Case Study: Webcasting Fosters Better Parents in Washington

Government bureaucracies are snail-paced and behind the times, right? Well, that’s certainly not the case in the state of Washington, where government agencies have long used video for training and for disseminating information and now are embracing the Internet as an important platform for delivering that video.

One particular government program stands out as an example of the strategic use of Webcasting for training, though it is certainly not the only such project currently under way in Washington. It is a foster parent workshop that’s been developed by the Foster Parent Training Institute (FPTI), a unit of the state’s Department of Social and Health Services that is responsible for providing continuing education to the state’s 6,200 foster families. Improved care for foster children through better-educated and more aware foster parents is the goal, training is the method, streaming video is the medium, and the Internet is the delivery mechanism for this ongoing project.

The FPTI supplies the content and the instructors/presenters, while the actual production of the Webcast training events (and the Web site hosting) is handled by the state’s Department of Information Services (DIS). The DIS is a service agency for other state agencies; when an agency wants to reach out to the public or improve its internal or external communications, it contacts DIS.

The DIS offers state agencies a "Technology Mall," from which they can choose among such services as video production, Webcasting and video streaming, satellite broadcasting, downlink coordination, interactive system design, and/or Web site design.

With the help of the DIS, the Foster Parent Training Institute has been using video to educate foster parents since around 1996, when they began broadcasting video training workshops via satellite. This type of video distribution, though expensive, was appropriate for Washington, a big state with a large rural population spread throughout varied and often rugged terrain. Add the challenge of winter weather, and you can understand why an educational organization like the FPTI might want to limit the number of teachers it has on the road at a given time. Travel for learners also is a safety and cost concern.

Broadcasting training events via satellite required that learners gather at about 15 downlink sites scattered around the state, in places such as community centers, colleges, hospitals, and 4-H Club extension offices. This approach of doing a one-time broadcast event from a single central location provided a big cost and time savings over the alternative of holding multiple scheduled classroom-style, small-group workshops in virtually every community in Washington and having to pay-per diem travel costs for thousands of parents.

Since the FPTI has switched to Webcasting, the savings have been even greater. Renée Klosterman, multimedia production manager for Interactive Technologies at the DIS, isn’t sure how much the former satellite approach had saved the FPTI, but she estimates that the cost of doing a Webcast for 450 participants is about one-half the cost of sending the same presenter out to conduct live workshops throughout the state in 18 locations.

While satellite broadcasting was an improvement over multiple onsite sessions, it still had many drawbacks. One disadvantage of satellite broadcasting was its inflexibility. If the workshop leaders wanted to run overtime, they couldn’t, because when their time was up, they’d get "kicked off the bird," says Klosterman. "But with Webcasting, if the session goes overtime, you can just let it continue to run," she says. "You can be more flexible with the timing of your program." And then, of course, there was the cost of buying "bird time."

And even though the instructors didn’t have to travel from site to site (they just had to show up at the one broadcasting site), the learners/parents still had to do some traveling. "It was still a hassle for parents to travel 30 miles to a downlink site," says Klosterman, "and it also meant time spent away from the kids they were supposed to be caring for."

In contrast, when video instruction is delivered over the Internet, parents don’t have to leave their homes at all. They can participate in live workshops from their desktop PCs and even can ask questions via either email or a toll free phone number. Or they can opt for the even greater convenience of accessing the workshop content non-real time "on demand" from an archive on the DIS server. Of course, archive users who forego the live Webcast gain convenience but lose the ability to interact live with the presenters. Klosterman is surprised at how many people are willing to make this tradeoff. Among users, the on-demand option is far more popular than the live option, she says.