Screen production for education: digital disruption in an ‘ancillary’ market

From education to ‘educative’: some history

Any history of screen production for education in Australia must start with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), but no contemporary discussion can exist without taking into account the dramatic changes that have taken place in the last decade.

In schools, programs broadcast on free-to-air and, to a much lesser extent, subscription television continue to make up a significant proportion of content used in classrooms, although only a very small percentage is viewed at the time of broadcast (Cunningham et al., 2016). Traditional ‘educational broadcasting’ has been disrupted through the emergence of new players and providers and with the increasing use in schools of ‘educative’ as distinct from ‘educational’ content. This is principally – but not exclusively – a story of the disruption of public service broadcaster provision of content for educational use. Programs broadcast by the ABC continue to earn the lion’s share of royalties paid out under Part VA of the Copyright Act 1968: the Statutory Broadcast Licence that permits educational institutions to make off-air copies of television programs. But the majority of content accessed in schools is not ‘educational’ in the traditional sense; that is, the majority of content was not made specifically for educational use but was produced for general audience consumption and broadcast outside the traditional, and much reduced, morning educational block of programs on the ABC’s main television channel. The ABC has dubbed this content ‘educative’ as it seeks to fulfill its Charter responsibility to provide ‘broadcasting programs of an educational nature’ (ABC Act, 1983: s.6(1)(a)(ii)), despite no longer screening more than a few hours of educational programs per week on its television channels.

For 60 years, the ABC has been the principal producer and distributor of television programs for schools. The public service broadcaster did establish an education portal (Learn Online) as early as 1998, but at the turn of the century, the ABC’s online education presence was very much subsidiary and supplementary to television and radio programs, with a focus on the creation of complementary websites for educational programs with attendant teacher resources (Burns, 2004; Martin, 2007). Educational elements were incorporated into special web projects such as the 2002 Winged Sandals, ‘a state of the art website about ancient Greek myth and classical culture, consisting of interactive games, animation and educational material’ (ABC Annual Report, 2002–2003: 80), but digital provision remained sporadic.

The slow pace of change can be put down to a number of factors: the institutional inertia of a monopolist supplier, limited funding, and the lack of a holistic vision. In addition to these factors, there were also practical limitations in the education sector itself. Computers, let alone Internet access, remained luxuries for many schools, while poor download speeds and bandwidth issues plagued the first-movers. For most schools, broadcast television continued to provide the bulk of video content. Between 1988–1989 and 2000–2001, the ABC averaged well over 1000 hours per annum of educational broadcasting. From this point on, however, the total plummeted, with the number of hours dropping by over one-third year on year in 2001–2002 and by over half in 2002–2003. In 2003–2004, citing government budget cuts, the Corporation did not commission any new school programs, and axed its children’s news and current affairs program Behind the News, which had been a mainstay of its educational offerings since 1969. A public outcry and a government backflip on funding allowed the program to be re-launched in 2005 with a new website (Holden, 2005: 19). While ostensibly continuing the ad hoc policy of building supplementary, program-related websites, this move provided the first signs of a new response to digital disruption.

The simultaneous transition of the ABC’s attention from ‘educational’ to ‘educative’ television programs and toward the primary provision of online educational content accelerated following the appointment of Mark Scott as Managing Director in 2006. Scott established an Innovation Division within the Corporation in March 2007 that took responsibility for much of ABC Online. In the same month, one of the Corporation’s national radio networks, Radio National, launched a series of podcast-only educational stories called Edpod. Later that year, the ABC Advisory Council prepared a discussion paper on ‘Education and the ABC’ for the ABC Board and commissioned research into the use of ABC television and online content in schools. The development of an online education portal was also listed as one of the targets of the ABC’s Corporate Plan for 2007–2010. The Annual Report for 2007–2008 signaled the beginnings of a major shift in its discussion of these developments, noting, ‘In light of rapid technology changes, the ABC believed it necessary to re-assess the current and future needs of schools in relation to education content and the Corporation’s role in its delivery’ (ABC, 2008: 41). This renewed focus on education content was, in part, a response to a 2007 policy announcement by the newly elected Labor Government, launching an innovation termed the ‘Digital Education Revolution’ under which all students at state high schools in Years 9–12 would be provided with a laptop, and all schools would have access to high-speed broadband.

