NEWSLETTER
While digital technologies hold great promise in education, access remains limited for many communities around the world. Endless networkA global organization committed to addressing equity gaps arising from challenges such as inadequate Internet access, it strategically directs investments toward international companies that share its mission and actively contribute to its realization.
One of those companies, Information Equity Initiative (IEI), is working to close the digital divide so that all students have access to educational information. Erik Langner and his ingenious team at the non-profit IEI have discovered a revolutionary solution, and it's been under our noses for years.
From Sesame Street sharing to e-book sharing, streaming (sharing specific content over digital television signals) is designed to help deliver digital educational content to millions of students around the world. And it's starting with America's schools and prison facilities in North and South Carolina, Pennsylvania and Virginia.
Cheap, reliable, and with colossal bandwidth for seamless file sharing, television stations previously used streaming data to send emergency communications to homes across the United States. When combined with next-generation cloud technology, it is also a secure and effective way to share personalized digital content with students.
Driven to help by the monumental education access problems created during the pandemic, several local PBS Broadcast Stations collaborated to allow local schools and even individual teachers to use existing digital television signals to send educational materials to students with little or no Internet access at home.
The Information Equity Initiative was born and Langner, with more than 20 years of experience working with PBS and NPR stations, nonprofit and public benefit corporations, was the natural choice as co-founder and CEO.
EdSurge spoke with Langner to discover the potential of this proven but underrated technology. We ask where it fits on the path to universal broadband. And, most importantly, how does it serve students?
EdSurge: How did the Information Equity Initiative come about?
Langner: It was really born out of desperation. During the pandemic, 25 percent of American households did not have access to broadband. So three PBS member stations came together and recognized that they could use their television spectrum to directly serve children on the other side of the digital divide. Over the next three years, we worked with educators to design and integrate the system to work with learning management systems like Google Classroom, Schoolology, and Canvas.
The pandemic has eased, but a large number of children still cannot access content so they can review it and prepare for the next day of school. Now we're ready to help teachers create lesson plans seamlessly and send them to all students, even those without broadband. And the best thing is that nothing changes for the teacher.
“Nothing changes.” Can you explain that? How does data transmission work?
In the United States, PBS member stations reach 97 percent of all households. Therefore, we already have an infrastructure that has almost ubiquitous coverage. We use these digital television signals, which have always been able to carry data. But until the IEI, the only data that was normally sent was emergency communications. We realized that if we could send emergency communications, we could also send an e-book, PDF, or educational video for a second grader.
That's why we now use a portion of the television spectrum to send data packets to students' homes. Here's how it works: The teacher chooses their own content or content available on our system and sends it to any student covered by their local PBS station. Each station generally covers about 8,000 square miles. Students have a special inexpensive receiver called Eddie that sits in their house, connected to a window-mounted antenna. The Eddie, which is usually subsidized by schools or Departments of Education, costs a little over $100 and has a lifespan of 5 to 10 years, receives the data and acts as a hotspot for any Wi-Fi enabled device. Fi, like a laptop, tablet or mobile phone, can connect and access content without the Internet.
Unlike television programming that is available for viewing at a specific time, teacher-generated data packets are stored locally on devices so that students can access them when they are ready to study and learn, even without an Internet connection. Up to eight people in a house can use Eddie. More powerful versions called Edwards are available for school buildings and correctional facilities and can serve thousands of people at a time.
Where does data dissemination fit into the path to universal broadband?
While we would love for everyone to have access to affordable, high-speed broadband, for many people that will take many years. And even once the last mile is connected, the question of affordability remains. Will the government continue to subsidize the monthly cost or not?
What we offer is not a substitute for the Internet. Instead, it allows a nearly unlimited amount of curated content to reach students' homes virtually anywhere in the world at an extremely modest cost.
What type of content can teachers share with students?
We specifically designed our platform to allow teachers to curate content locally. Therefore, teachers (or their school districts) always make the decision about what they want to send.
The teacher logs into the platform and we already structure his classes and add students. We do not collect any personal data. We only need to correlate a person with an Eddie device number so that the content reaches the correct home. The teacher can work through our learning management system, which has content from Sesame Workshop, PBS member stations, and soon other libraries such as Khan Academy, or through Google Classroom, Schoology, and Canvas and create the lesson plan. And when they hit send, we integrate into the background.
So if they work in Google Classroom, they won't even know we're there. We'll package all that content, whether it's an e-book or an educational video, along with lesson plan notes and send it wherever it's needed. Data transmission is designed to send large files, such as videos, so even large files are a piece of cake.
Where is IEI going next and how can schools learn more?
We initially thought it would be a national K-12 service, but we are finding a massive proliferation of use cases that go far beyond K-12 and the United States. For example, we are working in correctional facilities to provide educational, workforce upskilling, reentry, and therapeutic content; deliver educational and SEL content to early childhood centers; and work with federally qualified health centers and NGOs (non-governmental organizations) to focus on public and maternal health. Because we are interoperable in more than 80 percent of the world's countries, we are now beginning to collaborate with foreign governments to connect schools where the Internet does not exist or is too expensive. And because students in these environments often lack access to personal devices, we're pairing our Eddie with a projector so we can serve the largest number of students in the most cost-effective way possible. We are still in the early stages of implementation, so we don't have many results yet. But we plan to measure the success and impact of IEI on student learning and engagement. We are also working to raise awareness among public television stations and educators about this new technology and service.
