. 11, 2002
Copyright 2002 by Current Publishing Committee