Educational Experiments with the Communications Technology Satellite: A Memo from Evaluators to Planners

Summary

A series of educational experiments are being conducted in Canada on the Communications Technology Satellite. The description of these experiments reveals a diversity not previously encountered in educational applications of satellite systems. In evaluating these experiments, the authors adopted Stufflebeam’s Context-Input- Process-Product model in order to include in their investigation, as well as issues of instructional effectiveness, the wider problem of institutional assimilation of new communications technology. To date the project has shown that organizational constraints were more severe than experimenters had expected and that multipoint conferencing is very sensitive to technical quality. Although some of the experiments were very short the project has demonstrated that satellite communications have applications in education which go beyond the classical telelecture.