Educational Television (Hong Kong)

Educational Television , shortly known as ETV, is a series of educational television programmes jointly produced by Radio Television Hong Kong and the Education and Manpower Bureau of Hong Kong. ETV has been an auxiliary means for teaching the primary and secondary school curriculum on television since the early 1970s. ETV programmes change with the curriculum from time to time, covering a wide spectrum of topics. Programmes are broadcast during daytime non-peak hours on the English channels of TVB and from Monday to Friday, during the 32 weeks of the school year. As the popularity of the Internet has increased, ETV has made its programmes available on the world wide web on demand.

History

ETV began with the primary school curriculum and developed gradually. In 1972, the first programme was aimed at Primary 3 students. It extended one level up yearly and covered Primary 6 in 1974. In September 1976, ETV started to cover junior secondary school. It began with Secondary 1 and reached Secondary 3 in 1978. There was no major change in range until 1999. ETV extended to Primary 1 and 2 in junior primary and Secondary 4 and 5 on selected topics in senior secondary school. In 2000, ETV also began to broadcast Teacher Resource Programmes for teachers.

Programmes

The programmes are closely tied with the curriculum devised by Hong Kong Government. Most of programmes are in the Cantonese language. In the early days, it covered the primary subjects of Chinese language, English language and Mathematics, and the secondary subjects Social Studies, Health Education and Nature . Programme topics are changed weekly for primary school and biweekly for secondary school. The length of a programme is 15 minutes for primary school and 20 for secondary. Later the secondary subjects were merged to General Studies for primary school as the curriculum changed. As Putonghua has become increasingly important in Hong Kong, it was introduced into the Hong Kong curriculum, and ETV now produces programmes in the language. Social Studies for secondary schools was renamed to Personal, Social and Humanities Education.

Media

During normal school terms, ETV programmes are broadcast from Monday to Friday on the free TV channels TVB Pearl and World, alternately, so that one of the stations broadcasts ETV programmes in the morning and the other broadcasts them in the afternoon time slot. In each academic year, the two stations' ETV broadcasting periods swap over.

Although each programme is broadcast several times a week, their broadcast times are not adapted to school class timetables. The government therefore provides necessary television and recording equipment for reception of ETV programmes for government schools and aided schools in Hong Kong. The recorded programmes can then be viewed out of the broadcast time frame as required by the school.

Some programmes are distributed in form of VCDs or interactive multimedia CD-ROMs to schools.

With the coming of the Internet age, ETV programmes and other materials can be obtained from ETV website eTVonline.