Pioneering Video On-Demand Projects In K-12 Education

Abstract

This paper describes two projects of historical significance, because they pioneer the use of

real-time video on-demand technologies in K-12 education. The projects are currently in

progress at Okazaki City in Aichi Prefecture, Japan, and Lincoln, capital of the State of

Nebraska, in the United States. An overview of the projects is provided. Systems configurations

and the conceptual approaches are discussed.

Introduction

Digital Libraries and the information highways of the future will enable many new applications

and effectively take us further along the path to becoming an information society. Education is

perhaps the area of human endeavor that will be affected the most by the information revolution.

Access to primary sources of information, and the preservation of information have the potential

to change the way in which we teach and learn. New paradigms for learning will be enabled, and

new educational models will be developed, over time, to exploit the new ways of learning that

technology will offer. Such changes, when deployed in a large scale, have the potential of

becoming culture affecting, in the way for instance, in which television affected our culture.

A new paradigm for learning that has never before been a part of our educational environments

is video on-demand. In the classroom and at home, educational video could provide a window

into the world otherwise limited to students. Video on-demand technology opens that window. In

contrast with broadcast television, Internet (store forward), and stand-alone multimedia, video

on-demand has the potential to liberate information, and in particular video, from all temporal

and spatial constrains. The ability to access information when it would be most meaningful,

on-demand, is the most challenging problem of the information age, and it is only recently that

our power over information has been extended to include digital video. However harnessing

digital video on-demand for educational purposes is a considerable problem that touches upon

technical, educational, and social issues. Solving these problems could again trigger the use of

video to affect our culture, but in a much different way.