ABSTRACT
In any distance educational system catering for groups of students enrolled in specific courses, radio broadcasting can be seen primarily as a convenient means of distributing audio material for students to record off air and use in their studies. Since the Open University (OU) started in 1971, radio has been extensively used as one of a handful of media in its multi-media courses. In practice, radio never becomes an integrated and essential component in more than a few courses mainly in the arts faculty. The recent decline in the use of radio broadcasts in OU courses has been parallelled by a dramatic increase in the use of audio-cassettes which are mailed to the students together with the printed course materials. The effect of this has been that the total amount of audio material provided in OU courses has remained fairly constant.
