Though Americans are taking more and more college telecourses, PBS will drop out of the field as of Sept. 30 [2005], discontinuing its 24-year-old Adult Learning Service.
Millions of students still can’t get to campus for lectures, and colleges increasingly are serving them by making their own computer-based courses using CD-ROMs, Internet discussion groups and online readings instead of the video-based courses for which ALS was a major promoter and middleman, PBS officials said.
At its peak in the mid-1990s, ALS helped colleges with as many as 450,000 enrollments a year, but handled just 180,000 last year and will count a projected 153,000 this year, said PBS spokesman Kevin Dando.
PBS had made it easy for colleges to begin offering telecourses, providing a comprehensive catalog and acting as middleman between schools and telecourse producers, says Christine Mullins, executive director of the Instructional Technology Council, a group of college distance-learning officials [website].
Nevertheless, at ITC’s eLearning 2005 meeting in Dallas last month, Mullins was surprised to find very little reaction to PBS’s pullout.
Colleges will now make deals directly with telecourse producers such as Dallas County Community College District in Texas. Indeed, DCCCD itself is planning to represent other telecourse producers, taking on part of the old role of PBS’s service, said Pam Quinn, president of DCCCD’s LeCroy Center for Educational Telecommunications.
Another major telecourse source, the Annenberg/CPB Project, announced it will offer its line of telecourses to colleges without fees. Though it still offers 39 college telecourses it funded during its early years, the project now focuses on teacher training, said Michele McLeod, senior project officer. The project, formerly operated by CPB, merged last fall into its funder, the Annenberg Foundation.
PBS’s member stations serve as coordinator and promoter of telecourses in dozens of cities, though fewer participate than in the past and they devote less airtime to them—many courses are delivered on DVD or CD-ROM discs. The number participating in ALS fell from 79 in fiscal 2003 to 60 last year, Dando said. But some stations still see telecourses as an important piece of public TV’s mission.
In Philadelphia, WHYY is updating its service, offering an online courseware technology called WebStudy that lets professors design their own courses, and a video-streaming service for telecourses called CourseStream, says Susan Knoble, executive director of learning services. Fifteen local colleges offer telecourses with help from WHYY—enrollment now totals 5,500—and the station plans to work with colleges outside its region, she said.
The Dallas college district likewise is moving from video-based to computer-based courseware. DCCCD reinvests $500,000 to $1 million a year in telecourse production from fees paid by other colleges, Quinn said.
Once so profitable that PBS put it among its revenue-producing divisions, ALS was expected to barely break even this year. It didn’t do that well. By last fall, PBS was expecting to lose several hundred thousand dollars and held talks with a for-profit university about becoming a partner, according to Wayne Godwin, PBS chief operating officer. The university looked at the numbers and said no.
After consulting with committees of its board, PBS decided to close ALS and notified stations in February, though the network did not announce the decision publicly. Thirteen staff members are being laid off in stages, Godwin said. Already gone is ALS Director Clinton O’Brien.
PBS posted an announcement online at PBS.org/als/transition.htm.
“The staff has done a great job,” said Pat Fitzgerald of the PBS Board Education Committee. “We’re sad to see them go.”
PBS had not been reinvesting in ALS and it would not have survived for long, Fitzgerald said during board meetings March 29.
What if PBS had plowed ALS surpluses back into telecourses, adding computer-based features?
Godwin declines to speculate about what PBS might have done. ALS “had seen its day,” he said. To have a chance at competing in the evolving telecourse market, PBS would need to invest $8 million to $10 million, he said, and the venture would have no guarantee of financial success.
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posted April 23, 2005
Copyright 2005 by Current Publishing Committee