Recognizing an opportunity to further the corporation’s Charter responsibility in education, the ABC Advisory Council recommended proposing to the federal government that the ABC’s new catch-up television service, initially known as ABC Now and subsequently renamed ABC iView, be installed on every laptop provided to school students under the Digital Education Revolution plan (ABC, 2008: 189). Although this bold proposal was not taken up, our research shows that ABC iView is now widely used in schools. ABC iView is an online streaming service, and therefore does not fall under the statutory license scheme that permits educational institutions to copy and screen programs broadcast on television. While entirely legal, schools’ use of iView potentially deprives the ABC and other rights holders of royalty payments that would be paid had the programs been accessed via one of the services licensed to provide access to broadcast material such as ClickView, DVC, and Enhance TV. Although unintended, this is another way in which a digital service is disrupting traditional arrangements for use of screen content in education.

The contemporary digital supply landscape

Where once the ABC reigned supreme in educational broadcasting, via its daily block of schools programming, there is now an increasing range of content suppliers and service providers are active in the education space. The use of YouTube is virtually ubiquitous, but YouTube is by no means the only source of content. A complex mix of suppliers includes commercial operators like ClickView, DVC, and Kanopy; not-for-profits such as the Campfire Film Foundation and Australian Teachers of Media (ATOM); subsidiaries of not-for-profits such as Enhance TV and Informit EduTV; as well as providers of free content such as the ABC (through its catch-up television service ABC iView and its online education portal ABC Splash) and Australia’s other public service broadcaster Special Broadcasting Service (SBS). Not all are prospering in the variegated education market, with only a few successfully developing sufficiently robust, user-friendly, relevant, and scalable platforms. Traditional business models and service offerings have been disrupted both by the emergence of new players (whose approaches and business models differ from the traditional models) and by the adaptations made by existing players.

One notable development is the emergence of non-screen sector organizations that are involved in the provision of educational screen content. Many of these organizations employ or partner with screen sector firms. Most produce or commission specialized content tailored to particular elements of the Australian Curriculum. For example, the Sydney Opera House runs a digital education program alongside its program of performances for schools. The digital education program includes a ‘digital tour’ of Bennelong Point, the site of the Opera House, and its Indigenous history. Teacher resources accompanying the tour align it to specific curriculum outcomes in English, Science, History, and Human Society and its Environment, as well as outlining suggested pre- and post-tour activities.

Another example is the Primary Industries Education Foundation Australia (PIEFA), a non-profit organization founded in 2007 to promote and lobby for agricultural education in schools. In July 2014, the PIEFA was awarded AU$2 million by the Federal government to develop online resources including videos to support both primary and secondary teachers to incorporate agricultural education in six learning areas including science and geography. In concert with Education Services Australia (ESA) and a South Australian digital content agency, PIEFA created 17 units of inquiry and 34 accompanying videos for students from Foundation to Year 10, as well as an app for pre-school and early primary students called George the Farmer.

The experience of the Sydney Opera House and PIEFA demonstrates the opportunities that exist for content producers in education if they work with non-screen sector partners. The most successful of these initiatives tend to be those in which educational design thinking is embedded in content production from the outset. PIEFA, for example, appointed a former Tasmanian school principal as its CEO, and while the Foundation has close connections with ESA, it benefits greatly in its efforts to promote and facilitate the study of agriculture in schools from the education background of its CEO.

One of the affordances of digital disruption of education is the increased availability of informal (or out-of-school) learning opportunities. The fact that ABC Splash was initially announced by government as a service intended for use in the home rather than in school indicated a desire on the part of the federal government for the ABC to play a leading role in the provision of such opportunities for Australian children. It soon became apparent to those in charge of the portal, however, that the site was principally being used during school hours and that teachers rather than parents were the key intermediaries. To some extent, this mirrors the use of YouTube; many students report using YouTube for educational purposes outside school, but the platform is also broadly accessed in schools (Cunningham et al., 2016).

We profile three companies and services that showcase the changing dynamics of the education ‘market’ and what is at stake in successfully supplying into it. The three companies exemplify key aspects of the digital disruption of education. These profiles are constructed from data collected for the Australian Screen Content in Education Project which aims to better understand how various kinds of Australian screen content are currently being used in primary, secondary, and tertiary education. Data were gathered through a combination of desk-work and interviews with industry representatives, on the supply side, and a national survey, interviews conducted in five Australian states with teachers (approximately 150) and students (approximately 175) and classroom observations (approximately 25), on the demand side.

