Write a summary of the following passage in about 180 words. Give your summary a suitable heading and state the number of words used.

Educational technology is providing us with a wide variety of new aids to learning and teaching, helping to combat the increase in demand at all levels and the shortage in the supply of skilled teachers. The use of such aids has considerable implications for the design of spaces in colleges and universities.

The simplest and most obvious way to match large numbers of learners with a small number of teachers is to increase the group size for teaching and learning, in other words, to have larger audiences for each teacher. This may be superficially efficient in dispersing rare talent over a wider audience; it is not necessarily effective as a learning situation. For instance there may be little opportunity for student participation, little opportunity for students to discuss and clear up difficulties and misconceptions with the lecturer, and hence little immediate feedback to advise the teacher on the success or otherwise of his teaching. Wherever group sizes increase, there is a corresponding need for supplementary small-group follow-up or for the incorporation of methods whereby students may seek clarification or help as the instruction proceeds. The first solution brings us back to the shortage of the teachers concerned, unless a highly skilled or specialised lecturer can be supplemented by assistants of an intermediate level; for instance, the use of post-graduate research students as 'demonstrators'

in some university departments. The second solution, namely the opportunity to interrupt the lecturer, must inevitably be limited to few students and few occasions if the lecture is to make progress. A third and more profitable solution is to provide greater opportunities for students to teach themselves.
Paradoxically, and perhaps fortunately, while the new mass media such as film and television can be employed to assist in the teaching of large groups, other new developments in the field of aids and media in education are helping to cater for increased individualisation of instruction and, in fact, much may ultimately depend on the degree of sophistication which can be achieved with such aids. These two opposite trends, towards the teaching of large audiences and towards individualised instruction, have obvious implications for the shapes as well as the sizes of rooms and theatres; in addition, the servicing required for electronics or other equipment may exert some constraint on the actual dispersal of different types of teaching space - for instance, in some senses the teaching of language can be regarded as a laboratory subject.
541 words K. Austwick, Media and Methods, edited D. Unwin