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Learning via Mail
Caleb Phillips,"Teacher of the New Method of Shorthand", posts an advertisement in the Boston Gazette seeking students who would want to learn through weekly mailed lessons (Going the Distance, n.d. ,para 1). -
Correspondence Colleges
In England, Isaac Pitman's shorthand course delivered by mail correspondence. The new postal system and the rail system began to make travel and communication quicker than ever before, influencing student-teacher interaction from remote locations (Tait, 2003, para. 2). -
Correspondence Courses in the U.S.
The University of Chicago offers correspondence courses, becoming the first traditional educational institution in the U.S. to do so (Miller, 2014, para. 3). -
Broadcast broadens educational possibilities
Pennsylvania State College takes advantage of radio broadcasting technology as a viable means of transmitting information by broadcasting courses over the radio (Miller, 2014, para. 5) -
TV advances the use of technology in education.
University of Houston offers televised college classes for credit as broadcast television becomes more prevalent (Miller, 2014, para. 5) -
College Telecourses
The first "virtual college" with no physical campus was in operation. This virtual college, called Coastline Community College, offers a wide variety of telecourses (Miller, 2014, para. 5). This, again, demonstrates an increasingly availability of receiving content in remote locations. -
Instructional Television debuts
After a few unsuccessful, ill-planned attempts to launch instructional television fail in the 1970's, the first state educational satellite system, Learn/Alaska, was created in 1980. It offered 6 hours
of instructional television daily to 100 villages (Simonson, 2006, p. 38) -
The Advent of the Internet in Education
the Western Behavioral Sciences Institute's School of Management and Strategic Studies started an online program. This program and others that follow channels the use this emergent technology as the main conduit through which distance courses would be offered (Miller, 2014, para 6-7). -
Online Degrees offered
Nova Southeastern University offers accredited graduate degrees through online courses. -
The University of Phoenix
Online educational programs emerged in 1989, when the University of Phoenix began using CompuServe. Shortly thereafter, in 1991, the World Wide Web (Web) was unveiled, and the University of Phoenix became one of the first to offer online education programs through the Internet (Kentnor, 2015,p. 28). -
Blackboard allows more schools online
Blackboard Inc. develops a standardized platform for course management and delivery that enables many more institutions to come online (Miller, 2014, para. 10) -
Creation of Khan Academy
In 2009, Salman Khan creates the Khan Academy, an online educational platform that provides over three thousand digital "lectures," many by Khan himself. The videos are free and available to anyone from anywhere, and have been highly influential in the "flipped classroom" movement (Pearcy, 2014, p. 178). -
Online Education not just a trend
65% of institutions reported that online learning was critical to their long-term strategic plans (Kentnor, 2015, p. 30). For a majority of universities, online learning has clearly become an integral part of curriculum and instruction. This statistic shows that schools will continue to invest in its advancement. -
Udacity offers MOOCs
The for-profit institution Udacity begins offering massive open online courses (MOOCs), which allow for very large numbers of students to enroll in free courses. MIT and Harvard followed with MOOC platform edX. (Miller, 2014, p. 13). -
Online-only Public Universities
The first online-only public university, UF Online, launches in the United States (Miller, 2014, para 13) -
Harnessing the Internet?
"The internet is reclassified as a public utility so it can be more easily regulated legally by the Federal Communications Commission. Because of its potential impact on “net neutrality” and free speech online, this remains a controversial subject." (Ferrer, 2017). The implications of "net neutrality" remain to be seen in the coming years.
