Over the last few years, Distance Education has come into its own as the mainstay in the field of education. The integration of satellite technology and education has yielded rich rewards socially, culturally and economically, to name just a few. It being a truism that education has its own reward for any society, distance education has also been a boon in a more specific sense to educational institutions themselves as it allows extremely useful contact across national and international borders.

Indian Space Research Organization has pioneered the use of front line space based communication technologies in the field of education and development. ISRO launched EDUSAT, a satellite meant exclusively for education sector, on September 20, 2004.

• Network Configuration  
  The satellite-based interactive narrow casting network has one-way video and two-way audio facility. The network is capable of data transfer from the teaching end to the remote classrooms. The data includes lecture notes, courseware, presentation material, exercises etc. The network consists of three major elements: teaching end, remote receiving sites called classrooms and spacecraft.
  
  
• Teaching End
  The teaching end consists of a small studio and an uplink earth station. The studio, which originates live or recorded lectures, is linked to the uplink earth station. The lectures (visual images and the audio signal) are transmitted to the satellite from where they are beamed back to earth covering a large geographical area, for instance, entire Karnataka. The 6.3-metre antenna for uplink has been installed in DSERT campus at Bangalore.
  
  
• Receiving End or Classroom  
  The live lectures are received at classrooms of the engineering colleges. There are two types of classrooms - interactive and non-interactive. The 1.2-meter antenna has been installed in each college.
  
  
  • In the interactive classroom, the students can interact with the subject expert at the teaching end through a voice link via satellite (64 kbps audio return channel). The question and the subject expert's response to the question can be heard live in all classrooms.
    
  • Non-interactive classroom will have 'receive-only' facility and the students can interact with the subject expert via telephone line or mobile phone or internet. In this case, normally, the subject expert repeats the question for greater clarity.

• Spacecraft
  EDUSAT,world's first satellite meant only for educational purposes, is being used.
  
  
• VTU-EDUSAT Project
  The main purpose of the project is to introduce newer techniques of distance education using interactive multimedia system and to gain experience in multicasting with satellite return channel.