Beyond the gates...
On-campus opportunities -- off-campus outreach
By Don Agostino
Director of Radio-Television Services, IUB
Those campus gates figuratively swing in both directions. Students enter
the university's geophysical campuses to access its myriad learning
resources, offerings and opportunities. Conversely, the university projects
its services to all off campus through outreach.
No novelty, outreach grows from the root purpose of the university: to
make a difference in people's understanding and outlook. Indiana
University faculty always have spoken, published and performed off
campus. Graduates leave, extending their university training to their
associations and workplaces.
Done well, campus activities leap the walls. Breakthrough discoveries,
deeper insights, more encompassing explanations or creative expressions
fly figuratively outward through the campus gates. Though less
newsworthy, the daily routine of campus-based learning also exhibits an
expressive energy, a kind of self-propelled centrifugal force. The
importance of university impact and service beyond the gates, though
secondary to that on campus, is growing. For the broad public, university
outreach becomes the comet's tail, less substantial but more attractive
and illuminating than the body.
Traditional university outreach in the form of correspondence courses,
professional certification programs and even broadcasting retained the
academic structure and character of the campus while responding to off
campus needs. IU began broadcasting in 1948, providing regional K-12
schools with a few hours of math instruction, dramatic readings of
American literature, and lessons about Indiana history. Those programs
reflected the classic lesson structure of order, clarity and completeness.
Now, almost 50 years and many changes later, public radio and television
from IU provide many communities with continuous informational and
cultural programming.
WFIU-FM and WTIU-TV interconnect with several networks of more than
1,300 other broadcast stations and 300 IHETS receiver sites. These both
provide programming for local broadcast and an outlet for university
programming. WTIU is a local provider of Ready-to-Learn, a national
school preparedness project serving 30 million American preschoolers,
and GED on TV, a statewide effort to serve those needing a home-based
alternative to high school. Nova, Front Line and The News Hour, traditional
public television programs, are backed up with over 10,000 Web pages
containing thousands of hot-buttons to other resources.
Like broadcast services, all university outreach is changing in response to
shifts in community needs and advances in learning technologies. The rush
of multimedia electronic networking has allowed the university to utilize
telecommunications to connect with any individual or group with access
to off-air signals or a telephone outlet. Outreach is now expanded, is
interactive and individualized in design. And its format, both technical and
pedagogical, reflects the jazzy, layered, multi-directional patterns of
contemporary media.
In broadcast services, networking increases reach and efficiency while
decreasing control. The same seems to hold for the competitive
marketplace for off-campus learning services. Outreach users have many
simultaneous options for their attention. Web-based materials, for
example, provide a degree of freedom wondrous from the user's
perspective; frustrating from the provider's. While the campus remains
home for the systematic, the precise and the faintly authoritarian,
outreach must succeed in a market that is customer-controlled, diffuse,
unpredictable, individualistic and dense with appealing content.
Increased university outreach activities and their users are now
influencing our campus and those who work from it. The gates become
even more symbolic.
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