ABSTRACT
Demonstration can fulfil a particularly valuable function in distance-learning projects. The student is either following the course by correspondence or simply by studying the appropriate texts, and the occasional demonstration lecture over a television system, or by videotape, is one means of bringing the subject to life and ensuring that the students at least have some notion of the relationships between theory and experiment. There are many different kinds of distancelearning projects in existence, especially in Third-World countries. Lord Perry35, former Vice-Chancellor of the UK Open University and Honorary Director of the United Nations University’s International Centre for Distance Learning reports over 200 institutions in Western Europe and North America, and about a further 100 in Asia, Australia, Africa and Central and Southern America, actively engaged in distance-learning projects of one sort or another. In the West Indies the University makes use of satellite broadcasting; in Thailand, the Sukhothai Thammathirat Open University has well over 200 000 students; in India a very extensive system uses time assigned to higher education in the INSAT-1B satellite programme; and in the UK the Open University has its own BBC studio for the production of television programmes on the campus. It must be emphasised, however, that many of the projects do not use television very much because of the expense; in the UK, for example, it is said that television programmes cost at least seven times as much as radio programmes of the same length. There seem to be two main ways of using
