Continuing education professionals have long been interested in telecommunications media because of their potential value in extending instruction to distant students. The first mass medium to offer a timely means of distance instruction was open-broadcast radio. During the 1920s and 1930s, 13 United States colleges offered credit courses over the airwaves. Yet radio did not live up to its seemingly great potential; by 1940, instructional college programs had vanished. The State University of Iowa (currently the University of Iowa) offered perhaps the best university program of that area. Research into the program at Iowa shows that it started with great enthusiasm and eventually enrolled almost 100 students from many distant points in combined radio-correspondence courses. However, as time went on, the technical limitations of radio, the lack of well-defined target populations, and the failure to create an adequate faculty reward system eventually spelled the doom of the system. Thus, as has been the case with other technical advances in education, the potential of radio was oversold, badly marketed, and eventually unrealized. (KC)