Connecting Communities

Nebraska: The Reality of Multi-Platform Programming

• CLASS
• Wonderwise Science Education
• Grassroots
• NCITE
• NAPT

No state in the Union has a greater investment in public media than Nebraska, and no state has done more to ensure that its facilities – and its thinking – are state-of-the-art. Nebraska Educational Telecommunications (NET) is the engine-room of this enterprise, largely financed by the state government and its educational institutions, but with many of its individual projects funded by federal grants. Molded by its geographical location on the plains, it has been a pioneer first of correspondence learning, then of distance communication and learning, and now of interactive media development for all kinds of education and information.

The amount of activity is awesome. NET is the umbrella organization that includes the eight state-licensed stations of the Nebraska ETV Network, a s well as KUON/Channel 12 in Lincoln, which is licensed to the University of Nebraska, and the nine state-funded radio stations that make up the Nebraska Public Radio Network. In addition to over-the-air broadcasting, it has:

NEB*SAT, a 28-channel satellite system that provides communications for educational and state government services, as well as public broadcasting;

a compressed video service allowing 20 simultaneous one-way or 10 two-way interconnections;

a fiber-optic service linking groups of elementary, secondary and post-secondary schools to share two-way instruction; and a statewide cable network (EduCable).

It also owns and operates what may be the most technically innovative educational production and distribution company in the country – Great Plains National, co-producer of Reading Rainbow, Newton’s Apple and many other series. But the fastest developing side of NET is the Interactive Media Group, where as many as seventy programmers work shifts in order to meet deadlines on projects like CLASS.

CLASS stands for Communications, Learning and Assessment in a Student-centered System, and for once the acronym is an accurate description. Its purpose is to make available on the World Wide Web a complete accredited Nebraska high school diploma sequence. It is aimed at the geographically isolated, the housebound and the homeschooled – but it is also there for students who wish to accelerate their high school graduation or need courses to supplement the high school experience. All the tools and materials a student needs are contained within the course – text,audio, video, Web links, online quizzes and tests, and many other features, including an electronic notebook to capture graphics and text, an e-mail link to the teacher and a newsgroup where the teacher may post general announcements or moderate student discussions – all this within a seamless navigational system that encourages individualized discovery and learning.

CLASS is work-in-progress, but much of it is already functioning. The first four Web-based courses were in operation as early as 1997. Since then, ten courses have been added each year, and all 54 will be online by September 2001, working in conjunction with 138 print-based courses offered through the Independent Study High School of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL). The $17.5 million project (commissioned by the University’s Division of Continuing Studies) is funded by a five-year federal grant from the General Services Administration, together with a Department of Education Star Schools award. It is no surprise that other states are already visiting Nebraska to see how the technology can be adapted for their own uses.

CLASS is the most spectacular of NET’s interactive developments,but by no means the only one. Wonderwise Science Education was developed with the Nebraska State Museum. It creates interactive kits (CD-ROMs and videotapes) that feature the role of women researchers in the history of science – in an effort to encourage more young women to pursue a career in science. In a very different kind of project, the Nebraska Law Enforcement Training Center commissioned NET to develop online courses for law enforcement training throughout the state. Its components cover subjects as varied as drug and narcotic enforcement and the handling of domestic disputes – all of them designed to enable officials and volunteers to train, and to be kept up to date , without the need to travel to distant centers.

Grassroots is another interactive media project in development. NET was aware that five separate rural and agricultural groups had approached it to seek help in improving efficiencies in rural life on the plains. It got them all together and developed a project that will confront their problems and help to devise solutions, using radio, television, and the World Wide Web. It’s a timely project, and it clearly meets a community need. Amidst economic uncertainty and the continued decline in the numbers of people employed in the agricultural sector, more Nebraska counties are losing population than are growing. Outmigration, combined with an aging population base, could lead to a severe population decline in the years ahead, crippling rural Nebraska’s ability to maintain services and create a future for itself. Grassroots will disseminate stories of farmers on the plains, in the process engaging Nebraskans in a statewide discussion about the challenges rural areas face.

"The goal of Grassroots, says Donald Mackie, executive director of the Nebraska Rural Development Commission, is to “get the plight of the Nebraska farmer on most people’s radar screen.”

Nebraska Educational Telecommunications is an object lesson in how public media – and public broadcasting, in particular – can harness the new technologies to the needs and aspirations of their communities. It earns substantial and continuing support from the community (as it has done for 45 years), and it is now beginning the task of forming its own community alliance – probably for the Great Plains region as a whole, rather than just for Nebraska.

Reliable community support is a hard - won commodity, but Nebraska’s success is also based on its spirit of entrepreneurship and an eagerness to experiment with each new technology as it appears. It is this spirit that informs the most ambitious of all NET’s development projects – NCITE: National Center for Information Technology in Education. The purpose of NCITE is to create a national laboratory to conduct basic and applied research into how we learn, and how technology can be used to enhance our learning. Its research in learning and cognition could help a third-grader in Chadron improve her reading skills. It could develop software to enable a school district in Iowa to revamp its fourth-grade mathematics program. It could create collaborative virtual reality technology to enable history students to study Native Americans. Its research and development could significantly lower the per-unit cost of education in K-12 science and mathematics. With its labs, its experimental classrooms, and its gathering of experts and expertise, it could make real contributions to the improvement of education in this country. NCITE is still a vision – a bold vision – but it illustrates the potential that public broadcasters (and public service media, in general) can legitimately envision when they match their access to new technologies with serious educational purpose and genuine entrepreneurial skills.

The growing capacity of the media also creates opportunities for groups that rarely had access to channels of communication in the past. Once again, Nebraska could show the way. Native American Public Telecommunications (NAPT) is a national nonprofit corporation composed of a number of public television stations and a group of Native American program-makers. It seeks to ensure an Indian voice in public broadcasting. NAPT develops, promotes and manages a variety of media services, including public radio, television and interactive media such as the Internet.

Headquartered in the Nebraska Educational Telecommunication Center in Lincoln, NAPT has nurtured the development of award-winning film and video productions, including Surviving Columbus, In the White Man’s Image and Last Stand at Little Big Horn. It makes its productions available for educational sale and broadcast use through Vision Maker Video service, the nation’s largest collection of authentic Native American programs. NAPT’s Production Fund currently is focusing on developing a major feature-length drama for theatrical and public television release, and a major public television series, Native Americans In the 21st Century, to air on PBS during 2000.

Among NAPT’s other services is the American Indian Radio on Satellite Network (AIROS), which broadcasts to a growing family of Indian-owned and public radio stations across the continental U.S. and Alaska. AIROS’s flagship series is Native American Calling, a daily call-in program that covers a wide range of topics important to Indians. Also in development is the American Indian Music Service, which will offer native music programs to AIROS affiliates and other stations over the Public Radio Satellite Service. NAPT recently assumed management of INDIANnet, a Native American-owned and -operated Web site that offers information access to tribal America. Plans are underway to broadcast Native American Calling in real-time audio over INDIANnet.

At the request of the Census Bureau, NAPT and INDIANnet are serving jointly as one of five Lead Information Centers in the nation. In this capacity, NAPT is housing a library of Census research materials in both paper and electronic formats, and it used its various outlets to help communicate the importance to Native Americans of being counted in the Census.

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Last updated: 14 July 2000 rta
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