Next, a school service with PBS’s name
A new digital curriculum service developed by PBS and WGBH in Boston is poised to move to the make-or-break phase of all pubcasting endeavors — fundraising for national buildout.
PBS Digital Classroom, an online service offering streaming video clips and other learning materials via local servers, broadband or wireless connections, will let stations put their names on a customizable PBS education service and promote its use by local school districts. It features the content teachers keep asking for—a searchable database of video clips from PBS signature series such as Nova that is correlated with national and state standards—and provides online professional development courses for teachers.
The proposed service would expand WGBH’s existing Teachers’ Domain service into a resource for K-12 educators in all basic subject areas.
It enters a market now occupied by several e-learning services, including Unitedstreaming, a for-profit service that many public TV stations began distributing when OnCourse, pubcasting’s earlier nonprofit entry, failed to complete its fundraising and development phase last year.
Video on demand “is really what teachers want,” said Ron Thorpe, education v.p. for WNET in New York. With funding from the state department of education, public TV stations throughout New York began delivering Unitedstreaming content through their websites in September 2002.
ducators have embraced the service at a phenomenal rate, he said, but “they keep saying, 'Where’s Nature? Where’s Nova?'”
Discovery’s buyout of Unitedstreaming last year lent some urgency to PBS’s efforts to jump-start its own classroom service, according to Mary Halnon, director of PBS Teacher Source, a free web-based resource for lesson plans, activities and professional coursework. “It’s very important to us that there be a service that provides a clear and protected role for stations in K-12 education,” she said.
Public TV has limited time to mount Digital Classroom, Halnon said. If the field doesn’t establish a national service, its e-learning competitors may lay claim to state and federal funds that now go to instructional TV services run by public TV stations. PBS execs also worry that, with stations carrying Discovery content into classrooms on a co-branded service, the educational values of station and PBS brands become blurred and the case for public TV weakened.
Selective chunks
PBS pilot-tested Digital Classroom at seven stations using different distribution mechanisms and designed a business plan that, with strategic partners and $19 million in startup capital, predicts the service will be self-sustaining in three years. In contrast, OnCourse was able to raise only $3.5 million, which ran out before it could begin beta-testing a service.
Two committees of the PBS Board have endorsed the education and business plans for PBS Digital Classroom and the full board will decide whether management should court outside funders. PBS will not ask member stations to invest in Digital Classroom, although they can share in revenues if they market the service to local schools.
With the PBS Board’s okay, management will mount some “pretty aggressive fundraising to meet our anticipated launch in the 2005-06 school year,” Halnon said. PBS will look to foundations and strategic and technical partners to help mount the service. Strategic partners will not own equity in Digital Classroom, she said.
PBS recently surveyed 20 stations about the costs of digital services they already deliver to schools and found that the price points it set for Digital Classroom will fall within the wholesale rates paid by stations and the retail rates paid by schools. Wholesale license fees for other services range from 21 cents to $1.10 per student, but the retail rate goes as high as $2.19 per student.
Teachers’ Domain, developed by WGBH with its own money and grants from funders including the National Science Foundation, will be the backbone of PBS Digital Classroom, although its interface must be revamped and content expanded substantially.
The web-based service started as a WGBH project to mine its archives and create new materials for educators. It existed as a prototype when public TV leaders began planning OnCourse four years ago and was even presented to the CPB Board as an example of what the service could be.
WGBH invested and participated in OnCourse, but different philosophies and
funding needs prevented the two services from melding into one, according
to Michelle Korf, senior executive for educational media.
With Teachers’ Domain, WGBH sought to place digital clips in context
with text, interactive files and other media on the curricular subject, vetted
by experts in the field, Korf explained.
Rather than “chunking” a program and putting all of the pieces
online, content developers for Teachers’ Domain choose clips selectively
to address specific educational concepts. “Our goal isn’t to come
up with as many resources as possible; it’s to come up with the best
ones,” said Korf.
This approach distinguishes Teachers’ Domain from Unitedstreaming, according
to Thorpe. Teachers don’t want entire episodes of Nova, and the
cost of acquiring classroom rights for the full episodes would be prohibitive.
“So you don’t get the whole program,” says Thorpe. “You
get carefully selected clips that illustrate the concepts that teachers are
trying to get across and they’re embedded very nicely in a broader context
of materials around the clip.”
It’s more important for PBS Digital Classroom to offer high-quality
clips that cover key curricular concepts at every grade level than to have
thousands of clips that teachers must sort through to illustrate a specific
lesson, he said.
But the content on Teachers’ Domain so far is limited to science and
civil rights, while Unitedstreaming offers video “for every content
area in elementary, middle and high school,” Thorpe said. “There’s
going to be a lot of pressure on us in the system to have as many broad-based
curricular materials as teachers need. We have to cover all the content areas.”
Another feature that distinguishes PBS Digital Classroom from other e-learning ventures is its professional development courses, according to Halnon. The training components are rigorous and integrated with the multimedia materials that reside on Digital Classroom. Science teachers, for example, can sign up for a course that deepens their understanding of their subject area and trains them on how to integrate streamed video into their lessons, explained Korf.
Participating in Digital Classroom would not exclude stations from offering
other services. Indeed, Pam Johnson, v.p. of education & outreach at WNED
in Buffalo, said the station wants its new online service, ThinkBright, to
be a portal where users can find various collections of learning materials,
especially those derived from PBS programs.
“All of us in public television believe in our own content and the quality
and power of it,” Johnson said.
“This is not designed as a vehicle for WGBH content alone,”
Halnon said. Teachers’ Domain already refers educators to outside resources
such as NASA. As the collection is built out, advisors will help determine
which clips or other materials best serve educators’ needs in a specific
subject.
“Our strategy here is not to aggregate everything that public TV has
done under the sun,” Halnon said. In researching what educators want
from the service, PBS learned that they want fewer resources, but ones “that
are very credible and very carefully selected,” she added.
PBS’s business plan for Digital Classroom gives stations two ways to participate in the service: as a distribution partner that markets the service to local schools (and receives a share of any profits) or as a promotional partner that co-brands and localizes the service but doesn’t market it or share in the revenues. Stations that initially opt not to participate could still sign up later to distribute PBS Digital Classroom in their communities.
Web page posted Sept. 27, 2004
Copyright 2004 by Current Publishing Committee
