I will first look back at a little of the history of educational broadcasting in the context of distance teaching. My viewpoint is, perhaps inevitably, of somebody who worked at the Open University for 24 years.
The British Broadcasting Corporation - the BBC - has a long tradition of using broadcasting for education. This started in the 1920s, with radio broadcasting to schools. Thus it was not surprising that when planning started in the late 1960s for the British Open University, people conceived it as a "University of the Air". Thus when the Open University opened its doors in 1969, the partnership with the BBC was one of the fundamental building blocks. To use a more modern phrase from business jargon, the Open University and the BBC had a "strategic alliance".
In recent years transmission times have been moved to what are called "unsocial hours". In the current era this is defined by the BBC as the "learning zone" - the time between midnight and dawn. Of course in addition to the television programmes produced for transmission, a good deal of additional television is produced but distributed on video cassettes.
Expenditure on television production and distribution represents about 10% of overall OU expenditure, around 12 million pounds out of a total Open University annual budget of around 120 million pounds. Since television is still a relatively expensive medium compared to text, it represents a rather smaller proportion of student study time, maybe around 5% on an "average" course.
There have been many articles written in the literature about all aspects of the BBC-Open University relationship. Indeed, I think that there have been too many - and too many other organisations around the world have drawn too many conclusions from analysing that particular relationship.
So let me now look at some other things that are happening, and have happened, around Europe in educational broadcasting. The most interesting area is satellite broadcasting. Two organisations were the most influential - EUROSTEP and EuroPACE. Both developed useful expertise in non-traditional types of educational broadcasting.
The first lesson is that you can become too obsessed with terrestrial over-the-air broadcasting. Of course people know that there is no fundamental physical limit to the transmission capacity available. Yet for too many years, educational thinkers in the UK and elsewhere have been agonising only over access to terrestrial over-the-air channels. EUROSTEP and EuroPACE proved that you could use satellite transmission capacity to achieve broadly similar ends. They opened up the minds of users to new transmission possibilities.
The second thing they established was that it was possible to produce television which was "fit for purpose" without involving major broadcasters or open universities - I mean of course open universities of the traditional, "monolithic" style, like the Open University in the UK. Indeed I would single out the people at the University of Leuven and University College Dublin as being particularly influential in this aspect. Now of course this second point is obvious to any of us who have studied the output of the major State University systems in the United States - such as Penn State or George Washington. Sadly, too few Europeans have done that - they dismiss all the US material as "talking heads" without, usually, even bothering to watch it! Of course some of the US material is truly dreadful, even that from some of the most prestigious US private universities.
Despite the intellectual success of the EUROSTEP and EuroPACE services, in pure business terms they were not so successful. So in fact in the minds of some people, including several influential thinkers from European open universities, the view became prevalent that educational television as a whole was a failure, not just the particular versions of it that EUROSTEP and EuroPACE represented. This led, in these same European circles, to a sort of intellectual malaise about educational television in distance teaching. This malaise, and the reasons for it, is what I want now to address. Broadly speaking, there are five alleged inhibitors to the use of educational television in distance education. These are:
educational television does not overcome the barriers of time even though it overcomes the barriers of space
educational television cannot be expanded because there is insufficient additional channel capacity
educational television has high production costs
educational television is a linear medium and "therefore" unsuitable for education
educational television is not interactive and "therefore" unsuitable for education.
I do not regard any of these inhibitors as being particularly convincing. But many people do. So let’s look more closely at them.
First, "educational television does not overcome the barriers of time". In other words, each programme is transmitted at a specific time which may not be suitable for its viewers.
This objection is an easy one to demolish - educational television programmes can be recorded off-air. Most of the Open University students do that now that they have video recorders. In fact, some Open University programmes are never transmitted - instead they are copied straight onto video cassettes and posted directly to students.
And along behind video cassettes are coming new distribution media. It was announced a few months ago that there is an agreement on the new Digital Video Disc format - DVD - a sort of super high capacity CD-ROM with space for several hours of video on it. I know some of you will think "look what happened with video disc" - but just because one technology is a failure, it does not mean that the replacement technology will fail too. And of course there will be online distribution media too - but more of that later.
The second point is that "educational television cannot be expanded because there is insufficient channel capacity". This is based on the theory that services cannot be static - they either grow if successful, or decline if not.
I have pointed out earlier that whatever the situation with terrestrial over-the-air transmission, there is plenty of satellite capacity available. How much capacity is unclear - a lot depends on where you are in Europe and what you want to pay. Maybe some general figures will give people an idea of what is around. Currently there are over 60 satellites covering one or more parts of Europe. About 25 of them have large amounts of television on them. There are around 250 television channels well known enough to get into the listings magazines. That’s a lot of television. How much is educational? Not much - I think it could be a lot more.
As well as satellites there is cable television. As one example, about a third of Finnish TV homes are on cable. In some countries like the Netherlands it is a lot more (nearly 100%) - it depends on geography, of course, as well as on financial factors - in others like Greece or Portugal it is a lot less. There are some interesting trade-offs between satellite and cable. Only time will tell whether satellite or cable is best for a particular country’s situation.
What is much more topical than satellite and cable is the digital revolution sweeping the television sector. Most people know that this will allow many more channels to be available on satellite and cable than there are now, since several digital channels can be squeezed into the space previously occupied by an analogue channel. Fewer people know that the digital technologies allow us to have many more terrestrial over-the-air channels than at present. This revolution is planned to hit several countries, including Britain in late 1997, expanding the present 4 analogue channels to perhaps 18. Will one of these be an educational channel? Why not!
In the very long term it is likely that there will be no over-the-air television broadcasting since the broadcast spectrum will be needed for mobile services. Instead television will come via fibre optic cable in the ground. This crossover is called the "Negreponte Switch" - named after Nicholas Negreponte, director of the MIT Media Lab who was the first to suggest it.
