Brazil, with its large territory and low school attendance, has been experimenting with radio and television education for more than three decades. Two states in the Northeast (Ceará and Maranhão) created secondary schools through television in the 1970s. Yet, a bit later, another player - a private enterprise, the Globo Television Network – stepped on to the stage and completely changed the relationship between secondary schools and television. Being the world’s fourth largest network, Globo had ample experience in production, excelling in soap operas that found huge markets in all continents. Twenty years ago, the Roberto Marinho Foundation (FRM), the education branch of Globo, created the first Telecurso, adding a number of important innovations. First, it used very expensive production. Second, it used actors instead of teachers. This program was a major success and was aired for more than 15 years.

In the early 1990s, with the rapid transformation and globalization of the Brazilian economy, industrialists were having problems with the appallingly low schooling levels of their workers. In many cases, they provided sponsorship for their students to take the preparatory courses leading to the government examinations. However, the quality of these courses was, at best, mediocre.

Content of Telecurso 2000

Telecurso 2000 is a condensed version of a basic curriculum for distance education, which is to be provided through a combination of videotaped classroom sessions and books. Thus, both television sets and videocassette equipment are used. In addition, an optional curriculum is offered that focuses on teaching basic mechanical skills (the vocational course on mechanics).

The initial discussions on the development of a curriculum for the three courses to be offered by Telecurso 2000 (Level One, Level Two and the Vocational Course on Mechanics) were subsidized by education specialists who wished to elucidate the teaching of basic skills in the context of a postindustrial society.

With that beginning, the guiding principles for the educational program of Telecurso 2000 were developed as follows:

These four principles - job-oriented education, development of basic skills, citizenship education and contextualization - underlie all the disciplines that are taught through Telecurso 2000. The development of the program content for each discipline was entrusted to teams of professors associated with the major universities, all of whom were required to have ample experience in the field of basic education. This requirement was particularly important given the highly specialized nature of adult education and the need to adjust the language to be used accordingly. Textbooks had to be easy to read without being childish.

The following table shows the content of the curricula for the three courses offered by Telecurso 2000, as well as the number of TV classrooms and books used in each discipline.

Approach

Users of Telecurso 2000

It is difficult to identify all the users of Telecurso. Suffice it to say that 5.2 million accompanying texts were sold or distributed between 1995 and 1999. "Telesalas" (classrooms with television sets) have been created in enterprises, and a support system for those working with students has been established. At present, more than 200,000 students attend classes at factories, schools, churches, offices, prisons, ships and buses.

An unknown - but probably large - number of people watch television and study on their own. But even more surprisingly, another large and uncounted crowd watches the programs regularly or occasionally, apparently because it is interesting, light and fun. A recent telephone poll indicated that 5% of the respondents – closely representative of the Brazilian population - had watched Telecurso 2000 in the previous week (this is close to 7 million people). The interviews have shown some interesting findings. Surprisingly, the modal level of schooling of the audience is higher education, and most respondents indicate that the reason they watch the program is that they like education programs.

A further development is the spontaneous utilization of the programs in regular schools – something that had already started with the old Telecurso. The growth rate of this form of use is even more impressive. The data are unreliable but it seems that more than 200,000 students attend classes where the Telecurso is the predominant mode of delivery.

Like all forms of education using technology, television requires heavy initial investment. Significant savings are obtained in current costs, since one can use less expensive teachers and still obtain serious results. However, the fixed costs up front are quite high.

Simple arithmetic suggests that in order to have reasonable costs per student, many students are needed to share the fixed costs. Assuming a cost of US$30 million for preparing Telecurso 2000, if the program were to stop today, figures for book sales indicate that several million students participated in Telecurso somewhat seriously. Suppose three million used the program, this would amount to US$10 per student. This is a very modest price (per student) for a set of 1200 15-minute lectures.

Costs per book are around US$4 (the primary school program uses a single book and the secondary program uses multiple books). Hence, the social cost per student working on his/her own is US$14.

Classroom modalities completely change this cost equation. Since it requires one teacher per classroom, the costs begin to approach those of conventional education. Estimates for classes offered in factories and in well-respected philanthropic institutions yield costs per student around US$400. This is no more than the average costs for public education but less than the costs in the more affluent states where most of these classes take place. In other words, once we put a teacher in each classroom, the costs of Telecurso look about the same as those of regular schools - which do likewise, without the support of technology and good books. At the present scales of operation, the imputed costs of the US$30 million initial investment almost disappear inside the much larger recurrent cost of paying teachers or instructors. Actually, there is a strong tendency to hire regular teachers for the "telesalas." Hence, cost-wise, the Telecurso is similar to a regular school, since the television component has a negligible weight. But there are ways of reducing costs even with a teacher in the classroom, which have not yet been experimented with. For example, the number of classroom hours for night schools, attended by 60% of all secondary school students could be reduced by say, one half, requiring students to watch the program on their own half the time and in tele-classrooms the other half time, at which time teachers or monitors could help with problems.

How Effective is Telecurso?

Telecurso 2000 is an ambitious initiative, mobilizing hundreds of people at the production, distribution and instructor-training levels. Does it pay? Are the results commensurate with the costs?

No rigorous study allows us to give a precise and reliable answer. Costs are easy to compute. The delivery and its organization are clear enough. But good measurements of outputs are lacking. And when they are available, they lack comparability with other groups (regular students or students preparing for "supletivo" by other means). Research is currently underway to try to answer these fundamental questions. In any event, Telecurso has already proved its value through providing opportunities which were not available to young adults, through opening a new perspective on pedagogy and on educational materials.