ABC Splash symbolizes one part of the modification of public service provision of content in education while still maintaining a public service broadcasting (PSB) ‘tutelage’ model. YouTube exemplifies prototypical digital disruption–an unconstrained profusion of myriad content which is at the same time highly navigable, readily available, and immensely popular despite numerous education authorities’ attempts to restrict access to the platform. Finally, ClickView exemplifies the expansion of for-profit entities into the previously non-market-driven provision of screen content in education. ClickView’s success is based on its profile as a ‘born digital’ Australian company employing advanced technology, business strategy, and professional pedagogics. The profiles also collectively instantiate the three types of content and content use in education:

ABC Splash

The ABC’s online education portal, ABC Splash, principally comprises ‘education first’ and ‘curated and re-versioned’ content. In addition to drawing on the enormous archive of material made or broadcast by the ABC since its creation in 1932 (much of which was first produced for educational use), ABC Splash has commissioned a range of ‘education first’ interactive content resources. It is the primary means through which the public service broadcaster is meeting its obligation to broadcast educational programs while responding to the changes and challenges wrought by digitization. Along with Behind the News, Splash is the principal conduit for the ABC’s provision of educational (as distinct from educative) content to schools. Splash has its origins in the ABC’s Triennial Funding Submission for 2009–2012. Since 1989, these 3-year plans have provided the rationale for the ongoing government appropriation that remains the principal source of funding for the ABC. The 2009–2012 Submission included a proposal for ‘enhanced online delivery and additional content, including archival information for education’ (ABC, 2009: 76).

The digital utilization of the ABC’s extensive content archive had been an early priority for ABC Innovation, and the potential for collaboration in education was swiftly identified. Schoolteachers were surveyed and interviewed about the kinds of media content they were using in class and what they were looking for: short form and Australian content were popular requests. In December 2011, the federal Ministers for Communications and Education jointly announced a special program of funding for a digital education portal that could demonstrate the value and capacity of the National Broadband Network (NBN) in education. In partnership with ESA (a national not-for-profit company owned by all Australian education ministers with responsibility for supporting delivery of national education priorities), the ABC was allocated almost AU$20 million over 3 years to develop ABC Splash.

From the outset, ABC Splash was intended to support the implementation of the Australian Curriculum, although the government envisaged it principally being used at home rather than in schools. It quickly became evident to the Splash team, however, that teachers would be the main conduits for content to reach students and parents. This has been borne out by usage data over the site’s first 3 years, which demonstrates that the site is principally used during the school day. In terms of content provision, initial focus fell on English, mathematics, science, and history, the first four learning areas in the Australian Curriculum to be developed for students from Foundation (pre-Year 1) to Year 10. With ESA providing pedagogical guidance, as well as writing metadata and supporting material, the Splash team began mapping content from the ABC Archive to the curriculum. This highly articulated, detailed approach has been the bedrock of the site over the course of its life, with subsequent commissioned content receiving the same oversight and linking to the Australian Curriculum as the archival material.

The development of content for the site has involved several ABC Divisions, as well as partnerships with external organizations. For example, the Splash Live pilot program Making the News combined the expertise of ABC Innovation, Television, and News and Current Affairs, and the Australian Centre for the Moving Image in Melbourne, to connect four NBN-enabled primary schools in four states to develop news stories over a 6-week period culminating in a collaborative video streaming event.

ABC Splash also commissioned 10 flagship interactive projects, including games and data visualization initiatives. By the end of 2014, the site contained over 2000 videos, almost 600 games, and over 120 audio clips and was recording around 10,000 visits per school day. Our field research shows that the site is principally used in primary schools, but also that many teachers remain unaware of its existence despite the extensive efforts of the Splash team to connect with schools and promote the site. In part, this may be because teachers have access to several alternatives, including Scootle, a national digital learning repository developed by ESA, and in Queensland, C2C (Curriculum into the Classroom), a digital resource developed by the state Department of Education and Training. But our research on the demand side of this market – that is, among teachers – also points to over-curation as a reason teachers may under use of the ABC Splash platform. Teachers’ professional identities are closely tied to their relative autonomy to curate and customize content for their own classroom, especially in secondary school (Cunningham et al., 2016). This may explain our finding about Splash’s different profile at primary and secondary levels.

