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The power of digital libraries

Audio-visual medium empowers teachers to enrich their own lectures

FILE PHOTO

GOING DIGITAL: Students browsing at a hi-tech digital library at the VIT campus in Vellore.

A COMPUTER, enabled by software to function as a digital library, can hold the content of thousands of books, periodicals and course notes; but it is not widely understood that it can also hold hundreds of hours of television recordings and slide presentations. It is important to store such content in digital libraries to make valuable learning resources available on demand on the campus, round-the-clock and throughout the year. This would vastly increase the impact of educational TV, attracting a large number of students to programmes they do not currently watch because they are available only on a fixed time schedule. Consider a student preparing for next week's exam on, say, physics. He would surely watch a video programme that explains some of the things he needs to understand well, if he knows that a relevant programme exists and is accessible at that moment.

Visual education

If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a TV programme or video should naturally be worth a lot. Distance education universities have recognised the value of the medium and have put a lot of effort into it. Brick-and-mortar colleges also need to use educational TV, which can bring vivid visuals that a student is not likely to see in his college and in his day-to-day life. It can bring material that has been planned and prepared at considerable cost, and has been designed to hold the student's attention. This can involve photographs and video clips of historical value. It can also bring views through telescopes, microscopes, and endoscopes, animations of explanatory value, and images shot from aircraft or satellites. Most importantly, TV can bring inspiring talks and interviews with eminent intellectuals.

TV vs. Internet

Making TV programmes available on demand over the Internet is an interesting possibility, but this is best done where there is maintainable and affordable broadband access to the Internet. The dream of having such access in every college will take several years to materialise. Currently, campuses without adequate bandwidth to the Internet can only download short video clips, not full-length TV lectures or programmes. In comparison, it is easy to access educational TV at any college campus equipped with an inexpensive satellite TV dish, which brings high quality images. But the only way to make the received programmes available on demand within the campus is to set up a local archive, such as a digital library.

The current shortage of quality faculty makes the audio-visual medium all the more important. This medium empowers local teachers by giving them the means to enrich their own lectures. Selected parts of TV recordings can be used by a local teacher along with information in text form, questions and diagrams and photographs put together by him, to create interactive multi-media lessons. The power of such lessons is that they put the student into an active state, having to react frequently to the material presented, answering questions and making choices as to what to skip or to see next. They also give the student a sense of achievement by displaying a selected measure of his success in answering questions. Colleges should, of course, ensure that they do not violate any copyrights belonging to commercial TV channels when they use or adapt what comes over such a channel.

Ideally, every teacher, at least at the college level, should have access to training, software and time to create his/her own interactive teaching modules, using the available video clips selectively. This is essential to ensure that TV empowers the teacher rather than compete against him for student attention. However, the ideal of teachers becoming creators of interactive multi-media content has not been reached in most educational institutions.

Get connected

Some colleagues ask the author why TV programmes cannot be disseminated through DVDs alone. The answer is, the DVDs containing video material are like bicycles — each one being possibly good for a few individual users who can share it, but not for a whole college with several hundred students. A digital library run by dedicated library staff and made accessible through every PC on the campus is a necessity. Selecting the programmes required, acquiring them, and creating and maintaining an organised collection are major responsibilities that only dedicated staff can handle. The best solution is to expand libraries to include recorded TV programmes in their collections and include descriptions of their contents in their library catalogues. Online library catalogues are rapidly searchable through an easy-to-use search engine. They are valuable to let students find what they need, when they need it.

Optimal use of online resources would require colleges to have an adequate number of PCs connected through a good Local Area Network, or LAN. Most college administrations have recognised the need for this. The fact that PCs are essential to teach computer skills valued in the job market is driving colleges to acquire them. Digital libraries can make these PCs valuable to mainline education as well, by offering video content in all subjects covered in the course curriculum.

S. RAMANI

The author is Vice-President, HP Labs India.

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