The ABC's Experience and Strategy in Online Education
 
ABC EDUCATION ONLINE
From the beginnings of the ABC Online service, there has been an educational presence. One of the first three web sites to exist on the ABC was Behind The News, which is still going strong as a web vehicle and is attracting very good rates of usage. it's the longest-running still active site on ABC Online.
 
Over the years there have been many ABC educational sites appear, such as Schools Television ( now Education Television).
 
In mid-1997, however, the potential of the new medium to serve an educational market was given higher priority at senior levels of the ABC by the creation of an Education Online portfolio, with a staff position attached, to co-ordinate such sites and generate new resources from existing ABC material. Part of that position was also designed to seek out and explore relationships with educational organisations and institutions, both commercial and public, which could lead to collaborative projects.
 
Currently there are a number of sites of primarily educational intent on ABC Online. Details of all of the sites can be found at Learn Online, the "gateway" site for the ABC education online resources.
 
Educational sites fall into two categories: those attached to parent radio or TV programs (BtN, Frontier Education, Vital Systems, For the Juniors, The Good Citizen) and those which are "special projects" containing not only material from existing programs but web-original material as well: Oceans Alive, ConCon, LabNotes. Over time, I expect that the difference between these two forms will blur and they will become more closely integrated, just as pressure from digital technology will inevitably blur distinctions between all forms of electronic media.
 
Convergence is a term often used to describe this phenomenon, and usually it implies the Web will evolve more of the characteristics of broadcast and pat TV. personally I think this is a somewhat feeble vision of what will truly occur and that the spillover of interactive digital modes of media use will change Television and radio more profoundly than vice-versa.
 
Regardless of that, though, it seems to me that the ABC faces a future in which it ceases being a maker of radio, television and online network material and becomes a cross-media information and entertainment producer, using all three media to reach the most appropriate audience. Nowhere is this more true than in the education sector.
 
So far our success has been variable. Projects such as BtN are very successful, tapping into the parent program's strong pedigree in targeted educational material. Some of the stand-alone projects are still trying to find their way, and in no case have we managed to draw on the full resources of the ABC's immense video and audio archive.
 
It's early days yet, however,and we are trying to develop models appropriate to both our existing strengths and our realistic resource abilities.
 
One direction most promising is the formation of alliances and co-productions with other organisations with complementary aims. There are already some well-established existing relationships ( such as with Open Learning Australia) and others which are rapidly emerging ( such as the Monash/OLA/Radio Australia/ABC Online project "The Money Markets" or the British Council/Community Biodiversity Network/ABC Online project Oceans Alive) and there are other exploratory discussions under way. With constrained budgets, it is possible for the ABC to dramatically increase the value of its material by seeking out partnerships with other non-commercial organisations with specialist expertise.
 
The Near Future for Online Education
The picture overall is a promising one. Strong committment from state governments to cable rollout, connection, computers subsidies and in-service training means that over the next three years a significant change will happen in every public school. Similar initiatives in the non-public schools sector are happening as well.
 
Within that timeframe, growth in bandwidth and enhanced compression will mean that full-motion full-screen video over the web into schools will become a realistic tool. High bandwidth home connections will also become commercially available, albeit at a high price if current telco strategies are anything to go by.
 
The proliferation of online services and devices throughout the entire community will also mean that much of the mystique of the medium will have worn off and, coupled with a maturing classroom methodology, we'll be able to really go to work on creating educational materials on a much more stable and reliable technological foundation.
 
If the US experience is anything to go by, we'll also be able to look forward to the successors of today's CD-ROM makers creating very precisely targeted educational materials, probably with a much closer curriculum tailoring than is familiar today. The tools to make these product are changing rapidly as well so "Australianising" a foreign title will be a simpler and more cost-effective proposition, with the potential to rebuild an existing product for our market in a way uneconomical today. Likewise, homegrown resources will see a drop in the technical production costs - but the educational development will always remain expensive.
 
There'll also be a trend for today's console machines - Nintendo and Playstation - to develop educational material to stave off the challenge from personal computers and build on the huge installed base.
 
The ABC intends to be part of this future and is well positioned to be a strong player in the field. It's a challenge that we're keen to meet.