Originally published in Current, Sept. 16, 1996
By Steve Behrens
The Department of Education has invested Star Schools money in a new LiteracyLink project that aims to put more technological firepower into teaching basic skills to adults.
PBS, Kentucky ETV and the National Center on Adult Literacy (NCAL) at the University of Pennsylvania received a $2.99 million Star Schools Program grant for fiscal year 1996, and stand to get as much as $15 million over five years if the grant is renewed.
Dan Wagner, director of NCAL and an education professor at Penn, says LiteracyLink will try to use more computer and video technology as a way of keeping up with the nationwide demand for basic-skills training.
"Our adult education programs are barely meeting the demand that increases every year, with high school dropouts and immigration," says Wagner. "Only an increase in the productivity of adult education services is going to make the substantial improvement that is required."
Kentucky ETV, for its part of the project, plans to make two new video series, according to Milli Fazey, executive producer. One of them, GED 2000, will replace KET's widely used GED on TV course, with changes appropriate for forthcoming versions of the national GED high-school equivalency test.
The other series, Workplace Essential Skills (working title), will be designed for adults with lower reading, writing and math skills, who have an even tougher time finding jobs.
NCAL's part of the project will involve the interactive technologies that Wagner wants to apply to adult literacy education. The learning software will be easy-to-use and icon-driven, with audio instructions, according to PBS.
The first users will be literacy trainers and other adults who already have access to computers, Wagner says, but over the next few years he expects PCs to become widely available in public libraries and even in many homes where there are adults who need the training.
While the learners improve their basic literacy and prepare for GED exams, they'll also become computer literate--a skill increasingly required in many jobs, according to Michael Fragale, associate director of the PBS Adult Learning Service.
NCAL already has been working with PBS to reach adult education specialists. The network has uplinked four satellite videoconferences on adult literacy to educators at as many as 850 sites around the country, says Fragale.
The project will work with 25 "innovation sites" at public TV stations, schools and libraries. The innovation sites will be coordinated by KCET, Los Angeles; KNPB, Reno; Nebraska ETV; Kentucky ETV; and the multistate Satellite Educational Resources Consortium.
The federal Star Schools Program that backed LiteracyLink also put a similar amount of money this year, $2.89 million, into the Pacific Adult Literacy Project, a regional consortium based at a Spokane, Wash., school district. The multistate consortium plans to develop three interactive courses--GED by satellite, a self-paced GED training course on CD-ROM, and an interactive course for displaced adult workers who need retraining.
Also announced last month was another Star Schools grant--$2.98 million to the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, for the CLASS Project, which aims to develop accredited interactive high-school-level coursework using computer and video, Internet and satellite technologies.
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Shortly after the LiteracyLink announcement, PBS found partners in higher-end adult education: providing video-on-demand training for employees through their office desktop computers.