A unique collaboration between media giant NBC News and online learning environment, HotChalk.com, is giving students and teachers what they’ve been longing for: an interactive educational tool that is informative, engaging and relevant to the YouTube generation.
The NBC News On-Demand Archives make over 10,000 video clips of historical footage and news broadcasts available to K-12 students around the world. Rather than simply reading about the non-violent movement of the civil rights era, teachers are able to show video of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. speaking to the media about sit-in demonstrations.
NBC Chief Financial Officer, Adam Jones, came to HotChalk.com with the idea to delve into the NBC archives and make them available for educators. They started with 60 producers who were given the task of finding content related to the following subject areas: U.S. history, English language and composition, government and politics, decision ’08, science, global studies, African American studies and women’s studies.
HotChalk.com has about 400,000 teachers subscribing to the site worldwide, with 93 percent of those being in the United States. By the end of this calendar year there will be at least one teacher using HotChalk.com in the classroom at every school in the United States, says Edward Fields, CEO of HotChalk.com. The Web site has become so popular that they have stopped marketing it because of a dramatic increase in subscribers.
Although the NBC News On-Demand Archives were designed for sixth through 12th-graders, Fields says, the company has seen interest in the content from third grade educators to higher education professionals. Fields says HotChalk.com does not plan to market to postsecondary institutions at this time because the company is intensely focused on K-12.
“It’s a largely underserved market,” he says.
NBC News plans to expand its educational efforts to postsecondary education in the near future, says Nicola Soares, the vice president of marketing and educational initiatives for NBC.