ABC Splash has been a significant Australian initiative in the provision and popularization of digital content in education. It represents the digital extension of the ABC’s Charter obligations on educational broadcasting. It also in part represents ongoing commitment to informal ‘public education’, which Michael Tracey argues is one of the fundamental principles of PSB (Tracey, 1992: 18). In pedagogical terms, ABC Splash combines social constructivist and directive approaches. It embodies the persistence of PSB ideals of education, access and equity in the digital space. An index of the challenges of the digital environment is that it has had limited penetration and profile, and its one-off triennial funding stream was not renewed.

The ubiquity of YouTube

YouTube is an important source of screen content used in education. The video sharing site has over 1 billion monthly users and is the second most commonly used search engine behind Google. The use of YouTube video in a range of educational fields at tertiary level is well documented, and there is an ever-increasing number of educators posting videos on the site for both student and general consumption. There is, however, still a relative paucity of scholarship on the use of YouTube in schools, something that our project is, in part, addressing. In terms of the three types of content use in education, ‘entertainment first’ and ‘education first’ are most common on YouTube although there are also many thousands of videos that repurpose entertainment content for educational purposes.

Today, the widespread use of YouTube in Australian schools belies the high-control approach taken by some Australian education authorities shortly after the service launched in February 2005. The site was blocked in South Australian and Queensland state schools in 2005, in New South Wales (NSW) state schools in 2006, and in Victorian state schools in 2007, principally in response to concerns about the content that students might access, and specifically to the posting of videos in which students were bullied by their peers (Colley, 2007: 27–28). In the United States, several school districts have removed or modified bans on YouTube, although high proportions of students interviewed by the Berkman Center for Internet and Society in greater Boston, Chicago, Greensboro (North Carolina), Los Angeles, and Santa Barbara in 2013 reported some form of restriction on their access to YouTube (Cortesi et al., 2014). Like some of their American counterparts, most Australian authorities have since dropped or modified restrictions on YouTube in response to pressure from teachers and students.

Our interviews show that some teachers make YouTube available to their students even when they have been directed not to, or where YouTube is blocked. One teacher was willing to provide his students with his password so that students could conduct research using YouTube. Another teacher simply passed her laptop to students to allow them to look up clips. More than one teacher told us they turn a blind eye to students using their smartphones to access YouTube clips for learning in class. Several others explained that they provide students with YouTube URLs to look up videos for homework. All the teachers who provided their students with YouTube access argued in interviews that they believe it is an important educational resource and that it does not make sense to restrict students’ use of it. Several of the teachers passionately defended their position, when presented with contradictory policies.

Many of the students who have participated in focus groups during our research have reported independently and regularly going to YouTube to reinforce their classroom learning and to undertake personal, interest-driven learning. While the students in our project are far less numerous, our findings broadly align with those of the latest Speak Up National Research Project on flipped learning in the United States. The results of the third annual report, released in February 2015, show that of the more than 430,000 students in K-12 who took the online survey, ‘40 percent … stated they found videos online (e.g. YouTube and Khan Academy) to help with homework or studying’ (Project Tomorrow, 2015). In the Speak Up survey, only 4.5% of students reported that they never used YouTube, while 44% said they used the service ‘all the time’. As the researchers note, ‘Video is the means for youth to access social media in their free time so it goes that they are very comfortable using video for their formal and informal learning’ (Project Tomorrow, 2015).

There are several reasons for the widespread use of YouTube in schools. First, the vast and ever increasing amount of content on the service has made YouTube a default video search engine for many teachers (Cunningham et al., 2016). Although teachers typically have access to online or locally stored digital video services to which their school or education authority has subscribed (often at significant expense), and notwithstanding the efforts of many education authorities to bar its use in the classroom, YouTube has become the preferred source for video content on almost any topic. Teachers report being able to access screen content that they have never previously been able to find for classroom use.

Second, YouTube clips are typically short (under 10 minutes). Duration is a key determinant of the use of screen content in schools; where in the recent past, screening a video was a significant occasion because a special trolley containing the television set and video player had to be booked for use in a classroom, and therefore longer screenings were common, now screen content has become a part of the relatively seamless flow of a lesson, and shorter clips are the default format.

