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What is this jam-packed DVD-5 all about? It's a program to help educators, new and seasoned alike, learn more effective teaching methods. We've seen DVD do this before, but what sets this one apart? It's geared toward teachers in the very remote Marshall Islands, which are located about six hours away (by boat) from the Hawaiian mainland. The Islands' remoteness makes it difficult for teachers to find access to the sort of professional development opportunities necessary to hone their skills and advance the state of education on the Islands. To address the teachers' needs, the Ministry of Education, in conjunction with Pacific Resource For Education and Learning (PREL) and Seward Learning Systems (who did the courseware development), decided to put together this program, and went to Diercks for help. Thus, Building Teacher Capacity was born. Historically, in the Marshall Islands, teachers have had limited access to online, audio, and video resources. While not addressing all their technology needs, or availing them of all that's available or advantageous for teachers in this Web-connected world, DVD solves many of their problems in a manner much more cost-effective than the alternatives. As a self-contained medium, DVD involves minimal infrastructure investment beyond a player, TV, and power supply. It's easier to get everyone set up with a DVD player for $150 than it is to wire a school to serve up streaming video, or to get teachers from multiple islands into a single room for a teacher's conference. Currently, the Marshall Islands hold an annual teacher's conference that lasts one month, which a lot more expensive than working with an interactive program, such as this DVD that is designed to achieve many of the conference's goals. "DVD is the only communication technology that is not a ‘yeah but…' proposition," says company president Richard Diercks. "It gives us everything that we need. That includes high-quality audio, high-quality video, capacity, interactivity, and cheap delivery with a large installed base." While students and teachers may not be technologically savvy, the Building Teacher Capacity DVD addresses that issue head-on. "We had to include a piece that explains how to use a remote control and how to make the choices," Diercks says. "Programming had to be thoughtfully done." The disc also had to take advantage of DVD's interactivity and flexibility necessary to create an engaging and effective teaching program. Here's an example of how the lesson plans work: A third grade class is being taught seven different lessons. Each lesson may have ten segments in it. From each segment, a user can progress to the teacher interview section, where there are nearly 200 different questions asked and answered by different teachers. technologically speaking The Marshall Islands has a rather unique language. While the words were probably not Latinate originally, westerners have standardized a written version on the language based on Roman characters. Thus, the written language combines the phonetic with several diacritical marks. Researchers at PREL and The Richard Diercks Co. searched for almost a month and a half just to identify Marshallese fonts that would work in the PC and Macintosh environments. All of the documentation was created in Microsoft Word on a PC, and all graphics were created on the Macintosh. "What makes this particular project unique is not that we're using groundbreaking techniques in and of themselves, but rather that this DVD encompasses so many unique DVD techniques in one program," says Willie Powe, DVD development manager at Richard Diercks. From a development standpoint, maintaining a good accurate flowchart has proven essential. This particular program has 3,629 individual project components, including multilingual pieces, multilanguage menu setups, and multiple subtitle tracks. A testament to the versatility inherent to the DVD-Video spec, teachers and students can access all of the program's current core features on a standard set-top DVD player—no PC required. "One of the beautiful things about this project is that each DVD player has 16 different registers that you can use as storage mechanisms to store values and data. In most cases, developers never take advantage of these. Having the ability to do this allows us to bring a whole different level of interactivity to this particular program," says Powe. Here's how it works: A full-scale tutorial section presents the end-user with a series of scenarios giving them the opportunity to go through each scenario step by step. Once the scenario portion is completed, they take a quiz which is fully scored and maintained by the DVD player. Depending on the responses given, each user will be taken down unique paths giving additional information about particular subject matter. At the end of the scenario section, the user is given a final score based on correct and incorrect answers provided. The program also gives additional feedback at the end of each lesson. For example, the DVD may suggest that the user revisit certain areas, or brush up on certain topics. "It's an extremely versatile program. When you use it in a set-top box, we feel that the interactivity we have incorporated really pushes the limits in terms of doing things like experienced planning and calculating scores," Powe says. Teachers who do have DVD-equipped computers can take advantage of a DVD-ROM section currently in development that will allow them access to a host of supplementary elements. Those elements include classroom handouts and booklets, all in PDF or Microsoft Word for easy downloading and printing. A full-scale workbook essentially works as a companion to the disc. other challenges In addition to the sheer scope of the project, Diercks faced an additional challenge in maintaining high standards of cultural correctness. Attention to detail proved imperative. Diercks says the development team started out with a number of assumptions that turned out to be incorrect, and also found that authenticity was everything. For example, they found out that a boat appearing in a disc background photo was the right type of craft for the general area, but actually reflected a specific design common in the Yap Islands rather than the Marshall Islands. "The Marshall Islanders would look at that and say, ‘what is a Yap boat doing on our program?' It may sound irrelevant, but it gets in the way," says Diercks. Although consistency is important in any program, particularly a complex one, Diercks says this project required extraordinary attention to detail as it required his team to create a grammar for programs so that certain menus mean certain things. For example, if something has a general blue color to it, that means it's a submenu. If it has a green color, then it may be a main menu. It's a structure that only succeeds if it's self-explanatory when you use the disc—therein lies the problem. costs From a development standpoint, putting together Building Teacher Capacity proved expensive. The original estimate on the DVD production portion of the project alone was around $78,000, broken down as follows: • Project management: $10,000 • Graphics: $15,000 • Authoring/Encoding: $35,000-$40,000 (most of that going to authoring) • Testing: $10,000 • Miscellaneous: $3000 In reality, the project is likely to come in just under $100,000, Diercks says. It's a relatively expensive project not purely from an authoring standpoint. The disc's development has also entailed a significant amount of project management, Powe says. Diercks' DVD design and development crew consists of about seven people in-house. However, others are involved as well, such as those who have provided the content, and those who are doing audio and video mixing. "We've been challenged in terms of bringing all of the pieces together, and making sure that everyone understands things like file-naming and formatting of elements," Powe explains. Thousands of files comprise this disc. "We had to name-number files in sequence so that we would know that something was missing if it was. When we first received the project, there was an error made in the numbering sequence. It rippled that error through 300 files. We were able to recognize that because of the filenaming system," Diercks says. While not creative from a graphics design point, the system was very controlled; "exclusive and exhaustive," he says. where the project stands By mid-May, The Richard Diercks Co. had been working on the program for six months of periodic work. At press time (also mid-May), they were still developing graphics and doing authoring, and still receiving some additional audio- and video-based components. By late summer, Powe expects this entire project to be ready for the first round of testing. With a project of this magnitude, the quality assurance phase will be lengthy as well. Building Teacher Capacity has been designed as a prototype for nine additional programs, each of which will feature the language and culture of a different cluster of Polynesian Island. Eventually there will be a set of discs that reflect the cultures of other islands, such as Yap, Palau, and Marianna. The Diercks Company will provide development services for those projects as well. (The Richard Diercks Company, Inc., 300 Ford Center, 420 North 5th Street, Minneapolis, MN 55401; 612/334-5900; www.diercks.com)
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