Glenn R. Jones, chairman and chief executive officer of Jones Intercable and creator of Mind Extension University, wants to ”make all America a school.” Ruth Otte, who runs the Learning Channel, offers ”the greatest bookstore you`ve ever been in.”
School and bookstore should be the perfect combination in a nation that has, in three decades, seen the virtual collapse of parts of its public school system. Yet Jones and Otte, who contend that they are not in competition, find themselves vying in many markets for ever-dwindling channel space.
Although technology is promising up to 150 channels in some cable systems, most still are limited to somewhere between 36 and 50. When the average system operator is offered two educational channels, he is likely to take only one, even though their bills of fare are entirely different.
Last year, before the Discovery Channel acquired the Learning Channel from the bankrupt Financial News Network, TCI, which is a major Learning Channel stockholder, dumped it in Chicago and replaced it with Mind Extension University. A short time later, Prime Cable of Chicago, in need of three adjacent channels to accommodate HBO`s multiplex service, also canceled the Learning Channel, taking it completely out of the nation`s third-largest market. Today, the Learning Channel has climbed back to 16.5 million households nationwide.
Meanwhile, Mind Extension University, which offers its viewers everything from General Education Development tests for high school diplomas to bachelor`s and master`s degrees at the college level, has grown from 1 million subscribers at its birth in November 1987 to 17.7 million households in 554 cable systems today. It serves its viewers both in their homes and as a teaching aid in classrooms.
Otte, president of the Learning Channel, said that, since losing the Chicago market and several others under the old FNN stewardship, her channel has undergone a total overhaul, dropping the classroom settings that duplicate Mind Extension University, moving the infomercials that once cluttered the slate at all hours into late night, and bringing Discovery`s big production guns to bear with documentaries, magazine shows and other non-fiction offerings.
”The two services now are so different, you really can`t compare them,” Otte said in a telephone interview from Discovery`s Landover, Md., headquarters. ”Our philosophy is that people learn, not just from lectures, but from the entire experience of the pictures, the scripting and the music.
”We`ve revitalized the entire channel, and primarily our theme is we`re going to take you, through television, to the greatest bookstore you`ve ever been in and we`re going to explore all its different aspects from geology through astronomy to literature and music.”
Jones` goal is equally ambitious. Appalled by studies that he said show that one-fourth of all American high school students will drop out before graduation, and that one in five of those who do graduate will be functionally illiterate, he said he will not rest until every citizen, young and old, is back in the classroom.
Now, for the first time in the history of communications, that is feasible. A student, whether he lives in the belly of the inner city or in a remote mountain cabin, needs only cable (or a satellite dish, of which there now are 3.3 million), a TV set and a VCR to participate.
In a telephone interview from his Englewood, Colo., headquarters, Jones pointed out that more than 90 percent of Americans have access to cable.
”Most major countries don`t have that going for them,” he said. ”In America, we have more entrepreneurs than anybody else in the world, so we can get our entrepreneurial juices focused on this problem and make education exciting and interesting.
”We need to approach this problem with the same serious commitment that we give to military problems, because it`s that meaningful to the country,”
he said. ”We don`t want to be peasants in an information age. People who can react to this problem of educating America need to do it. They have a national responsibility to do it.”
Jones said Thomas Jefferson, who held that the key to self-government was equal opportunity in education, would have understood.
”My approach is Jefferson`s approach,” Jones said. ”You give quality education, make it available to millions of Americans wherever they are and whoever they are, and it`s going to be very productive, because with the help of further education, some 85-year-old retired chemical engineer, working in his basement, could discover a cure for cancer.
”I`m looking for Thomas Edisons,” Jones added. ”Thomas Edison had about 1,100 patents when he died. He was very creative. This channel is looking for Thomas Edisons in the general population.”
To that end, Jones has recruited 21 colleges and universities to supply teachers, curriculums and examinations for those in his audience who wish to press for an MBA from Colorado State University, a bachelor`s in management from the University of Maryland`s University College, or a master`s in education and human development, with a major in educational technology leadership, from George Washington University.
Take the courses-via TV with interactive phone communication-from any of the participating colleges and, on passage of final exams, degrees will be awarded from the three universities. Students even can go to their campuses and march in cap and gown on graduation day.
Tuition and fees must be paid for all three degree programs, but they are a fraction of what they would be on campus and the student never has to leave home or job to obtain them.
The system uses the same approach to educate those who never graduated from high school for their GED diplomas, using a standard nationwide program set up by the American Council of Educational Testing, and to reach the Mind Extension University`s biggest audience: ”the millions of people who just want to empower themselves” through continuing education.
The Learning Channel offers no degrees, but it does offer a torrent of education in virtually all the arts and sciences, and Otte said she is mounting a ”very aggressive campaign” to regain cable systems lost before the channel`s overhaul.
The channel capacity problem, however, is likely to remain until the fledgling technologies of fiber optics and digital channel-compression (which can enable a single satellite transponder to carry as many as six channels)
become the rule rather than the experimental exception.
”None of us know when it`s going to happen, so we all need to get out and tell our story so that we can get as many of the current channels as we can,” Otte said.
Jones said the potential of the new technologies, with which Jones Intercable is experimenting, is ”just awesome” and about 10 years removed from reality. Until these technologies are viable, potentially opening more channels than all the programmers active today could fill in a lifetime, Jones said he expects Mind Extension University to grow in popularity on the education front and continue to find space on the cable spectrum.
”Our mission is to make all America a school,” he said, ”and we mean school-underlined and in capital letters.”
