t-learning

The steps so far… (i) May 3, 2008

Some days ago I came across a thorough research on this subject by pjb Associates and it is really interesting, so I want to share a kind of state of the art made up of what I’ve found there.

As t-learning is possible due to advances in Digital TV and distance learning, I will give a summary on both aspects, starting today with the former.

So, what is Digital TV? It is the broadcast of contents in a digital format, in contrast with the analogue format that we were used to receive. But not just the broadcast, as we are going to see an evolution in the way we use the TV: it will become more and more personalised, leaving traditional scheduled TV for major live events.

The personalisation of television is mainly task of the set-top box, which will receive signals from the user’s remote control device and adapt the content according to that. This can be used in a number of ways:

• navigation through the high amount of channels
• enhance of existing TV programs, by the addition of more information on demand for example
• channel independent interactive services (such as virtual magazines)
• interacting through the return channel, giving the viewer the opportunity to send information up to the broadcaster: quiz answers, voting…
• video-on-demand: receiving some specific content is totally independent of the current time
• home storage: contents are saved in the set-top box or other local storage device
• the hybrid of the two previous: Pushing content to local storage and Pulling content from remote servers
• meta-tagging

All these features can be of much use in t-learning: additional data can be attached to any program, providing even futher information sheets, and interactive learning can be achieved by the use of real time tests and quizzes, and questions or feedback from the learner. Also, meta-tagging is a crucial tool to easily classify and search contents of interest, be tutor or learner-side.

Other initiatives include:

• Web content on the TV: This has been proved to be not the best approach, as the adaptation is hard and the result is poor. Web content is optimized for a different interface, so that the graphical part is less than it should be and the access to the functionality is difficult when using just a remote control. Therefore, this is still a field for research. A good proposal is to develop general learning objects that can be afterwards adapted to both Internet and TV access, separating both processes, as noted in the article “Enticing learners: Rethinking the relationship between e-learning via DiTV and via the Internet” by Russel et al.
• Live personal video distribution: live demonstrations by tutors can be broadcasted to learners’ homes, in the way iSeeTV (for medical support – one-way) and FastWeb TVCam (TV-based videoconference – two-ways) do.
• Games consoles: given the potential they bring to TVsets, they are capable of presenting rich learning contexts. There has always been little interest in this field from games manufacturers, but fortunately Nintendo is promoting the idea these days.

Regarding standardization, the Home Multimedia Platform is the agreed standard for set-top box by the European Comission but it is unlikely that it will spread widely as there are already many legacy set-top boxes being used by consumers. Also, the TV-Anytime Forum is a global association of organizations, working in the idea of a device that may support a wide range of services – network and standalone games, information and educational packages, entertaining enhanced television, transactional services and utilities such as banking, shopping and smart appliances.