Connecting Communities

Kansas City: Alliance for Education

• MoKan Kids Network
• AITOL
• KCPT and Children’s Mercy Hospital
• KCUR and Partnership for Children

Aside from personal communications, no part of a community’s life is being more radically changed by the new technologies than education. The E-Rate (the federal government’s program of education discounts on telecommunications services) is bringing Internet access to every classroom and library in the land. Teachers can make use of online tools that both info r m them and provide them with new methods for teaching in the classroom . Home schooling and distance learning are possibilities that become much more attractive as the technologies improve. No community has done more to c o n f ront these challenges than the huge area of Missouri and Kansas cove re d by KCPT in Kansas City and Smoky Hills Public Television in Bunker Hill.

The MoKan Kids Network, originated by KCPT, is an independent nonprofit organization that serves 342 school districts (about 350,000 students) stretching from the Mississippi River to Colorado. Its board includes school board supervisors and teachers as well as public broadcasters. It provides instructional television, of course, but also online services and professional training for teachers. Since 1996, Link 19, which is a part of MoKan, has provided teachers with access to educational databases,newsgroups, forums, e-mail and a connection to the Internet. Kids TV 19 includes the Ready to Learn arm of the network;it partners with 97 educational and social service agencies and businesses to provide programming and outreach so that all students will arrive at school ready and able to learn. Compressed video conferencing facilities enable teachers to participate in update and training classes in their own towns, without the need to travel long distances to Kansas City where the classes are actually held. These and many other services (Ready to Teach,PBS Mathline, PBS Teacher Connex,etc.) are all part of MoKan, but its centerpiece is its use of Instructional Television (ITV) – in this case, a library of 170 series comprising 1900 individual programs covering subject areas right across the curriculum.

“[MoKan] is basically run by schools themselves,” says Gary Brock, Media Coordinator at Fort Osage School District in Missouri. “It has given us a place to go for information. The rest is up to us.”

Do teachers really want ITV programming any more? The answer, generally, is that they no longer want it in its traditional form – video programs, re c o rded off air, m o s t ly between ten and thirty minutes in length. Nevertheless, all that programming, with new titles being added each year, represents a resource that might be extremely valuable to teachers in a different form – if (for instance) it was to be digitized,put on-line, segmented, indexed and streamed “on demand” to the desktop. This is what MoKan is doing. First,it created an online Digital Instructional TV Handbook containing descriptive information about each program, a teacher guide that can be downloaded,lesson plans developed by classroom teachers using the video, a two-minute preview clip for each program, verified Web links to high quality sites that correlate with the video and professional development modules for teachers that highlight effective use strategies. Suddenly, Instructional Television became much more accessible.

“The MoKan network’s programs give more meaning and depth to the topics we’re teaching,” says Kari Goheen, a third-grade teacher at Prairie Star Elementary School in Kansas. In the past Goheen has used ITV programs to help her students learn about the solar system – but now she can use ITV as a tool that engages students in active learning,not just as passive viewers.

The next step is to add the ability to stream this programming (or segments of it) to teachers’ desktops on demand. This is the purpose of AITOL (America’s Instructional Television On Line), a KCPT project funded by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting’s Future Fund. Using a video server and high-speed T-1 connections provided mainly (and cheaply) by Sprint , twelve pilot schools are experimenting with this system. If it is successful – and it seems clear from MoKan and other test sites that it will be – AITOL will restore Instructional Television to the forefront of K-12 education . It will make a large and valuable catalog available to teachers “ on demand” and in a from that is easy to use in the classroom. It will support teachers with professional development as they use the new delivery systems . It will give teachers a formative role in the design and development of these tools. And it will be made available, via the Internet, to public television stations throughout the country, a l l owing them to continue to p rovide front end services to their local schools while utilizing the infrastructure built by KCPT and AITOL.

AITOL is, in some ways,a rescue operation – an ingenious way of using new technologies to resurrect instructional television from what had been thought to be an early grave. But it is also a signpost to the future – to the uncharted realm of broadband digital programming in which television and Web programming actually converge. An unpublished KCPT concept paper sees this as the next great challenge for public broadcasting and its partners in the community and beyond:

The looming BDP revolution must be viewed in the context of two enormous societal changes: the instant worldwide dissemination of programming made possible by the Internet, and the publication of groundbreaking research into brain development and learning over the past three years. It is now possible to design programming that maximizes comprehension and retention at any leve l ; can be customized to each viewer through multi-media technology; and can be made available any time, anywhere to persons with Internet access.

This is not “enhanced television.” It is an altogether new form of programming aimed at a new type of consumer (someone who is,somewhat unfortunately, called a “viewser”). It might best be characterized as TeleWeb programming. It uses broadband technologies to deliver audio, video and data programming over the Internet; it provides for interactivity and on-demand access;it is capable of incorporating live chat and vector-based animation. It combines the production techniques of television with the distribution and participation opportunities of the Internet. It is designed for a new breed of media users (viewsers) “who are motivated to interact electronically with the mediated information they choose to access,while remaining consumers of traditional television resources.”

Broadband digital programming will almost cert a i n ly become the focus of the electronic media in the next year or two. It is true that ve ry few households at present access the Internet via b roadband connections. Nevertheless, it is increasingly becoming the norm of the commercial workplace, and educational and civic institutions are moving in that direction . It makes sense that public media (not just public broadcasting) should accept, now, that it is the future, and should plan accordingly. KCPT already has exciting ideas to partner with local newspapers and community institutions in pilot programming for the workplace – and that is just the beginning.

In addition to KCPT’s collaboration with educational institutions across the state, the station has worked with Children’s Mercy Hospital to address local health concerns.The hospital’s emergency department identified injury and morbidity statistics for children visiting the ER.Using this information,the station produced a campaign of public service ads focusing on smoking, poison control and pedestrian safety.

The spots, produced with both children and parents in mind,contained useful contacts and other information. Pedestrian safety was a particular concern in Kansas City because the city’s schools had recently switched their focus from magnet schools to which children were bussed, to neighborhood schools closer to children’s homes. This put many more children on the street, according to Dee Rusconi, the station’s early childhood educati on coordinator. Rusconi characterizes the spots and their tailored focus on issues specific to Kansas City as “using information from the community, to give back to the community.”

Kansas City public radio station KCUR has also demonstrated the potential of alliances with public broadcasters and the nonprofit sector. Working with the Partnership for Children, a 10-year-old collaboration of dozens of local agencies and organizations committed to improving the welfare of children and youth, KCUR developed feature stories, call-in programs and a Web site devoted to topics like brain development, prenatal care and access to health insurance. The goal was to help develop greater awareness of the status of children in the metropolitan area – and to help the community find ways to improve it.

“Often the public has no idea about efforts to improve the lives of children in our community,” says Donna Peck, communications director for Partnership for Children. By combining the resources and expertise of the Partnership with the reach and journalism skills of KCUR, the alliance was able to increase public awareness and engage listeners in community problem-solving. The effort,which could serve as a model for other communities,was part of the Benton Foundation project Sound Partners for Community Health. Funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation,the project provides support to public radio stations to produce community-centered programming and collaborate with partners to address such issues as health care for young children, youth substance abuse, health-care decisions at the end of life, the health-care safety net and the needs of the aging and chronically ill. Now in its second round of grantmaking , Sound Partners has seeded programming alliances in different communities and is a test bed for new services and relationships in public media.

Contents | Introduction | Opportunity | Agents | Alliance Concept |Case Studies | Conclusions

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Last updated: 14 July 2000 rta
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