Interactive value-added services for educational purposes in digital TV

The Industrial IT laboratory (INIT) of Helsinki University of Technology (HUT) has studied the use of digital TV for learning purposes since 2001. Digital TV educational services range from traditional educational TV programming to interactive value-added services, which can be exploited as independent contents or combined with AN services (Lugmayr et. al, 2004). Our development work has been in the area of interactive value-added services. One result of this work has been the implementation of an interactive learning environment in digital TV based on the MHP standard. So far MHP has been adopted world-wide by many countries and operators as the standard platform for interactive services (Schiek et al., 2003). On January 12, 2004 a pilot group started studying the Local Demands for Global Enterprising course over the digital TV cable network. In this paper, we report the results of using digital TV as a learning environment for the Local Demands for Global Enterprising course and describe the developed concept of studies via digital TV.