Alongside NEC Corp’s new Super-tower head office in Tokyo’s Shiba is a state-of-the-art facility that provides satellite education services for NEC offices around Japan. Students in regional areas are no longer required to journey to Tokyo to sit in a classroom with engineers from other NEC branch offices, and are certainly denied the pleasures of carousing in the big city with fellow engineers, but NEC claims that the cost savings are considerable, and it is in the process of expanding the network – with analogue rather than digital equipment however. Run by the NEC Institute of Management, a company spun off from the Human Resources Development Division of head office, whose charter includes the education of engineers and NEC management, NEC Satellite Pedagological Network for Advanced Creative Education, NESPAC, came into being in 1988 as the world’s first fully digital two-way video and audio education network. Two Satellite Education Centres in Tokyo and at the Kawasaki are currently linked to remote classrooms in 14 cities around Japan, where NEC’s main branch offices are located.
Remote classroom
From these Satellite Education Centres, transmission is conducted in point-to-multipoint mode, via a 1.544Mbps satellite digital line to the JC-SAT1 domestic communications satellite on which NEC has leased a transponder. Another satellite digital line is used to transmit the return video and audio from one of the satellite classrooms. The instructor, sitting at the front of the Centre classroom can control which remote classroom is being viewed and displayed on one of two screens at the front of the Centre classroom. A maximum of 10 students in each remote classroom sit in front of two screens, and a request pad in front of each student is used to attract the teacher’s attention to ask questions. The instructor can then select classroom to all the other satellite classrooms.
By Anita Byrnes
Course materials and personal computer input can also be connected and transmitted over the line.One of the development goals of the system was media transparency, in other words to eliminate the awareness of the means of communication from the communication itself (NEC does not seem to have heard of Marshall McLuhan’s dictum that the medium is the message). Statistics from surveys of students following a satellite course indicate student satisfaction ratings that are almost identical with those obtained in traditional classes. Ratings from students in the satellite classrooms are less than 0.1 point different from centre classroom students. Novelty value still plays a part, but by the end of a week-long class, students actually feel that they are part of one classroom, according to reports. The main courses given by satellite are software and marketing training courses, making up over 50% of the total courses, and technical training for engineers. Starting this month, the second Satellite Business Course for sales and marketing staff with three to seven years’ experience will be run for over 100 students – by satellite. This will be run as an all day seminar, for 14 days over eight months. The centre operates from 9am to 5pm every day, and also from 6pm to 8pm in the evening for self-development courses. The system is linked into other communication systems including the cable TV systems running in the NEC Super-Tower head office, and via a Kokusai Denshin Denwa Co connection through Intelsat internationally. This was given a trial in December last year when the NEC International Convention of regional managers was held in Singapore.
Lodging costs
With over one tenth of the half million student days of training now being conducted by satellite, and given the substantial cost benefits to NEC stemming from the system – NEC claims the system broke even at 12,000 student days or $4m dollars, balancing high transmission costs (the satellite transponder alone costs $4.4m annually, and there are back-up land lines) against the costs of travel and lodging within Japan – the challenge now is how to expand the system. Because of the
high costs of the NETEC video codec unit used for compressing the digital signals for transmission, it has been decided to supplement the digital system with an analogue one-way video and two-way audio system which will use ordinary FM TV transmission equipment and telephones for spoken communications with the centre. The analogue centres will be connected in parallel with the digital ones so that the same programming, or different sessions, are possible. Satellite transmissions are currently off the air for two weeks while the analogue system is installed, at perhaps one hundredth of the cost of the full digital set-up. Practical issues take priority over publicity value even at NEC.
