Choosing &
Using Technologies in Education & Training
Technologies for Teaching and Learning
Conventional television broadcasting
enables a wide audience to be reached anywhere within the
transmission area. Since specialised studio facilities are
required, and program production must be at commercial
standards, it is expensive both to produce and to distribute.
It is most successfully used in conjunction with print or
other materials to reach learners in high volume subjects.
Often, the broadcast is used for overview material or
interviews with high profile speakers, with the detailed
program content provided in other media.
Television is also successful in
introducing potential learners to the concept of open
learning, which they may follow up by enrolling for programs
using different delivery methods. The dependence on time and
place is greatly reduced when learners video tape programs to
watch at a later time.
Satellite broadcasting, like television,
enables a widespread audience to be reached in the satellite
receive area. Programs may be available to anyone who has a
receiving dish; or they may be encoded so that only those who
have purchased a decoder can receive them. Satellite
transmission has been used in the form of interactive
television, where viewers can respond or ask questions
by telephone or fax, which can then be answered on air. This
interactivity is obviously limited, especially if the
audience is very large. More sophisticated forms of
interaction are likely to be available in the future.
Generally speaking, broadcasting is most
useful for introductory material or where programs are
uniform across a wide audience, as in schools or lockstep
classroom situations. The diversity of the vocational
education and training sector, and the need to customise
programs to specific needs, means that its use is more
limited in this sector. It can, however, be useful to present
specialist material (for example, to capture a presentation
by an international expert), and has been used successfully
in professional development programs.
One emerging development of television is
video on demand, where viewers choose when they
wish to receive programs. This will reduce the time
dependence of broadcasting, but will eliminate real-time
interaction. For the producer, it may provide greater
flexibility (especially for updating materials) than
producing videos as stand-alone programs available to
students through libraries or the post.
Another emerging development is the
convergence of television and telephone to provide access to
a range of broadcast programs, Internet resources, and
interactive computer-based learning.
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