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CCCSAT Explores Direct Broadcast Education
The mission of the California Community College’s to bring education to everyone requires broad vision and design. The California Community College Satellite Network (CCCSAT) multiple and varied delivery mechanisms develop that vision. Sherilyn Hargraves, CCCSAT Project Director, defines CCCSAT’s goal as "providing technology delivery modes for higher education and for education throughout California." The satellite uplink at Palomar College and the downlinks on community college campuses open up the possibilities for transmissions of video based courses to community college classrooms throughout California. CCCSAT’s use of satellite transmission of video courses to individual campus receive sites is only the beginning. Within two years, those courses should also be in individual homes. Broadcasting courses on local public access cable channels was the first wave of bringing college courses into the home. With public access cable, community colleges could serve their local viewing areas. CCCSAT is investigating bringing video-based education into the home through public interest programming. Students access public interest channels through a direct broadcasting system (DBS) by having a small satellite dish at home and subscribing to a DBS provider such as EchoStar or DishTV. DBS subscription costs about the same as cable subscription, provides the consumer with many more channels, and is already used by millions of people. A CCCSAT educational channel could be one of the DBS public interest channels. Monica Pilkey, a consultant with Educating Everyone, says, "I’m a believer that there’s appropriate technologies for everything. I see DBS as a delivery mechanism that provides you with an opportunity to deliver high bandwidth, full motion digital video to the home." In 1992, Congress passed the Cable Television Consumer Protection and Competition Act, which included a provision requiring direct broadcasting systems to devote a proportion of their programming to public interest programming. In 1998, the Federal Communication Commission adopted rules requiring DBS providers to set aside four percent of their channel capacity for this purpose. Public interest programming includes both informational and educational programming. Because the cost of a public interest programming channel is only between 5 and 6 percent of the cost of a commercial channel on the same satellite, religious and political groups have been quick to apply for the bandwidth. Pilkey says, "My concern is that education will lose an opportunity to take advantage of this resource because they’re not prepared." CCCSAT is one of the exceptions, and is expecting the possibility of partnering with EchoStar to bring education across the nation. |
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