Financial pressures are mounting in higher education, and there is need for ways of saving costs without reducing performance. The most obvious instruments of salvation are the new media of television, videotape, film, computer-assisted instruction and so on. Like printing, they are able to reproduce the same teaching material in unlimited numbers of situations. So, if costs are low enough, they ought to produce the first major change in university teaching methods since the invention of moveable type. The rest of the communications industry has already been transformed; yet so far education, and higher education in particular, remains unmoved. Why is this?