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Caleb Phillips ran an ad in the Boston Gazette offering lessons in Shorthand -
Isaac Pitman, known as the pioneer of correspondence education offers shorthand lessons via correspondence in Bath,England
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Illinois Wesleyan College becomes first academic institution to offer courses and programs through correspondence or " in absentia" -
William Harper Rainey developed the correspondence division at the University of Chicago. It enrolled 3,000 students in 350 courses with 125 instructors. -
Guglielmo Marconi invented the first spark transmitter and received the first patent for the radio.
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Professors at the University of Wisconsin created an amateur radio station dedicated solely to educational broadcasting.
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Due to the overwhelming number of radio stations and the interference of frequencies, Congress pass the Radio Act of 1927 which attempted to regulate the radio industry and placed the power of decision making into the lap of the Federal Radio Commission (FCC). Due to this new act and the Great Depression, many educational institutions took hit. Of the 176 educational broadcasting stations, only 35 survived by 1930. -
NBC (National Broadcasting Company) began the Radio Corporation of America (RCA) Educational Hour. This hour long program introduced children and adults to the sounds of symphony orchestra. It became known as "The Music Appreciation Hour"
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The IER was founded in Columbus, Ohio where radio was used often within classrooms. The purpose was to develop, share and expand upon educational methods used in educational broadcasting.
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The Rockefeller Foundation and the Carnegie Foundation came together in an effort to promote radio in education to organize and fund the NACRE. -
The FCC answers educators' requests by reserving a total of 242 channels to be used exclusively for educational broadcasting.
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By the mid 60's to the late 70's, radio and TV were used extensively within the brick and mortar setting as well as families tuning in to learn together at home during educational broadcasts. However, the use of TV for distance learning didn't really stick in the manner educators had hoped. By the late 70's The BBC (British Broadcasting Company) had set a standard for everyone to follow and mimic.
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In the 1980's we saw computers be used to educate the workforce in the corporate arena for existing and new hires.
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The official unveiling of the World Wide Web (WWW) occurs. This could be argued as the turning point for distance/online education. Shortly after the WWW was introduced, the University of Phoenix was the first institution to offer online education programs via the internet.
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The Asychronous Learning Networks (ALN) was developed by the Alfred P. Loan Foundation to help explore alternatives for students who had difficulty attending traditional courses. -
New York University, created a for-profit online program called, NYU Online. Likewise, Western Governors University (which was founded and supported by 19 state governors) was founded to help Americans have more opportunity to access quality online education.
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In 1998, Blackboard merged with CourseInfo LLC to provide the first software product for online learning.
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NYU Online, the only program thought to be able to compete with the ever growing University of Phoenix closes, along with countless other online programs. The cause? Online programs being run and designed by Brick and Mortar institutions failing to understand the difference in pedagogy between the two settings, difference in learning styles of setting and lack of instructor buy-in.
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Moodle, the first open source internal network is introduced and ups the game of online learning. -
With technology changing and improving, Learning Management Systems were now being housed in the clouds.
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Google Classroom was made available for members of Google GSuite changing the dynamic of both online and in person learning.
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While the COVID-19 pandemic didn't set out to revolutionize education-- that's just what it did. Educators, Administrators, students, parents, LMS designers, curriculum designers, educational program designers, etc. all had to be resilient, think outside the box and get creative, very fast and with a very limited budget. Educators made connections across the globe to learn from their peers to provide quality education to their students in a time of uncertainty.