Remembering Aprende en Casa
For posterity’s sake, a look back
Today brings to an end a sprint that has lasted a month and a half and seen an unprecedented coalition of actors mount the largest emergency service in the history of Mexican broadcasting.
In the Beginning
At first, when it launched in the middle of what turned out to be a month-long halt to classes in March, Aprende en Casa seemed like a bit of a toy. But when it became clear that in-person classes couldn’t safely resume even in a month— and eventually, not at all this school year — suddenly everyone was dependent on it.
Aprende en Casa began in earnest on April 20. Its initial coverage roster featured the combination of Once Niñas y Niños and TV UNAM (for primary school) and Ingenio TV (secondary school) as its bedrock carriers, supplemented by the state networks and a few additional local carriers (including two social stations: XHABC Chihuahua and XHMAP Monclova). The state networks — and indeed, other concessionaires — were allowed to take advantage of special temporary streamlined authorizations to add class-bearing subchannels. The first to do so was Tabasco, which quickly added Once Niñas y Niños and Ingenio TV as subchannels on the Televisión Tabasqueña transmitters. Other state networks combined their normal channels with new pop-up subchannels, as in Aguascalientes, Chiapas, Coahuila, the State of Mexico (which launched a channel already in the works), Morelos, Nayarit, Oaxaca and Yucatán. Lucky Zacatecas already carried Once Niñas y Niños on its state network.
My first-week reviews of the service pointed out that it was almost entirely dependent on public television coverage, which left some glaring gaps, and furthermore Ingenio TV coverage was particularly poor:
I get why main Canal Once, Canal Catorce, and Canal 22 were not drafted, and Ingenio TV — already in the Televisión Educativa fold — was. But that choice left secondary programming with less coverage than the primary schedule. Ingenio TV once was on every SPR transmitter, but when minimum bitrates came for the SPR, they had to drop a channel, and well, it was pretty obvious who was going to go.
And the whole thing left some glaring white areas in places that just didn’t have public television anyway. A few of the carriers that stepped up were in white areas, notably Intermedia subchannels in Mexicali and Ciudad Juárez and Canal 29 Monclova. But in several critical coverage donuts that lacked social or public television stations, there was no one to pick up the slack.
As I warned at the time, “Save a miracle deal to piggyback on Televisa or TV Azteca’s transmitter network, this won’t have national coverage beyond existing solutions.”
Luckily, That’s What Happened
When the SEP announced that Televisa was joining the ragtag army with 16 transmitters, it was very good news indeed. Unfortunately, it took nearly a month — and a request for information from this blog — to learn all of them.
The 16 transmitters in 10 states read almost completely like a master list of public television’s largest blind spots (with the inclusion of Puerto Vallarta and the Oaxaca Istmo, which do have some coverage, and Manzanillo, where the state network has a concession to build). If the SPR wanted a list of “places it needs to build a transmitter”, it should start here (though two areas were in its fifth wave that it dropped).
Televisa only carried the primary school program. However, their willingness to get on board provided much-needed relief.
Beyond the SEP
The Aprende en Casa experiment also saw some program production at the state networks, including radio shows. The SRCI system also produced indigenous-language classes for some of its stations.
In television, the real outlier was the Nuevo León state network, which opted to produce its own classes known as “Escuela TV” in association with the state secretariat of education. Veracruz and Chiapas also produced shoulder content. In Veracruz, the state produced classes in English and Náhuatl languages and mathematics. Chiapas produced one class a week in five different indigenous languages.
Many of Sinaloa’s public stations, and a new indigenous webcaster, also aired classes led by teachers in the state, but the Sistema Sinaloense de Radio y Televisión still doesn’t have a TV station, and no XHUDO-FM in Los Mochis does not cover the whole state:
Going Forward
There’s always the chance in the next year or so that this experiment must be repeated. While the current plan has remedial classes starting August 10 (to get kids back on grade level) and the actual school year beginning September 21, the health situation may preclude that from occurring. So here are some suggestions for Aprende en Casa in the future:
- Do a better job announcing channel assignments nationwide. I had to put the guide together, and I had to ask for the Televisa list. I shouldn’t have. That should be on the SEP or the IFT.
- Choose a more available channel than Ingenio TV for the secondary service.
- Consider reserving a national virtual channel number for pop-up channels to make them easier to find and facilitate national promotion. For instance, channels 70.1 (primary) and 70.2 (secondary) could be designated. A lot easier than promoting 26.3, 9.2, 34.2, 10.2, etc. This wouldn’t apply to Once Niñas y Niños, TV UNAM, or primary channels of state networks. (The highest virtual channel allocated in Mexico is 66, but two border markets have stations using 69.)
- Get a local carrier in Durango. I’m disappointed that, between three university TV stations, none of them stepped up to the plate.
Longer-term lessons:
- Consider building public TV transmitters in the cities where Televisa had to step in, or other large cities that lack public TV service. (Yesterday, RTG Guerrero and the SPR signed an agreement, the details of which had yet to be released. More agreements like this would be great!)
- Encourage states that have not done so to build out state TV networks. It’s no accident that four of the 16 Televisa transmitters are in Tamaulipas. In other states, new transmitters may be necessary; Campeche, Coahuila, San Luis Potosí, Yucatán and Zacatecas all have state networks with one transmitter in the capital city and required Televisa supplements.
- Encourage more states to be like Zacatecas and add an Once Niñas y Niños subchannel. That service needs more OTA coverage, especially if kids are going to be at home a lot. (Worth noting that the IPN’s Guadalajara transmitter was permanently approved for it in the middle of all this, and you have to imagine Monterrey is coming soon.)
A hearty thank you should go out to the people who helped organize and produce this emergency service.
