t-learning Case Studies - Near video-on-demand to schools, Italy

Although this is not an example of delivering interactive learning services to the home, it does illustrate a simple solution to the school and has been operating for over three years.

Mosaico is a RAI-Educational project in Italy created to supply teachers with audio-visual and multimedia teaching and learning materials integrated with and complementing lessons and text-books. Mosaico works as a kind of “Video on Demand" using the combined potential of the Internet, Satellite Television, Newspapers and VCRs.

A constantly up-dated catalogue of more than 6000 items, divided into 10 thematical areas, is available on the Internet. Each one is an "audio-visual teaching unit" lasting around ten minutes (thus meant to complement lessons, rather than substitute them), and is made up of clips from films, TV plays, documentaries and cartoons or from programmes produced on request for groups of teachers or for the Ministry of Education. The search engine enables users to look up unit titles by age group or school types, and by key words.

When a title is selected, a detailed ten-line summary of the unit's contents appears. Units, which teachers would like to use during their lessons, can be requested directly with the click of the mouse. RAI-Educational, with a minimum of one week's notice, then broadcasts the requested material on the special interest channel RAISAT, during the daily programme "Mosaico", which goes on the air from Monday to Friday from 10.30 hrs to 13.30 hrs. The morning programmes are repeated in the afternoon and during the night.

To guarantee that schedule information for "Mosaico" is available, the editors publishes a full-page weekly calendar of the programme on the web at www.mosaico.rai.it - complete with the summaries illustrating each "audiovisual teaching unit". In this way, other interested teachers can, if they wish, video-record the programme to show their students at their convenience during the school year. In a short space of time Italian schools can thus acquire rich and specially selected video-libraries for use by their teachers and students.

The programme Mosaico is broadcast via satellite using digital technology; reception thus requires a satellite dish and a digital decoder. Unfortunately such equipment is still not as widespread as it might be in the schools. RAI-Educational, therefore, in agreement with the Ministry of Education, has installed, at its own expense, satellite dishes and decoders in 5000 Italian schools so as to make its educational programmes more widely available.

There are plans to extend such a service across Europe via satellite and world wide via the Internet. The project envisages, for example, teachers in France consulting the catalogue at the web-site of available teaching units from the Italian Mosaico and e-mailing the RAI to request broadcasts of their choice of items. Likewise, once the French have their own version of Mosaico, teachers in Italy will then be able to ask "La Cinquième" (the French equivalent of RAI-Educational) to broadcast items from the French catalogue. A similar exchange will eventually be possible between all other European Union countries. RAI-Educational has already taken steps towards this goal by organising a series of meetings, through the European Broadcasting Union, to plan and set up this educational "Eurovision".

Further information

Web site of Mosaico (in English)