Third, teachers often favor the use of YouTube clips over pre-curated content despite the fact that much of the pre-curated content, such as that available on ABC Splash, is also short form so that it may be tailored to a particular element of the curriculum and is often accompanied by supporting teacher resources or bridging materials. Teachers often prefer to curate screen content along with a variety of other resources themselves as a significant expression of their professional identity and in order to tailor their own lessons to the particular needs of their students (Cunningham et al., 2016).

Fourth, students are often connoisseurs of YouTube in their own time, and in broad terms students report responding positively to the style of clips on the service. Typically, short, fun, fast paced, and above all recent clips are most likely to retain students’ interest. This aligns with the shift from ‘educational’ to ‘educative’ television content, where the latter is typically guided by entertainment aesthetics and values rather than a more formal, instructional, educational mode.

ClickView

The importance of entertainment in facilitating student engagement with screen content in education is well understood by some of the newer services that specialize in the provision of screen content for education. ClickView (which was a distribution platform for pre-broadcast and specialist content) bought the production unit of Video Education Australasia (VEA) in 2013. For many years, VEA was a major traditional source of educational Australian screen content. ClickView now makes approximately 1500 minutes of new content per year principally for school use in Australia, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom. ClickView straddles all three types of content use in education. Its production arm produces ‘education first’ content, often heavily informed by entertainment values in order to maximize its appeal to students. Licensed as a Resource Center under the statutory license, ClickView provides schools with access to broadcast television content, much of which is ‘entertainment first’. And through the efforts of both its own content development team and of teachers and teacher librarians who are able to customize and add content and resources to the service, ClickView is a major repository of repurposed and curated content.

ClickView is a prime example of a ‘born digital’ company that, through its business model and service offerings, has dramatically disrupted video purchasing and user practices in schools. ClickView’s chief innovation ⁴ was the development of a system entitled ‘predictive chapter buffering’ whereby media content is ‘chapterized’ and delivered to the player on request, one chapter at a time, with the next chapter requested, transferred, and received in time to play as soon as the current chapter has finished playing. The method differs from streaming video either from a server on a local network or from a server in the cloud, wherein video is pushed to a client computer in small packets at the same rate that the video is being viewed. This requires considerable power on the server side and limits the number of clients that can be served simultaneously. The capacity of the network cable further limits the number of clients who can be served simultaneously. The method of ‘chapterization’ and the use of smaller video files were perfectly suited to the tendency (as noted above) for teachers to use shorter video clips in the classroom.

ClickView’s initial business model involved a school purchasing a hard drive containing about 1000 videos that was then installed on the school server and, using the patented software applications described above, that was then accessible on all computers in the school’s local area network. Over the last 12 years, the content library available via ClickView has grown considerably as the company has purchased archives and entered agreements with other distributors. Since ClickView was approved by Screenrights as a ‘resource center’, schools could access free-to-air television content through the service. The model of selling a hard drive and then charging an annual subscription fee comprising a base price supplemented by a cost per student has proven much more attractive to secondary schools than to primary schools, as the latter often have much more limited information technology (IT) infrastructure and support and also have lower library budgets.

At the end of 2015, ClickView reported 48% of secondary schools (around 850 schools), 37% of K-12 schools (around 450 schools), and 3% of primary schools (around 200 schools) subscribed to their service, with an annual renewal rate of 94%. The company is moving to serve its subscribers from the cloud, and new subscribers no longer purchase a hard drive of content. In part, this move has been prompted by the lack of good analytic data on use from the school server–based system. Subscribers access the service via ClickView’s website, as well as by dedicated desktop, tablet, and mobile apps that allow a range of data to be collected, with the intelligence generated informing the company’s content development and production strategies.

Over the last 3 years or so, ClickView has turned its focus to the production and distribution of its own content, as well as the distribution of content from third party suppliers. In 2013, the company purchased one of the largest Australian suppliers of educational content, VEA, in the process acquiring an archive of approximately 2500 titles, and a production unit based in Melbourne. For approximately 6 months after the VEA purchase, ClickView’s team of content producers and teacher consultants worked through the archive to map the content to the Australian Curriculum, looking for gaps that could be filled with the company’s own, newly produced work.

This shift toward content production has been prompted in part by the increasing level of competition from other online services so that original (and exclusive) content development becomes both a point of difference from competitors who tend to be limited to distribution and a selling point for ClickView. The shift has also been driven by the company’s recognition that much of the existing content available to schools is becoming dated and can be less well-suited to contemporary pedagogy and classroom practice. The former VEA production unit currently makes approximately 1500 minutes of new educational content per year, although the ‘Australianness’ of the work is often downplayed through the use of presenters or actors with ‘neutral’ accents in order that the content may also be used in the United Kingdom and New Zealand, where ClickView also operates.

