INTERACTIVE TELEVISION - ARTICLE 2

Distance Learning

Interactive Television will make it possible for people to educate themselves on all sorts of topics, in their own living room, at their own pace and in private. People can learn to read, see what Saturn looks like, find out what the government is upto, and much more!!.

Distance Learning :

• is learning where the student and the teacher do not physically have to be in the same location.
• broadens the student's learning experience by allowing them to experience presentations from teachers and specialists in selected fields of study. In order for students to feel fully participant, two-way communication is needed.

In order for the teachers to successfully use the distance learning network, they must not need training on special training methods, or need to modify their teaching plans or limit the teaching materials. However, the learning material has to be in modules.

A good feature is for all the students to see all other students and the teacher at any moment in time. This provides the most involvement by all the students and allows the teacher to judge the students more easily. In order to do this, cameras can be used to transmit the presentation. The audio quality (of the speakers) must be excellent. The audio system must provide a clear transmission of questions with as least noise as possible.

Figure 1

Information can be sent in two ways :

• synchronously - here there has to be synchronous participation of all students and teachers. The interaction is done in real time.
• asynchronously - here there does not need to be simultaneous participation of all students and teachers. Students do not need to be gathered together in the same location at the same time. Students can choose where they learn from and also when.

Several experts think that Distance Learning will be available on mass scale within the next 10 years. Below is a quote from Bates A.W : (1993) Educational aspects of the telecommunications revolution in Teleteaching North Holland : IFIP which is from http://tecfa.unige.ch/edu-ws94/contrib/peraya.fm.html :

"The implications for education and training are immense; learning can be independent of time and place, and available at all stages of a person's life. The learning context will be technologically rich. Learners will have access not only to a wide range of media, but also to a wide range of sources of education"

Figure 2 : Different types of Learning Technologies

A system called Live Interactive Television is being used in Edith Cowan University, Churchlands, Perth. Live Interactive Television uses live programs which contain an interactive element - viewers can communicate on-air with the presenter. The instructor is able to ask questions and challenges to the viewers during the program. It is a form of talk-back TV. The interactive element enhances the learning through the television.

Live Interactive Television is used for applications such as :

• seminars and conference presentations,
• tutorials,
• short courses,
• lectures,

Live Interactive Television has a number of strengths :

• interactivity provides many opportunities for varying the instructional format,
• the interactivity is able to enhance the quality of the teaching and learning,
• the interactions can help to provide more motivating and stimulating environments in which to deliver lectures, seminars etc.

Telebanking

Another interesting topic is telebanking. Until now, payments were made using traditional payment mechanisms like regular bank-accounts, credit cards details etc. Now Internet users can open a special electronic cash (ecash) account to pay for web-services.

Below are the more popular methods of payment :

• Payments external to the Internet

  In this system, monthly fees for a service can be transfered from their bank-account into the account of whom you want to pay. Problems with these payments are :

  • they are expensive,
  • they take a long time to process.

  The method is used efficiently for people who are frequent users and not just for one-off payments.

• Payments using credit-card details

  To avoid bank-transactions, payments using credit-cards became the next possibility. If you want to use a service, you simply send your credit-card details to the service provider involved and the credit-card organisation will handle this payment. There are however some problems. Intercepting messages on the Internet is quite easy for a hacker, so encrypting, scrambling or coding of confidential information must be used. This mechanism of scambling has two major disadvantages:

  • The costs of a credit-card transaction are fairly high,
  • The development of a hard to brake encrypting code requires a general adoption across the Internet of standard encoding protocols or the making of arrangements between buyers and sellers.

  Issues related to security and privacy are shown below. Click here to go there.

The reliability and security of the system

Interactive television can be used for important things like paying for services, telebanking or other services that work with important or confidential data. The system must be reliable and safe from interference from anyone. A scrambling system is applied to a television signal to ensure that it is only receivable by the person(s) for which it is intended.

There are two basic types of scambling system :

• dumb - the channel cannot turn a subscriber's descambler off,
• addressable - far more complex - allows the channel to be individually turn on and off descramblers.

Another problem is with voting from home. There are a number of issues relating to this subject :

• When employing this method, there must be a system where each individual has his/her own password/identity. There are a number of ways that the identity of the individual can be checked - password, finger prints, voice recognition....
• Problems can occur if the password is lost or is known to others.
• Problems occur when the vote is being sent to the central counting system - hackers may change the votes while being transmitted. A way pass this is to encode it in a special way, but this is both expensive and can still be hacked into.
• This system must be reliable. There has to be a way where the person knows that the vote has been received at the central counting system, this can be achieved by the central counting system sending an acknowledgement.

There are also problems associated with telebanking. Two of the most important aspects of electronic cash systems are security and privacy. Electronic cash is very hard to protect and could even damage the clients privacy. It is essential to pay attention to the effect that paying with electronic cash has on:

• the security of the paying traffic,
• the privacy of clients.

Security

An important aspect of security is the prevention of the double spending of ecash. Ecash is nothing more than a few bits. Banks must disable users to spend duplicated coins.

When an e-account client withdraws cash, the user's software randomly chooses serial numbers of the electronic coins and includes a blinding factor. The bank will encode the blinded numbers and leaves the bank's validating digital signature on the serial number. When the user copies the coins, he has two coins with exactly the same signed serial numbers.

To prevent the coins from being intercepted by criminals, digital signature techniques are used. These techniques are complicated and technical.

Privacy

Because the use of information technology is increasing rapidly, people fear that their privacy is at risk. The ecash system, designed by DigiCash, gives the payer his/her privacy. When paying with ecash the identity of the payer is not revealed automatically. This way the payer can stay in control of his/her personal information. During a payment a payer can of course reveal identify, but only when he/she chooses to do so.

The Future

Interactive Television will revolutionise the way we watch TV. The viewer will be able to participate in some or all aspects of the program as if they were on the show. A completely new type of programming will evolve to take advantage of this added interactivity.

Live Interactive Television is a form of interactivity but real interactivity will be found in the future where viewers can participate even if the program isn't live.

Bibliography

• Far West Laboratory for Educational Research and Development
• Broadcast Spectrum and the Debate on the Future of Television
• http://www.teleport.com/~isi/article1.shtml
• http://liswww.fste.ac.cowan.edu.au/Distance
• http://www.cyberdoor.com/ia/itved.html
• http://tecfa.unige.ch/edu-ws94/contrib/peraya.fm.html
• Working of telebanking
• http://homepage.interaccess.com/~ghoyle/
• Security notes from Operating Systems course by M.SLOMAN

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Copyright © Keval Pindoria 1996