NASA Online and on Tube Has Wheeling Feeling
If you ever watch NASA TV or view a NASA event online, you probably are seeing a signal that has passed through or originated in the facilities at the Center for Educational Technologies through our NASA-sponsored Classroom of the Future program. For years the Classroom of the Future™ has worked with NASA TV and now what's called the NASA DLiNfo Channel providing broadcasting and webcasting support to the space agency. That work continued in 2012 through our Video Support Services department. Not only did we continue to manage educational programming for NASA TV, as we have done for years, we managed the operations of the DLiNfo Channel, which features programs disseminated by NASA's Digital Learning Network (DLN). Through distance learning technologies like videoconferencing and webcasting, the DLN connects students and teachers with NASA experts and education specialists.
Looking at some internet statistics, you can see just how busy a year it was. The DLiNfo Channel hosted 158,210 unique IP addresses with multiple viewers for each connection. We also supported three of NASA's major educational outreach activities: the transit of Venus, Curiosity's landing on Mars, and the movement of space shuttle Endeavor to the Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum in New York City. We hosted programming from New York City for the Intrepid event and streamed webcasts of all three events to millions of Internet viewers.
From October 2011 to October 2012, our NASA TV web streaming support to all states and internationally totaled more than 11.8 million unique hits, including all shuttle launches, NASA news conferences, and special programs for Aerospace Education Services Project (AESP, NASA electronic Professional Development Network (ePDN), and other NASA Education projects.
Enhancements
In 2012 the Classroom of the Future improved the DLiNfo Channel in many aspects. We added 475 new video program elements to the webcast channel that are subject specific and STEM based. We also added an additional high definition videoconferencing system to expand the programming outreach and allow us to provide a dual stream on two web providers (NASA ETouch/Akamai and NASA's Ustream Superchannel). We added special programming outreach for NASA projects like NASA NICE, AESP, NASA Explorer Schools, FIRST Robotics, LunaBotics, Inspire, IGES, Teaching from Space, NASA Education Stakeholders Summit, and NASA CORE. The Classroom of the Future also improved the DLiNfo Channel's public outreach by more than 200 percent.