Nations recognize the need to invest in education and to develop productive citizens for national and local communities; most require mandatory schooling. In developing nations, satellite technology has the capacity to reach teachers in remote and educationally deficient areas contributing to improved teaching skills and productivity. This paper describes the experience of consultants and university administrators in their attempt to design a Venezuelan direct broadcast satellite infrastructure for the training of preschool, primary, and middle school teachers. Satellites combined with multipoint compressed video and fiberoptic terrestrial links extend the educational parameters of the nation state. Wireless and digital technologies provide affordable communication infrastructures to answer the need for individual access and convenience. This paper describes a joint venture experiment in distance education and emphasizes potential viable opportunities of global tele-education developments in an exciting new space market. This project is one of the first examples being explored by Project LEARN of the International Space University (Reference 1).
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