Gail Phillips

It is almost a truism to state that radio is the invisible medium - in the words of Peter Lewis, "radio is everybody's private possession, yet no one recognizes it in public". [1] However the ramifications of such invisibility are serious. It means radio is very much taken for granted as a background medium by its audiences. It means the impact of radio on our daily lives is under-researched and arguably under-valued as a result. It means that in a medium where the aim is precisely to erase all trace of technological artifice it is easy to underestimate or in fact ignore altogether the multi-faceted theory that informs this type of communication.

Teaching and learning is a process of communication between teacher and learner. The information which passes from one to the other must be absorbed and retained if it is later to be applied in a meaningful way that confirms the acquisition of knowledge. What we are talking about is not just information delivery but audience capture, and in this respect there are parallels between the teacher-student relationship and the media producer-media audience relationship. Online learning has led to a blending of the two paradigms as educators use computers to deliver instruction via multimedia formats. An ARC-Linkage project between Murdoch University and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation brought media producers and education researchers together in a project aimed at testing the effectiveness of media in the online learning environment. The aim was to see whether compelling media content could lure the student from a 'warm bath' entertainment experience to serious engagement with a given medium. The paper describes the design and production of an audio documentary intended to serve as an educational tool in a unit targeting professional media managers.