In addition to its pivot to content production, ClickView is notable for several recent innovations on its digital platform that have further disrupted the educational content space. First, ClickView has developed a ‘digital curriculum specialist’ known as Albert. Essentially a sophisticated search engine, Albert enables teachers to search for content in the ClickView libraries by subject, by year group, by strand, by curriculum code, by keywords, and by tags. Teachers are able to add their own links, tags, and keywords to video content, as well as rating the links’ relevance to the curriculum outcome to which they are aligned. Links are rated on a scale of 0–5 stars, with any content rating 0 being automatically flagged for review by ClickView’s content development team and curriculum consultants. Links rated 5 stars can then also be prioritized in future search results. Android and iOS native ClickView apps for mobile devices allow teachers and students to record content and upload to ClickView, with content only accessible to other users from the same school.

In this way, ClickView has added a degree of ‘futureproofing’; as students move increasingly toward production of their own content for assessment and class work, ClickView has positioned itself as the repository for such work. A further innovation has grown out of ClickView’s role as a resource center through which schools can access free-to-air television content. Five data centers located around the country record all free-to-air channels 24 hours per day, 7 days per week. The main innovation of this service (ClickView 24-7) is the indexing of the subtitles that accompany the content streams. This allows teachers to search on words spoken in a program, and locate a specific reference to the exact moment of broadcast. Finally, ClickView has created a free service, ClickView TV, under which the content development team curates approximately 20 programs per week from free-to-air television, along with selected pieces of ClickView’s own content. This teaser service is available to all teachers, whether or not their school subscribes to ClickView. In addition to building up ClickView’s own content library, the service functions as a promotional tool, advertising ClickView to prospective subscribers.

Conclusion

This article is part of a wider study of both supply and demand in a media ‘market’ – screen content developed for or used in formal education settings – that is significantly different from the majority of media sectors. At the same time, this sector is being disrupted by digital technologies, services, and affordances in similar ways as other media sectors. New services, new business models, and new approaches to production and distribution are challenging previously settled arrangements and requiring established players to adjust their strategies and offerings. Formerly the terrain of Australia’s main public service broadcaster, the educational component of the ‘Reithian trifecta’ (Spigelman, 2013: 48) – to inform, educate, and entertain – is an increasingly contested and innovative media space. Some of this innovation directly flows from the ABC’s response both to the broad digital disruption of traditional media, as well as the specific disruption of the education sector. In the report of the wider study (Cunningham et al., 2016), we have developed in greater detail the points made in this article about the dynamics of the demand as well as the supply side of the education market. In directing findings and suggestions to teachers and lecturers, to policymakers, and to producers and distributors, we seek to fulfill the aims of the research project to ‘inform and improve content delivery, resource preparation, curriculum planning, policy development, and decisions over funding of Australian screen content for education’.

In this article, we conclude by stressing that the factors and developments driving digital disruption in the education sectors – exemplified in the profiles of three companies and services that make up the final part of this article – have not, to date, attracted substantial attention from media scholars. It is our contention that the education sector is deserving of detailed attention from media industries scholars committed to the public and prosocial value of media production. The production and distribution of educational and educative screen content are characterized by different sorts of complexity than media scholars are attuned to, but the ways in which the most successful services and companies are negotiating this space have strong parallels with how producers and distributors are navigating digital disruption in media industries more generally. Given that the previously core and largely unchallenged position of the ABC as the principal source of screen content in education in Australia has long gone and given the similar position occupied by many PSBs in many other countries – particularly those modeled on the British system – this sector should be of great interest to PSB scholars examining the future of such services.

More broadly, as our focus in media studies increasingly extends beyond mainstream media and must perforce embrace digital media and all its ramifications, the production, distribution, and use of media content in sectors such as education should become a more significant object for scholarly attention, responding to Graeme Turner’s (2016) call for closer integration of digital media studies with mainstream media studies. As screens and screen content are now virtually ubiquitous, the particularities of their deployment and use in specific settings such as education, as well as their pedagogic applications, further emphasize the importance of studies such as this for screen and media studies.