A prototype of the OnCourse home page welcomes Jay, an elementary-school teacher, in the top left corner and at right offers a variety of language arts materials he might want to use in class.
Public TV’s e-learning start-up to begin beta tests this fall
Public 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. 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 comfortablewith 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.
Pugliese to lead Online Education Service startup
Public TV's fledgling Online Education Service [later renamed OnCourse] last week retained Lou Pugliese as a "virtual c.e.o." to develop a business plan and get the service up and running.
Pugliese, a veteran of education dot-com businesses and a former broadcast director for the New Jersey Network, has agreed to lead OES for three months. "I'm the start-up person for now, but if it takes off like I think it will, I'll put in more time in whatever capacity," he said.
"He knows this business cold. We're hopeful of persuading him to take this job, and we may be able to do so," said Ward Chamberlin, chairman of the OES Board and managing director of WNET in New York.
As a consultant to OES, Pugliese will "create the first draft of a real business plan," defining the company's business strategy and program service—and working his connections with venture capitalists interested in education, Chamberlin added.
Pugliese continues to consult as an "entrepreneur in residence" with Novak Biddle, a Washington-based venture capital firm, where he develops "early stage investments in education," Pugliese explained.
The OES concept was defined last year through a CPB-funded business plan and talks amongst public TV education leaders. It is to be the field's digital "portal" for education, and will eventually adopt another corporate identity. "We're still looking at a name," said Chamberlin. "We've got a good one, but we're not sure yet if we can use it."
Early this year, 22 stations and educational organizations invested $50,000 in the OES concept, and these "founders" have been working on several fronts since January to get the company up and running.
OES retained longtime Wisconsin pubcaster Steven Vedro as technical consultant, and Jim Kohlenberger, a telecom policy specialist who advised Vice President Albert Gore during the Clinton administration, to gauge interest in the service among educational institutions and associations.
OES plans a "soft launch" next spring. Chamberlin described it as a "teacher-training exercise to explain to people what we're doing." He predicted that "concrete service offerings" will roll out in fall 2002.
The search for a chief executive, led by Korn/Ferry International, has taken longer than anticipated. The job was offered to another candidate who was "enthusiastic, but couldn't bring himself to do it," said Chamberlin. Recruitment of a permanent exec will continue while Pugliese devises the company's launch strategy. "We have to assume that he won't take it, but we may be able to convince him."
Pugliese's last corporate appointment was as c.e.o. of Blackboard Inc., a dot-com specializing in infrastructure software for education. Between 1998 and 2000, Pugliese raised more than $51 million for the company as it expanded from 15 to more than 200 employees. Blackboard remains in business, and reports on its website that strategic and venture investments in the company have topped $100 million.
Pugliese led start-up of cable giant TCI's Educational Technology Centers from 1996 to 1998, and he previously directed marketing and sales of Scholastic's Internet-based education service. During a six-year stint with Turner Broadcasting, Pugliese launched CNN's first foray into the education market with CNN Newsroom, a program designed for classroom use; developed and marketed Turner Adventure Learning electronic field trips; and led the company's entry into several online markets.
During his public TV days, Pugliese directed New Jersey Network's broadcast operations from 1981 to 1989.
Chamberlin said station leaders have a "great deal of enthusiasm" for the digital education services OES plans to offer and the revenues they would bring in.
"The scope of the opportunity is enormous," commented Pugliese. Public TV already has substantial professional development resources and K-12 curricular materials, and university licensees participating in OES have already done "significant work" in online education.
"The focus needs to be on developing the service where market voids are right now." He described openings in middle and high school reading, math and science curriculum, and "providing more of a contemporary context around what we learn in schools."
"We want to be able to leverage those assets that already exist and put together a service that has a shot at making a difference," he added.
"What public television provides for a first-class online education service is a ready-made distribution system through its stations," explained Chamberlin. Many stations already have established relationships with local schools and universities. They will play a key role in pitching OES to these local educators, because the service is intended to go into the community on the name of its station.
Web page posted May 16, 2002
Copyright 2002 by Current Publishing Committee