WSEC's transmitter is located south of Franklin, Illinois; master control and most internal operations are based on the SIU campus in Carbondale.

[6] The name Convocom was adopted in 1978 for the corporation;[7] George Hall, former general manager of the UNC-TV network in North Carolina, was appointed its first president that year.

[11] WQPT-TV in Moline, WIUM-TV in Macomb, WQEC in Quincy, and WJPT in Jacksonville (serving Springfield) would operate as satellites.

[14] In January 1982, the Convocom television station project was revived by a federal grant, which, together with local matching funds totaled $745,000, would provide for construction of transmitters to serve the most populous area of the country without public television;[11] two years later, the first phase of the communications network was in service, connecting schools in Peoria, Springfield, Macomb and Jacksonville.

[17] George Hall resigned as President of Convocom in 1982 to serve as Virginia's director of telecommunications under Governor Chuck Robb.

[18] Black Hawk College built WQPT in Moline, which signed on November 2, 1983, to serve the Quad Cities metropolitan area.

[15] The remaining transmitters came on air in the months that followed: WIUM-TV in Macomb signed on October 1, 1984,[21] and it was joined by WQEC in Quincy on March 9, 1985.

[20] Over the next ten years, regional, political, and consortium membership change led to revisions in financial support and a different mission statement.

In 1989, a new marketing and branding program changed the FCC call signs for two of the three Convocom broadcast facilities: WIUM-TV became WMEC and WJPT became WSEC, to identify them as the "educational channels" for Macomb and Springfield.

[citation needed] In 1998, to address reception problems in Springfield from WSEC at Waverly, a 1,400-watt translator was built in the city, originally broadcasting on channel 65 as W65BV.

[26] In 1998, the FCC mandated that broadcast stations migrate from analog (NTSC) to digital (ATSC) television transmission in the United States.

[27] This had the effect of imposing an unfunded federal mandate on public television stations, one Gruebel called the largest in history.

The same year, Network Knowledge applied for assistance from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB)'s financial distress program.

[27] In 2016, the network announced major cutbacks in over-the-air broadcasting times to save money due to the Illinois state budget stand-off, along with other cuts from donors and production contracts.

[37] Cable and AT&T U-verse viewers were not affected, since the station continued to feed morning programs through a direct fiber optic link to Comcast.

The sale was part of a larger partnership between Network Knowledge and WSIU that had been announced on October 26 in hopes of preserving public television in western and central Illinois.

[31] Master control operations for both WSIU and the former Network Knowledge were combined in an outsourcing agreement with Public Media Management in 2019.