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the University of House made distance learning history when it began offering the first televised college classes on KUHT (today called HoustonPBS), which was the first public television station in the United States. Referring to itself as the “The Channel That Changes You”, KUHT ran 13-5 hours of educational material each week, accounting for approximately 38% of the channel's total broadcast time. Many of the courses aired in the evening so that learners who worked (OnlineSchools.org, 2014).
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The Western Behavioral Sciences Institute uses computer conferencing to provide a distance education program for business executives (Thompson, 2023).
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The University of Phoenix became the first institution to launch a fully online collegiate institution that offered both bachelors and masters degrees. In 1996, entrepreneurs Glen Jones and Bernand Luskin launched Jones International University, which became the first accredited and fully web-based university (OnlineSchools.org, 2014).
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Nineteen U.S. governors found Western Governors University to help Western states maximize educational resources through distance learning (Thompson,2023).
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the Blackboard Learning System staff announced that 40,000 instructors were teaching 150,000 online courses to more than 6 million students, across 55 countries (OnlineSchools.org, 2014).
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2009 there were over 4.5 million students taking online classes, with a Master of Science in Business Administration (MBA) being the top degree offered in the United States. This trend seems like to continue into the future: currently, 83% of all U.S. institutions that offer online courses say they expect an increase in online enrollment in the coming decade (OnlineSchools.org, 2014).
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President Barack Oabama has pledged over $500 million for the creation of new online course materials to fuel the industry(OnlineSchools.org, 2014).
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About a third of higher education was entirely online before the pandemic, and the rest continued to be delivered face to face in brick-and-mortar classrooms, according to the research company Bay View Analytics. The huge spike that occurred during the peak of lockdowns propelled not only unprecedented innovation and investment in online higher education, but also a spree of research into whether and how well it works(Marcus, 2022).
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Marcus, J. (2022). With Online Learning, Let's Take a Breath and see What Worked and What Didn't.https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/06/education/learning/online-learning-higher-education.html
education-history/
OnlineSchools.org. (2009). The History of Online Schooling. https://www.onlineschools.org/visual-academy/the-history-of-online-schooling
Thompson, E. (2023). A History of Online Education. https://thebestschools.org/magazine/online-education-history/