The third point is "educational television has high production costs". This is a criticism often levelled at large broadcasting organisations. One easy answer is to say that "high cost" is a relative term. Another easy answer is to say that it depends on audience size - someone once calculated that the production cost of one episode of "Dallas" was about one cent per viewer world-wide. But I suppose few educators can aspire to audience sizes like those reached by the major soap operas.
No doubt greater efficiency can produce lower costs and many people would claim cost-benefits from the procedure of outsourcing programmes that has become prevalent for example at the BBC. But let’s look at more strategic answers.
The simple strategic answer is to point out that the march of digital technology will bring about major cost-savings in the production of television in the near future. These savings have already been seen in the peripheral aspects of TV production - captions, animations and so on - but as editing becomes more digitised, equipment costs will reduce rapidly.
But there is another answer. It is a little too easy for educational TV producers to claim they must make programmes with the highest production values - and costs - analogues of dramas, of documentaries. There are other programme formats, popular with viewers, that could be adapted for education at far lower cost. Look at the popularity of quiz and chat shows. I am always impressed with the simplicity of the format, and set, on a show like the David Letterman show. On a recent trip to the US I saw more than one US university campus TV station using such formats. So in Europe by using such formats we should be able to make some attractive but still educationally effective material - as long as educators don’t demand David Letterman fees, that is! Well, I can dream...
It has to be said that making such "enhanced lecture" format TV programmes is likely to be much easier for "traditional" universities entering distance education than for some of the existing open universities, who either have alleged rigid theoretical justifications for not using television or are restricted by high production costs.
I’m now going to move on to the criticisms of educational television that are more substantial. Both are enormous topics and so can’t be resolved as easily as I dealt with the previous criticisms. But let us clear the air a bit.
Many educators say "educational television is a linear medium and therefore unsuitable for education". Let’s start with the word "linear" and worry about the "therefore" later.
I think we all have to admit that educational television is linear - scene follows scene. But many other media that people enjoy and get benefit from are also linear. A detective novel is linear, one clue at a time - in fact it would spoil the value of a detective novel to read it in a non-linear way. So we can’t regard linearity as such as being bad.
I think what people mean is that television is not only linear but inexorable. Like life. "Stop the world, I want to get off!" to use the famous phrase. Wouldn’t it be nice! Well, unlike life, television can be recorded. And once it is recorded, it can be accessed non-linearly - you can go more or less directly to any scene. It is true that the current access tools on a video recorder are very crude; but the newer digital media such as CD-ROM and interactive cable allow much better search tools. The BBC are currently doing work on searchable archives of some of their schools broadcasting material.
Now I’m not a producer so I will be very diffident in my next recommendation. But to adapt the old phrase, "some of my best friends are producers"! Talking to my friends, it does seem obvious that the style of linear material we make will be different if it is later going to be accessed non-linearly. I can imagine educational programmes getting shorter, or programmes staying their current length but being made up of many rather more independent components. Such a modular approach is creeping into lots of disciplines. The downside of it is that education might be reduced to a series of sound bites.
The last alleged criticism is "educational television is not interactive and therefore unsuitable for education". By an interactive medium I mean one that accepts feedback from users and adapts its behaviour accordingly - in an interactive film the denoument could depend on what the audience votes for.
I’ll accept the general point that educational television, even when recorded, is not interactive - not as programmes are currently made, anyway. (I’ll talk about futures later.) So what about this "therefore"?
Well, the assumption is that interactivity is good. Of course interactivity is good. But not all the time. If I am studying some difficult topic, the last thing I want is for my instructor to keep interrupting, disturbing my concentration, and asking "Do you understand it yet?" Conversely there is nothing worse than giving a lecture and having lots of students constantly asking questions. There has to be a time and a place for interactivity.
So we can talk about the "granularity" of interactivity. I’m a great believer in the educational process being interactive, but the feedback loop for interactivity can be shorter or longer depending on the task. There is not always a need for a particular television programme to be interactive. This is especially true for certain types of television programmes.
However, there are types of instruction where it is useful to have interactivity. This is often the case in seminars for post-graduate or other advanced students, such as engineers wishing to be updated. The techniques for adding interactivity to such programmes are by now quite well understood in Europe. Of course, they are often used in US educational television - some would say too often. The basic format is that of the phone-in programme, now a standard format in TV - and in radio. To the basic feedback channel of telephone you can add other feedback channels - such as facsimile or electronic mail. There even are specialised systems oriented to training in which feedback in a simple "Yes, No" format can be done from specialised keypads.
As hinted above, there are costs associated with interactivity. I know many distance educators don’t like to think about costs - but somebody has to.
The Vice-Chancellor of the Open University, Sir John Daniel, has written extensively on the balance between "interactive" and "independent" activities in various distance education systems. His analysis was based on his experience in the 1970s and 1980s with most of the Canadian distance teaching systems. It was always clear to him that the costs of interactivity tended to increase in direct proportion to the number of students, whereas the costs of the independent activities often showed good economies of scale, increasing very little as student numbers rose.
So interactivity has its price. If the price is right and the educational aspects are right, use it. Otherwise, don’t. It’s neither economically justified nor pedagogically needed in a great deal of educational broadcasting.
I hope I have shown you that none of the alleged inhibitors to educational television are nearly as damaging as they are often said to be. Educational television has shown that it can adapt to new transmission systems and distribution methods, and to the challenge of new pedagogical paradigms. Provided it does so, I’m sure that educational television will have a bright future within distance teaching systems.
Part 2 will appear in the next edition of this newsletter. It will look at the developments of the information superhighway.
Paul can be contacted via email at: p.bacsich@shu.ac.uk.