Mr. Director:
Few phrases are heard more often than that each crisis is an opportunity. And it’s rarely as true as it is now. The announcement of the creation of an educational channel opened up a world of opportunities for a screen that had been losing more and more impact in our society.
Today, open-TV channels are experiencing a permanent financial crisis. Reduced to their minimum expression in the impossibility of sustaining themselves in competition with multiple screens, content and funding models, it seems to have infected the virus of indifference among the youngest. However, the Covid-19 pandemic appeared to put an artificial respirator on it, giving it a prominence that six months ago he could not imagine.
The Chileans looked at the device again to inform us and join us in times of confinement. And in that sense, the creation of an educational channel (TV EDUCA CHILE) allows to re-signify the mission of TV in times of pandemic and passage, it crosses it with a fundamental mission such as transmitting values, knowledge and experiences that could now replace and then consolidate, a vital function of society.
By the way, it’s a mission not without great challenges. The first is to clarify that the content will not necessarily be aimed at teaching to solve equations or describe the parts of a neuron, but rather to use the image and stories to convey essential virtues in the formation of schoolchildren such as curiosity, discovery and those cross-cutting values that make up a society.
The system also does not allow an evaluation to know if what is being taught is being assimilated, nor does it make a difference of content according to the age of the viewer. But at least it will help parents who can’t always accompany their children in these times of confinement and interrupted schooling.
Solving the educational dilemma has been a real puzzle. While the integration of classes via Zoom or other platforms has been assimilated by an important part of the student, many of them cannot access on an equal footing due to the lack of minimum inputs such as the internet in their homes or computers. That’s why an initiative like this helps to match the court a little in our current uneven education.
Of all the challenges, one key will be to be able to compete for the attention of an audience full of stimuli and endless options to choose what to watch. Because whether you want it or not, an educational channel won’t do any good if no one sees it. Therefore, you will have to adapt its contents, make them interesting and eye-catching for a generation disconnected from this platform, without that imply falling into an entertaining devoid of meaning and training. If it succeeds, our tv-relieved will be able to return to a vital and key space in society and thicken, by the way, the list of “recovered patients”.
Mauro Lombardi
Dean Faculty of Communications and Arts of UDLA
