The birth of a new Universe of communications, caused by the ever-increasing development of the multi-media, has faced RAI (Italian Public Television) with the problem of redefining its mission as a public service, within the framework of culture and education above all, but also in the fields of entertainment and information.
The specific educational sector is a part of the company’s oldest tradition. RAI has almost always enjoyed an independent management which, besides the "cultural" programmes of the various TV and radio networks, has been devoted specifically to education.
This Management has changed its name over the years: at first it was "DSE-Dipartimento Scuola Education" and then it was "Video Sapere". In September 1996 it took on the name of "RAI Educational Multimediale" (Adopting an English expression which is universally understood, rather than the Italian words "Educazione" and "Istruzione").
So it is RAI Educational, but also Multimedia. At this point I should like to emphasize the latter concept at once. Within the context of an inclusive policy of adjustment to new communication technologies, the Italian Public Television has put the educational sector in the forefront, knowing full well that use of the new technologies is a service of the greatest possible relevance in this specific field for a modern and industrially developed country.
Of course, the new Educational Multimedia Management is still producing programmes for analogue terrestrial television. But there is also a great planning and innovative effort involved, aimed at the production of new educational products that are technologically based on digital communication, that is, television via digital satellite and CD-ROM, alongside the use of Internet.
In fact, RAI - and I am talking about all RAI, not just Educational Management - is performing a great leap forward in the up-to-date development of themed channels, in line with the novel possibilities offered by the epoch-making change from analogue to digital television.
Digital television via satellite is already operating in Italy by means of the Eutelsat satellite, HotBird 2. RAI broadcasts its three terrestrial channels and, as from the 29th of September last year, it started transmitting a first bunch of "themed" channels; one of them is educational and another is entirely dedicated to University lessons by the "Consorzio Nettuno". Let’s see what it’s all about.
This is the title of the new RAI channel devoted entirely to educational broadcasts transmitted by HotBird2 since the 13th of October 1997. The structural basis of the channel includes an agreement drawn up with the Ministry of Education; this will permit the development of an important series of programs by the end of 1998, expressly designed for use in Middle and High schools.
What counts for more, however, is the fact that the "Encyclopedia" satellite channel is only one branch of RAI Educational’s overall policy. Unlike the multimedia terrestrial networks, and also unlike many monomedium satellite channels, "Encyclopedia" takes advantage of a multimediality that encompasses the whole media universe. It intends to produce works destined for channels with different means of circulation: television, radio, Internet, CD-ROM, home-video, books (in the wake of the experience garnered from the most important educational networks in the United States, such as Learning Channel or PBS).
Each product will have to interact with the others, in order to develop a higher level of knowledge than is possible with the pure and simple sum of the single means.
To return to satellite broadcasting, in progress from the 13th of October, I can go into some detail. I can say that an important portion of the channel, from 2 p.m. to 6 p.m., is dedicated to broadcasting programmes for schools. Next winter almost one hour will be live transmissions with video-conference link with some other school, about an event of the day.
It will be also a very important time for a "near-video-on-demand". Schools will have a catalogue of five thousand titles, taken from the RAI archives, at their disposal, from which they can choose the programmes to ask for and, if they so wish, record them (thus they can create an important specialised school video library if they want to).
Moreover, programmes made by the schools themselves could also be broadcasted.
For the remaining hours, programming of the "Encyclopedia" educational channel is based at the moment on the repeat, at different times, of the educational programmes broadcasted at present by the terrestrial networks at the times reserved for the Management of RAI Educational. These programmes have, however, a wealth of important additions. I’ll give you an example: where the programming time on the terrestrial channel only permits an educational programme to give an extract from a documentary or a film, the satellite programme will permit the full-length broadcast of the work in question.
Finally, on Saturdays and Sundays the "Encyclopedia" channel will devote the whole day to a single subject. At the initial stage, the topics of the Seventies, Theatres of Italy, and the great themes of courage and faith have been chosen.
But RAI Educational is studying the way to better use the satellite dedicated channel. In the next future the hours utilised to repeat the programmes broadcasted by the terrestrial channel will be reduced, to open up new opportunities to broadcast very dedicated programmes, for different kinds of users.
Within the next three years, all Italian state schools will be filled with satellite dishes, thanks to the Ministry of Education. And, of course, the programmes are also fully available to private schools that want to provide themselves with the network and create an operational dialogue with RAI.
To conclusion, the 13th of October was an important date for the creation of a new generation of Italian TV viewers, with the cultural (and organizational) opportunity to use the new medium, within the framework of the most complex policy developed by the Ministry of Education.
This channel was officially presented in Rome in mid-September 1997 during a Press Conference organized by RAI and the Consortium together. The channel, on the digital satellite HotBird2, has been created as a development of the experiment that the Consortium itself has been carrying out up to now - and will also continue to develop - by means of RAI’s terrestrial channels.
