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On March 20, 1728, teacher Caleb Phillips placed an advertisement in the Boston Gazette offering shorthand lessons.
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Sir Isaac Pitman was an English educator and inventor of a shorthand system named after him. He is recognized as the pioneer of distance education. He taught shorthand by correspondence in Bath, England by mailing postcards to students for them to transcribe Bible passages into shorthand and to return them, by post, for correction. -
Illinois Wesleyan College became the first academic institution to offer degree programs “in absentia”.
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Guglielmo Marconi invented the spark transmitter in 1894. He was also granted a patent for his system of wireless telegraphy. Youtube demonstration
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In 1919, professors at the University of Wisconsin began the first federally licensed radio station dedicated to educational broadcasting. Youtube
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Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover and Bell Laboratories held the first long-distance live video and voice transmission (New York Times article) -
The Institute for Education by Radio (IER) is founded in Columbus, Ohio. This was a place where radio was used extensively in the classroom.
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The University of Iowa experimented with the first use of television broadcasting for education.
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The Public Broadcasting Act of 1967 established the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), which established NPR, the National Public Radio network of the United States. Britannica
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The University of Phoenix began using CompuServe, one of the first consumer online services, in 1989. Other online educational programs followed shortly after. -
The Asynchronous Learning Networks (ALN) is developed in 1992 by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. The ALN is designed to explore educational alternatives for those unable to attend traditional classes in the classroom.
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The World Wide Web was unveiled in January 1992. The University of Phoenix became one of the first schools to offer online education programs through the Internet.Britannica -
In October of 1998, New York University was the first large nonprofit university to create a for-profit online education subsidiary, NYU Online. -
Western Governors University is founded as a nonprofit, online university. -
The California Virtual University is a consortium of almost 100 universities and colleges in California with almost 1,600 online courses. It opened in November of 1998.
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Many for-profit subsidiaries did not stay open for long. NYU Online closed in October 2001.
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By 2002 the number of students enrolled in a postsecondary course was 1.6 million. By 2008, that number had almost tripled.
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In the fall of 2007, 3.9 million students were enrolled in at least one online class. That is about 21.4% of the total number of students enrolled in higher education classes. By the fall of 2010, the number of students enrolled in an online higher education class had risen to 6.1 million or 29%
of the total number of students enrolled in a higher education class. By the fall of 2012, 6.7 million students or 32.5% were enrolled in a higher education class.
