In the final section of this paper I’d like to look at the further future of educational broadcasting. (Read part 1 first)
It is clear that following not long behind the revolution of the Internet, the Information Highway, there is the further revolution of the Information Superhighway. I know that in some countries people are well aware of this because the telecommunications structure is so good, but in some other countries the educators have not realised that this next technological revolution is coming very soon.
Whenever a new technology is deployed, the easy thing to work out is how to migrate the old applications to the new technology. I already see a lot of people talking about doing educational broadcasting over the superhighway, and some starting to do it. In Scotland, for example. To me that is not very interesting in research terms - it’s just an engineering change. What is much more interesting is when the superhighway allows you to do new things that were not possible before.
Several people, in particular at the Open University have been working on educational uses of interactive radio services on the Internet for about a year. They installed the RealAudio software from the US company Progressive Networks and used it for various demonstrations. This has produced some interesting systems, but somewhat to my surprise, neither the Open University nor any other major organisation in the educational arena has yet taken up interactive radio on any significant scale. (However, it has become very popular among local and thematic radio stations.)
What the superhighway promises is to be able to upgrade interactive radio to interactive television. Actually, I have been thinking about interactive television for over ten years. In 1984, a group including myself and Professor Tony Bates did the first studies on the relevance to the Open University of interactive cable television. In those days, the topic of greatest importance was the idea of using cable television to transmit educational TV programmes. Although I kept a watching brief on the area, it never became relevant since Britain is still not yet adequately cabled. In contrast to most European countries, Britain has more satellite dishes than cable TV installations - out of the 22 million TV homes, 3.5 million have satellite and just over 3 million have cable.
In the middle of 1995, with my co-worker Robin Mason I started looking at what was new in interactive cable television, both in Europe and in the US. I was not very impressed with the trials, or rather I should say, with the relevance of the trials to our own development plan.
The typical interactive cable TV trial seemed to have four main features, none of which we liked:
First, their market model seemed to be oriented to replacing trips to the video rental shop by use of the "online video recorder". We felt that for those who really thought about it, the evidence was around, both in the UK and the US, that this could not be the main justification. In marketing/technical terms, it did not look like a "killer app".
Second, their user profile was oriented to "couch potatoes" sitting far from the screen. Such people in such a mode did not seem likely candidates for Open University students.
Third, the approach to the user interface was conditioned by the needs of children, couch potatoes and mere selection of video channels. This did not seem a rich enough interface to us, to allow the kind of educational interaction we wanted.
And finally, on an engineering point, the video server technology was oriented to very large-scale use, to be run by telecommunications companies or cable operators. We wanted something we could run ourselves.
So in fact we wanted the opposite of these features:
First, a wide range of user applications including several that might not even use video.
Second, a user profile oriented to professionals at home (who form a large proportion of our students), not to couch potatoes.
Third, a user interface familiar to our current online users, but more powerful - a model some of us call "Netscape on steroids". In other words, an Internet-style browser interface, but on faster networks.
Lastly, our engineers and planners wanted a video server technology oriented to use by "ordinary" medium-size organisations - like us - using familiar server and network operating systems and hardware.
This process all became a bit more urgent when we heard that the UK government was looking for submissions for interesting educational broadband projects - a scheme with the obvious but unexciting name "Superhighways for Education". So, after the usual lengthy discussions, with some other companies we formed a project called VODER. As usual that’s an acronym - Video On Demand Educational Resources - and in the usual way we made that phrase up afterwards!
Bureaucratically speaking, VODER was to be a joint project of the British Open University, Microsoft and Hughes Olivetti Telecom. However, due to changes of direction at Microsoft and my leaving the Open University, the project has been put on hold in its present form.
However, as we say, "it is not dead, only sleeping". In particular, it is waiting for a happy constellation, in one or more geographical areas, of operational interactive broadband services linked to a consortium of universities with a genuine business case to use re-engineered television services over the superhighway. The revised concept is now called EVITA and I can give interested enquirers more details.
I will finish by giving you a flavour of what I think the educational services in such Educational Interactive Television systems will be like, and also what they will not be like. Actually it is easier to begin with what they are not like:
I do not think that they will be like CD-ROM. There is little point in just redeveloping CD-ROMs for access over the network.
They will not be like an educational channel with programmes at scheduled times - there are other technical ways of doing that, if that is needed.
The services are likely to be much more like Internet applications, but turbo-charged with richer media content. The typical Internet page has text and some static graphics - our superhighway pages will have appropriate audio and visual "annotations". Some of these annotations will be large enough to behave like short TV programmes; but even within these short TV programmes you, the user, will be able to stop, start, rewind and fast forward.
As to the content of the services, this is still undergoing much discussion. This will depend on the interests of the universities in the consortium. Teacher training and Telematics/Multimedia are likely to remain hot topics.
It is fair to say that in the last few years the worlds of educational television and educational computing have remained far apart, despite a small degree of convergence in the area of CD-ROM.
Unfortunately the rapprochement which started 10 years ago with the interactive video disc died when that product ceased to be relevant. It is my hope that the advent of the interactive broadband services will allow the worlds of educational television and educational
computing to converge, to the overall benefit of the educational sector. Perhaps the Internet will act as a kind of catalyst. TV producers, computer programmers and Internet webmasters may come from different backgrounds, and not always agree, but all have a great deal to offer the students of the future - if they work together.
A key topic is to get more refined forecasts of the likely penetration of interactive video services in European homes so that we can get some idea of when educational interactive television services can be deployed operationally and commercially. Fortunately the EU’s ACTS Dissemination project Infowin, in which I am taking part, is keeping an eye on this situation.
Regarding content, there are so few developers of educational interactive television material that it makes excellent sense for us to collaborate in a European context. It will be some years before we are competing with each other, though competion will come.
It is better in my view for the early adopters to collaborate; the losers will be those who do not or cannot adapt their use of educational television to the modern era.