Technology and Education

Educational Television.

In the fall of 1961 on the opening day of school, educational instruction literally took off on the wings of an elaborately equipped plane which became the equivalent of an eleven thousand-foot-high broadcasting tower. This was the Midwest Program of Airborne Televised Instruction (MPATI), which served six midwestern states with carefully taped programs of the nation's finest teachers, encompassing key subjects in the curriculum from grades one to twelve. The projected cost of this state-of-the-art technology per student, per year was estimated to be about that of a single textbook. Although by 1960 the University of Michigan had already studied the effectiveness of televised instruction for fifteen years, few districts had access to such well-crafted programs as those offered by MPATI. However, when the time came to shift the financial burden from the Ford Foundation, which had developed MPATI, to the...

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