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From its earliest mandate of
"taking the university to the people," CKUA has diligently offered
education by radio wave. This has included the university talks by
University of Alberta professors in the earliest days of the station's
broadcasting, the Alberta School Broadcasts produced at the request of the
Department of Education, and the radio and distance learning partnership
between CKUA and Athabasca University. Indeed, CKUA is considered to be
Canada's first educational broadcaster.
With its roots firmly placed in the educational format through the U of A
Department of Extension in 1927, CKUA's job in the early years, was to
find a more efficient method to bring speakers to Alberta rural
communities than sending them on time-consuming road trips.
While much of the educational focus of the station has shifted - for
instance, the demand for the award-winning Alberta School Broadcasts
decreased radically in the '80s, necessitating a move to creating programs
for students in second-language studies - there has nevertheless continued
to be a mixture of education coupled with entertainment through much of
CKUA's programming.
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One of the best-known examples is From Ragtime to Rolling Stones, an early
partnering of CKUA producer Brian Dunsmore and Athabasca University
professor David Gregory. Modeled on Great Britain's Open University, AU
was seeking an alternative to education by telephone tutorial and printed
materials. As a popular culture and musicology course, the series would
run for four years and cover in 104 one-hour programs, the world of
popular music in North America from 1900 to 1970.
But there are other successful examples of the CKUA-AU partnership, such
as the broadcast of Ensemble: French for Beginners, a 24-part BBC-produced
series (an echo of CKUA's foray into radio French lessons in its early
days) that was the AU's French 103 course. In the early '80s, Gregory also
paired up with Dunsmore for the 74-program series Writers and Thinkers as
an adjunct to its humanities courses. In 1984, it was retitled Theatre of
the Air, and ran until 1996 with Athabasca University professor Anne
Nothof.