If you don’t know what Consortium Nettuno is, I will briefly explain that Nettuno is a consortium of 27 Italian Universities plus RAI, Telecom Italy, Confindustria and IRI. It will produce, for the next Academic Year, 180 different university courses for eight different diplomas. There are 2500 Italian enrolled students. But during the last year all the eight Albanian Universities have became members of Nettuno Consortium.
The number of lessons that the Consortium had to "broadcast" to its students was increasing year by year, as a result of the continuously increasing numbers of recognised degree courses. The broadcasting hours available on a traditional, non educational channel had become dramatically insufficient. Here are some figures for you.
Even today, and for the whole Academic year 1997/98, RAI is broadcasting (via RAI2), at no cost, four hours of University lessons every night, provided by the Consortium, for a total of about 1500 hours of lessons during the course of the year.
The Consortium could no longer be confined within such limits; nor was collaboration with a private channel (Tele+) enough, since it was also limited to a few hours during the night on a general channel. Nettuno needs more than 7000 hours.
RAI and "Nettuno" have come to an agreement, arising from this situation. RAI has granted the Consortium the use of a channel, twenty-four hours a day, on HotBird2. And it is allowing Nettuno, through the management of the Educational Department, to take advantage of its own technical and organisational co-operation, so as to permit lessons to be broadcast 24 hours a day, in line with a broadcasting plan freely drawn up by the Consortium itself. There is no need to say that this plan is devoted exclusively to educational needs, freely identified by the members of the Consortium, thus with the full agreement of the Universities belonging to Nettuno.
In this way, the Consortium is able to have all the time it needs to reach out to all the students who have enrolled, even if everyone is studying at home, in any part of Italy and, maybe, even abroad.
The lessons have been broadcast, unscrambled, from the 5th November 1997, allowing all the European viewers (and those along the northern coast of the Mediterranean) to receive the lessons, if they wish to. The "cultural" advantages of this new situation strike me as remarkable and very obvious.
In conclusion, with regard to what I have said so far in connection with RAI’s new channel, "Encyclopedia" and the "Consorzio Nettuno", I think it is worth remembering that several audio tracks for the same "programme" can be broadcast easily. This creates the opportunity to develop the "market area" of an educational programme, which can, in fact, be national and/or supranational, without being obliged perforce to intercede with the English language....
In this case there is already a concrete example. This is a European programme aimed at staff training for small and medium-sized firms. The programme (EETP-European Educational Teleports) has the Italian company Trainet, for 80% of Telecom Italia, as its prime contractor; its partners include, among others, RAI, the Irish and Finnish state televisions and Telecom Portugal.
Thanks to the composition of the partnership, all media, both on-line and off-line, will be employed starting with the new digital satellite television, exploiting its diffusion throughout Europe, its multilingual capacity, and the ease of connection with other instruments belonging to the digital world.
More simply, I can say that when a training programme envisages the transmission of didactic elements via satellite, they may be provided with several parallel audio tracks, so as to actively reach the audience in the small and medium-size firms taking part, whether they be Portuguese, Italian, Spanish or Finnish.
In conclusion I should like to emphasize two points.
The first one, to which I referred in the opening paragraphs, is that even today, and to a greater and greater extent in the next few months and the next few years, television, having become digital, is no longer going to be a radically autonomous and independent medium. Television can cease to be one-way. Television (the digital kind) can be part of a strongly-articulated multimedia system and can be used as both an element of live communication and also on demand, and as a more or less important element in a multimedia communications framework.
This thought takes us to a second reflection. Since television is, above all, an image (even when it is understood as an item in a multimedia system), this means that the image, together with an excellent audio quality, can go back to being an extremely powerful didactic instrument. Becoming even richer in potentiality than a traditional face-to-face didactic stage.
I should like to emphasize this change. Throughout the lengthy history of the scientific film (understood precisely as a moving picture in the service of research and learning) and before the advent of what we now call "the new technologies", we dwelt for a long time on the communicative and educational potentiality of the image. Such potentialities were determined by the wealth of information contained in a construction of moving pictures and, at the same time, by the fact that they were very simple to understand.
The years when television debuted world-wide, during the Second World War, offered a new element of hope everywhere. This was the possibility to put what was thought of as the cinema’s "poor relation" into every home: television to be precise.
As we know, this did not happen, in spite of some praiseworthy exceptions, especially in the United States. Starting from the end of the 1970s, in fact, the arrival of the "new electronic technologies" set aside and marginalised that educational dream of a moving (sound) picture.
Other technologies (also supported by important industrial interests and significant Community incentives) dominated, particularly during the last fifteen years. Television (together with the cinema, at a slower pace) passed, how can we put it? - out of the educational market.
In my opinion, all this is about to undergo another change. With the infinite multiplication of television channels available at a low cost (digital, terrestrial, satellite, cable), pictures (audiovisuals) can again be a significant part of a rich communications system, both as the primary element of a dialogue (teacher/students/teacher), and also as an essential and/or complementary element of didactic documentation.