Datacasting Solutions for Education

As unexpected school closures become the norm rather than the exception, educators need cost-effective technology to reach their students outside of the classroom. 

Datacasting, which can deliver educational material to a broad area, is an effective and low cost file delivery transport for delivering files to a nearly infinite number of receivers.  In addition, datacasting can also make the delivered files available to select users, such as a classroom, school system, or faculty group.  Datacasting is a natural fit for remote learning situations as it can be integrated into the Learning Management System (LMS) such that use of datacasting is invisible to the educators.  The datacasting transmission is “behind the scenes,” delivering the assigned materials to the appropriate students.  West Pond’s datacasting technology is a cost effective component of any remote education solution. 

Datacasting technology is used to transmit computer files over broadcast television transports such as terrestrial, cable, and satellite TV.  When integrated into an existing workflow, datacasting can be invisible to most users.  Users, such as teachers and students, continue to use the tools they are familiar with while software and specialized transmission equipment move the files through the broadcast airwaves rather than using the internet.  

Educators assign resources such as links, photos, pdfs, videos, and multimedia files to students, often using the same LMS tools they currently use. Any remote student, or students with slow internet, are provided a datacasting receiver box.  The receiver box becomes a WiFi hotspot that students can access using mobile phones, Chromebooks, Raspberry Pi computers, or other web browser enabled devices.  The receiver boxes download files assigned to them by the educator from the datacasting network.  The assigned material is presented to the student via web pages on their computing device.  The experience is very similar to the students connected directly to the LMS via the internet.  The one big difference is that the student cannot submit their work – this must be done using other means.  

With datacasting, the educational material can be any content that is supported by a web browser.  This includes forms, documents, music, videos, animations, interactive media, and more.  The system even supports live audio and video.  The datacasting content can be distributed to the entire school, isolated to a particular class, or personalized for private access.  In many cases the datacasting solution can be integrated into the school system’s existing workflow.  In essence, the students and teachers can focus on their lessons rather than learning new tools.