THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Saturday, November 11, 1995 TAG: 9511110525
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: D01 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Interview
LENGTH: Medium: 92 lines
In his industry, Glenn R. Jones is known as a visionary. His Englewood, Colo.-based Jones Intercable Inc. is one of the nation's 10 largest cable providers. In 1987, he formed another company: Jones Education Networks Inc. Its Mind Extension University has 15,000 students enrolled in degree programs at nearly 100 U.S. colleges and universities. It is the largest U.S. cable-TV learning network.
On Tuesday, Jones will deliver the Batten Media Lecture at the University of Virginia's Darden Graduate School of Business. The lecture honors Frank Batten, chairman of Norfolk-based Landmark Communications Inc. and the founder of a fellowship program at the school.
In a preview of his planned speech, Jones talked Friday with staff writer Dave Mayfield.
Q. The hype about interactive TV seems to have died this year. Will it take much longer to deliver video on demand, interactive games and all the other stuff cable and phone companies promised?
A. Most of the promises came from the telephone companies. It was all sort of new for them. Cable companies had a more mature attitude about what was deliverable when. Things are progressing with speed. They're just not going to happen on as sharp and clear an edge as some thought. But as technologies develop and you get the infrastructure laid, all of this stuff will play, and play a lot easier.
Q. You have been dedicated to making a business out of education. Why is this important to you? Has it been a good investment?
A. The huge businesses of tomorrow are going to be built on areas like education . . . where there are substantial problems that the institutional environment has been unable to resolve. In education, the private side now is an acceptable way to approach the problem because everybody realizes they need entrepreneurial help to drive the costs down and make services more widely available.
It behooves cable companies - out of intelligent self-interest - to use this spectacular tool we call television for delivering things other than detective stories and sports programs. It's a longer-term cash-flow break-even business. But it's a win-win for everybody.
Q. How much resistance have you had from universities?
A. We don't have much of a problem now. In the early days, it was tough. It took a long time for people to understand that we're augmenting, not replacing, them, and that we want to build on the existing structure to get a virtual university up and running on a global basis.
Some of the key people we are trying to reach are in the inner cities. They desperately want to be educated, but can't afford to because the cost and the time is too great. We're trying to make an education available to them in their own homes on their own schedules and without having to buy all the clothes and all the kinds of stuff you need to step on campus.
Q. How do prices of your degree programs generally compare?
A. First of all, our prices keep going down as the other prices go up. But right now our price is generally less than the cost of being an out-of-state student going to a state school, but more than if you're an in-state student.
Q. How can it be as good an education when the student isn't sitting there in the classroom face to face with the professor and especially now that collaborative learning - students working in groups - seems to be the rage?
A. We're responding to that. We're going to form a learning society. We cut across the time zones with voice mail and e-mail. The students are forming electronic communities and study groups, even sororities and fraternities.
Q. Look out five years from now. What will one in three households be doing routinely that they aren't doing now when it comes to computers, TVs, telephones?
A. I bet a lot more of them will be getting some education electronically. One in three will have access to the Internet one way or another, preferably through cable. Interactive games will be available from phone and cable companies.
I think the electronic book could be coming to us in that time frame. You'll have a device the size of a regular book that could contain the equivalent of as many as three-quarters of a million books. And you can change the font sizes and do a lot of other things with it - even have it leather bound if you like.
Most important, we'll have a convergence, a combination, a crashing together of a lot of things. There will be a kaleidoscope of electronic tools and rivers of information overflowing their banks. The speed with which it's happening, people are generally unprepared for. And it's accelerating. ILLUSTRATION: photo illustration by ROBERT VOROS
The Virginian-Pilot
Graphic
Jones on...
[For a copy of graphic, see microfilm for this date.]
by CNB