Joined-Up Learning

While predicting the growth of broadband in the business and residential sectors is akin to staring blankly into a crystal ball, for those involved in the education sector the broadband ‘roadmap’ offers a lot more clarity. And the reason for this is the in which both European national governments and the European Union have embraced the concept of broadband as a way to raising education standards across the region.

The European Commission reports that 80 per cent of schools in the EU have Internet access – compared to one third of homes – and it is estimated that the market for European e-learning is worth an annual 12bn euros.
Unsurprisingly, many companies offering a link in the broadband food chain are clamouring to gain access to this ‘gilt-edged’ market.

Thus, significant funding is now going into converting this sector, which is currently dominated by dial-up and ISDN access, to broadband technologies such as ADSL, cable and even satellite. “Access is frustrating and limiting with an ISDN line,” says Omron Khan, marketing manager for education-oriented ISP DIALnet. “It makes it harder when you’ve got 20 or 30 PCs all trying to get content.”

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A learning process

Embryonic test projects currently define much of the broadband education landscape, with network providers, content publishers and government engaged in a learning process as relevant as that of the pupils themselves.
Widespread pilot schemes are also helping the industry discover not only what their education customers are demanding, but are instructing them in the value of interactive communities – lessons that may be later applied to drive home and business take-up.

The schools are far from passive guinea pigs in this large-scale experiment, though.
“The education community knows what it wants to achieve and is very creative,” says NTL head of education Richard Grazier. “The education agenda has switched from ISDN to broadband, because of the demand placed by the number of devices on a local area network and the need for high bandwidth content.”

Although government and EU money is currently driving the growth of broadband education networks, new ideas for funding are also emerging. BT’s ‘LearningStream’ project, for example, is based on the principle of using schools as regional hubs.

These would serve a wide variety of external clients, such as libraries and Citizens Advice Bureaux, giving schools the benefit of high-bandwidth access while spreading costs beyond education budgets. More controversially, the Dutch government is exploring the use of advertising on its national education network, ‘KennisNet’, although promotions would be kept separate from core learning material under the proposal.

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The diversity in the technologies applied and in the rate of take-up varies from region to region. Most areas that enjoy the advantage of an established broadband network at present are benefiting from having been selected for one of the many pilot schemes deployed by network providers.

Also, such schemes are entering an environment where the delivery of content may already have been contracted: a provider may serve a region where the local authority has bought in content for every school, or may find that only certain schools have deals in place.

This has led to network providers offering their own portals alongside their core infrastructure services, supplying content that schools and local authorities are free to take up or disregard. NTL has been working with Granada Learning, Helicon and Guardian Education. “We try to make the portal as device-independent as possible,” says Grazier.

DIALnet’s ‘learnall.net’ offers material from brands like Channel 4 and ADP.
“Content and broadband technologies go hand in hand,” says Omron Khan, “but customers are not tied in – people can purchase the products independently.”
Network providers can therefore offer a straightforward tiered subscription system.
“NTL is split between infrastructure and content, and is tiered between primary and secondary,” says Richard Grazier. “A flat rate per annum means no hidden surprises towards the end of the year for the school, and some schools already have their own relationship.”

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Annie Valva, VP of content and technology integration for Pearson Broadband, says the revenue model for content publishers will become more complex as the market grows. “It’s going to be a combination of subscriptions; you might pay to take the educational channel, alternatively, you might want to take a complete course.”

Content created for broadband is also fed back into other media, she says. “We have developed a back-end system that lets us deliver to different platforms, and play across multiple distribution paths. We’re driven by what our users will have. We’re keeping our content modular and keeping our eye on 3G and Pocket PC and we’re looking at strategic points in the television sector,” she says.

Dedicated content

The variety of learning standards across Europe, not to mention the language barriers, means that publishers are delivering content on a national scale rather than Europe-wide. “We’re only starting to see the high bandwidth content in education coming along now,” says Richard Grazier. “There is a mix of text-based and more visual content like streaming video,” adds Omron Khan.

Pearson Broadband is a new arm within one of the world’s largest publishers of educational material, with content from the likes of Penguin, Longman and Dorling Kindersley to call upon. The Pearson Broadband brand is focuses on delivering content into the home, says Annie Valva.
“We’re the interplay between our interactive, television and print arms,” she says. The division is complemented by Knowledge Box, an US-only project aimed at educators. “They’re looking at opportunities for internationalisation,” she says, “and we are looking at opportunities to tie our school products with our home products – that’s basically the killer app.”

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Valva explains that, by adopting a modular approach to converting its existing content pool to broadband, this allows the firm to think globally in its marketing efforts, while offering new levels of personalisation to the user. “The user has to be at the centre of our thinking,” she says. “We can allow people to learn at their pace, within a context that’s personal to them.”

Pearson’s management system allows it to track original content and repurpose it, says Valva. “We can re-ingest it from high-resolution tapes, replace the voiceovers and compress it back out. Not everything is a re-do. The model allows us to connect learning objects with each other – what we call learning scaffolding.”
She continues:” You might want to take a business class and an English language class. At some point, you might be learning how to use English in a business environment, so you may see the same piece of content with a different voice track.”

If treating content as components that can be assembled to suit the user delivers a more personal learning experience to the user, as Valva suggests, it also aids the publisher in meeting the requirements set out by educators.
Richard Grazier says the publishers working with NTL must use QCA meta-tags, the British education standard, in their content.
“The meta-tag is for searching,” he explains, “so if you want Key Stage 2 Maths, it helps you find content that’s relevant. Teachers say to us, ‘I’ve only got 45 or 50 minutes for the lesson, so we need to be able to find the content,’“ he says.

Although broadband offers clear opportunities for richer learning material, particularly high-resolution streaming video, service providers must also understand the increased potential for interaction, giving pupils the chance to take a more participatory role in their own education.
“Things like video conferencing will become a reality,” says Omron Khan. “Schools will be able to talk with their twins in Europe.” As systems capable of supporting voice and data emerge, he continues, “teachers will be able to introduce telephone conversations into lessons. It opens up lots of new possibilities.”

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However, the 2Mbps connections coming online in some schools have to be shared between many users meaning that, at least in the short term, video is likely to be rationed – although practices like multicasting, where a video stream comes through a single server before being split between several PCs, helps to ease the network’s burden.

New approaches to schools’ specific needs are being developed, however. With the backing of its new owner, the telecoms firm Redstone, DIALnet is currently trailing SDSL, a variation on the basic DSL technology where upload speeds are as fast as downloads – a factor that becomes more important as pupils make a greater contribution themselves.
A media rich networked environment also allows for the wider use of more traditional Internet tools, making options such as an email address for each pupil more realistic.

As broadband creeps ever deeper towards the home, network providers and content publishers, alike, intend to apply lessons from their broadband education experience, creating a richer information environment that is no longer tied to traditional learning locations.
“Broadband for us is not just a big pipe,” says Pearson’s Valva. “It’s an opportunity to create new forms of learning – everything from video to interactive learning. Technology is often seen as a straight implementer: people develop content in isolation and hand it off.
We see design, technology and editorial content as a three-legged stool of integrated production delivery - one drives the other. It’s not ‘We’ve made a TV programme, now let’s do a website’... It’s a very collaborative process,” she says.

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