Educational Broadcasting Media Compared
 
Overlaid on the characteristics of the raw media, educational uses of the media have other characteristics which clearly separate it from news, documentary or entertainment broadcasting. This is true of both radio and TV.
 
A major change in the manner in which broadcast media could be used educationally came with the development and market penetration of domestic video recorders. it had always been possible to record radio programs, but now it became possible ( especially with the rapid evolution of programmable timers in VCRs) for users to record and time-shift video without having to purchase physical copies.
 
In a way, that development philosophically foreshadowed the arrival of online educational media, with its integral on-demand nature and its element of user choice in recording and replay. Like online materials, the broadcast video material is effectively of free or marginal cost to the user and like online materials in the infancy of the technology it was awkward, unfriendly and unfamiliar.
 
In addition to broadcast video, a thriving market arose in non-broadcast video for education, through larger text publishers as well as a number of independent production companies. This is analagous to the CD-ROM model - with the same constraints of physical distribution but also with the same clear and simple revenue system based on traditional unit-sale models.
 
The Characteristics of traditional educational broadcasting
Broadcast educational media - and to an extent non-broadcast , such as video- have the following characteristics:

• long shelf-life of product compared to other forms of mass market electronic media
• Multiple repeats (either uses or transmissions) acceptable
• Significant end-user time-shifting ( ie recording for later use)
• national orientation
• strong teacher loyalty to proven product
• high classroom utility - usually high student interest
• Doesn't encourage fundamental changes in teaching style or relationships with students
• is not interactive ( though can be used to spark class interaction)
• is a resource rather than an activity
• is very specifically age/curriculum targeted
• is effectively free to consumers
• occurs at rigidly scheduled times
• is very difficult and costly to update
• uses stable and cheap technology
• has years of proven teaching technique evolved around it
• has an unbroken, linear heritage of teaching technique with older AV technologies
• almost universal access

Characteristics of online educational media:

• Unstable, rapidly evolving technology
• awkward access and interface
• highly interactive
• can be challenging for teachers to control use of
• demands new teaching methods
• demands new methods of teacher training
• very high interest level in students - probably for next 5 years
• materials online effectively free
• setup costs ( in $ and time) significant for schools
• completely on-demand
• long shelf-life
• easy to update
• rapid evolution of business, production and usage models
• no effective commercial model so far in getting significant profits from educational market
• low levels of Australian content
• enormous amount of material available world-wide
• allows significant collaborative possibilities and content-creation possibilities by users
• allows interaction many-to many

CD-ROMS:

• Difficult to implement across a class with numerous computers: this is not a problem where a school has few computers in the first place
• CD-ROMS offer rapid access and are proven, stable technology, which will reliably work or obviously fail
• It is possible for a teacher to know everything on a CD-ROM or to vouch for its educational bona fides
• The disks themselves are easy to lose and hard to replace. the web cannot be misplaced.
• CD-ROMs go out of date eventually, though well designed product has long lives
• CD-ROMs are very expensive to produce and take a long period
• the web is cheap to produce content for but expensive to maintain and technically service
• CD-ROMs and DVDs offer full-motion high quality video and audio with no restriction on bandwidth.

The ABC has reduced its level of involvement in CD-ROM production. The costs are too high, production cycles too long and market too small to make CD-ROM production a viable activity for a publicly-funded organisation without significant underwriting through a consortium or private venture partner. It's worth noting , though, that the disks we have made in the last year have included some notable successes: Real Wild Child, Bananas and Frontier have all won awards and Bananas is one of the best-selling disks ever made in Australia.
 
As far as the ABC is concerned, the future for CD-ROMs, outside of licensing content and properties, is in creating hybrid online/CD services which use a CD-ROM or DVD as a local store of large files ( audio and video) which are called up by a web site.
 
The characteristics of the Australian online education environment:

In a nutshell, highly variable but improving.
• High levels of committment from all state and territory governments to connection of schools
• highly variable degrees of strategic planning in implementing networking of schools
• widely variable levels of equipment and connectivity well into the future
• Committment to teacher training, but very wide range of existing expertise
• relatively high average age of school-sector teachers ( typically low forties)
• absolute lack of standardised browsers or technology
• Wide variation in cost of access, from high-bandwidth dedicated ISDN lines to pay-by-time dial-ups on STD lines in the bush
• Establishment of intranets by education departments and even schools
• relatively expensive technology costs and telco costs ( internationally speaking)
• Very rapid domestic uptake of new technology and penetration of computers and the Internet into homes and offices
• Some states ( notably Victoria) have created large and sophisticated networks ( SoFWeb) dedicated to educational publishing and interaction
• Commercial organisations attempting to establish a revenue stream from online activity but largely failing
• Multiple users of single computers
• Vocal teacher and student base
• nobody wants to pay for content.