Radio Assisted Community Basic Education (RADECO) was a cooperative distance education project implemented in a number of remote regions of the Dominican Republic in 1982. The project emphasized the importance of providing education to children in these villages and communities, who previously did not receive any form of basic skills and/or literacy training. Because the children were needed to work in the fields with their parents, few could attend any available school sessions during the day. As a solution, RADECO provided interactive radio instruction each evening, allowing the children to actively explore a number of subjects and important basic concepts previously only taught in formal schools.

The aim of the project was to see how well children could learn, using the radio as an educational guide, in remote areas which lacked trained teachers and formal schooling. Children, ages 6 to 14, gathered for one hour every evening from Monday to Friday to learn mathematics, reading, writing, and some introductory ideas in social studies and science. The sessions were informal; the children were not required to wear uniforms or necessarily appear well-groomed, as the focus was on learning.

Because of the difficulty of finding adequately trained teachers to work in the evenings in villages and communities, the radio was used in these classes as a distance teaching/learning tool. Program supervisors designed radio programs that imitated actual conversations between students and teachers; the teachers on the radio directed the students and also elicited responses from them, providing an active learning environment. The programs were characterized by frequent interactive exercises and immediate reinforcement of correct responses. Furthermore, the lessons were presented in short segments over a period of time (distributed learning) to allow for a variety of teaching approaches and to maintain student interest.

In order to provide the facilitation and materials for the instruction, supervisors, villages and communities, program producers, and radio teachers spent a great deal of time and effort on their responsibilities. After a specific community was chosen as a site for the project, a member of the community was selected to act as the "auxiliares," or instructional assistant for the RADECO class. The auxiliares was given minimal training to facilitate the children's activities and learning. In building the curriculum for the RADECO programs and classes, designers analyzed the demographics of the specific students, and prepared and reviewed lesson segments and scripts based on their findings. When the finalized scripts reached the studios, the producer carefully directed and timed the questions and responses of the radio teachers. Supervisors delivered the finished worksheets to the auxiliares, and evaluators monitored student learning in the context of the various scripts and teaching approaches.

RADECO is included in the International Literacy Explorer because of its beneficial use and development of radio technology to promote the education of children in far-removed, underdeveloped areas. The program's effective strategies, discussed further under Activities, can be modified and applied in numerous other remote areas in need of distance education.

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