Adapted from articles in Current, July 21 and Sept. 8, 1997
In January 1998, the Annenberg/CPB Projects will join other pubcasters in a new "education neighborhood" on the Loral GE3 satellite that also carries PBS feeds, the projects are announcing this week.
Scott Roberts, director of the projects, said the Annenberg/CPB Channel will greatly increase its reach by moving to a satellite where many schools, colleges, cable systems and public TV stations are already aiming their dishes.
This not only supports public TV's objective of concentrating education-related offerings for the convenience of schools and colleges, but also brings Annenberg/CPB Projects closer to fulfilling the dream of its benefactor, publisher Walter Annenberg, whose foundation has given millions to the projects over the last two decades.
Annenberg, the onetime owner of the Philadelphia Inquirer and TV Guide and later the ambassador to Great Britain, sought to use technology to make a college-level education available more freely to Americans with limited means. His initial donations to Annenberg/CPB funded dozens of telecourses that form about half of the PBS Adult Learning Service and are used widely in community colleges across the country. Annenberg later curtailed those donations and backed a new project at CPB that aims to improve math/science teacher training in elementary and secondary school.
Both Annenberg/CPB projects are boosting their impact by expanding the satellite offerings of educational programming from five hours a day, four days a week, to 10 hours a day, five days a week.
The present Annenberg/CPB Channel, riding on Hughes SBS-6 since last fall and already boasting usage by 10,000 schools, offers video materials from the latter project for teacher training, math/science education and school reform. College-level telecourses will be added in the expansion.
Supplemented by web site
At the same time, the projects are relaunching their web site, Learner Online, at http://www.learner.org.
Parts of the web site will offer multimedia spinoffs of Annenberg/CPB series--initially, an exhibit on The Middle Ages, related to the telecourse The Western Tradition. Prof. Susan Weiss of Johns Hopkins University led the preparation of the site. New online sections on statistics, art history, neuroscience, ethics, archaeology will debut, one each month.
The site also includes an expanded selection of 15-minute sample clips from telecourses, which can be viewed over the Internet using VDOLive or RealVideo software.
Online discussions connected to the video programming will also be accessible through the web site, Roberts said. "First thing you do is to make the content widely available. Next we will say: here are ways you can talk about that content."
PBS, meanwhile, is expanding web offerings to provide print materials for telecourses over the Internet.
Possible next step: DBS
The telecourses and other video materials from Annenberg/CPB may be offered even more directly to home uses in the future. They could be part of a major 24-hour educational channel offered by PBS to direct broadcast satellite (DBS) operators like DirecTV, according to Roberts.
DBS operators may be interested in such a channel because the FCC is now writing rules to enforce a 1992 law requiring DBS operators to devote 4 to 7 percent of their capacity to noncommercial educational programming.
"This is the digital moment," Roberts said, when many more streams of educational material will emerge. "We want to be there, and we're going to be there. Ambassador [Walter] Annenberg is extremely excited about this expansion of the channel," Roberts said.
PBS Executive Vice President Bob Ottenhoff said in July that Annenberg/CPB courses will occupy part or all of a packaged feed to be offered to DBS operators. In hopes that public TV will supply some of the mandated channels, PBS is talking with DBS companies about their preferences.
The plans will not disrupt college-credit licensing of the Annenberg-backed telecourses through the PBS Adult Learning Service, though it may give viewers more options for seeing the video portion of the courses, said Jinny Goldstein, senior v.p. of PBS Learning Services.
Annenberg/CPB has some 600 hours of college telecourses on the shelf--40 credit courses--and more than 200 hours of math, science and school-reform video, he estimates.
Partners with Annenberg/CPB in the present satellite channel are the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory and the Massachusetts Corporate for Educational Telecommunications (MCET), both in Cambridge.
Usage of the satellite channel has "exploded" since it was launched in fall 1996, said Roberts. The feed is picked up and distributed to schools in 20 states through such varied means as off-air videotapes in Bloomfield, Conn.; a public-access cable channel in Ft. Wayne, Ind.; a statewide ITFS microwave system operated by Louisiana Public Broadcasting; and MCET's Mass Learnpike satellite system.
Though the service is freely available and unscrambled, dish owners must have standard MPEG-2 DigiCipher decoders like those used by public TV and other users of digital satellite transmission.
To Current's home page
Earlier news: A federal court upholds the law requiring DBS operators to devote some of their airtime to noncommercial educational programming.
Outside link: Annenberg/CPB's web site.
Web page created Sept. 8, 1997
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