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Connected Education
In the fall of 1985, just before Pennsylvania State began offering computer-based courses for adult education, Paul Levinson and Tina Vozick created Connected Education, a program of online courses for graduate students taught by professors at the New School for Social Research ("History Distance Learning," n.d.). -
World Wide Web
In 1991, the World Wide Web went live to the world. "In 1992, comercial entities began offering web access to the public" ("History Distance Learning," n.d). -
Universities Embrace Online Education
Online education at the university level explodes as several universities begin to establish distance learning centers, develop asynchrous learning networks, and offer online courses ("History Distance Learning," n.d). -
WebCT
Murray Goldberg creates Web course tools, or WebCT. one of the leading web-based educational interfaces. By 1999 it served 2-3 million students in 30 countries. WebCT was acquired by Blackboard Inc. in 2006 ("History Distance Learning," n.d), (Miller, 2014). -
Free Education
Software billionaire Michael Saylor announced that he would spend $100 million to fund a “giant free Web site that would provide access to what he [called] the ‘10,000 greatest minds of our time,’ in lectures and interviews recorded especially for the venture;” his goal was to create “free education for everyone on earth” (Steinberg, 2000). This was a huge turning point, because up until then, online learning was mostly used by universities for paying, admitted students. -
Creative Commons Launched
"Creative Commons is a nonprofit organization that enables the sharing and use of creativity and knowledge through free legal tools" ("History," 2015). "The license that covers most of the lectures and other course materials available
within opencourseware initiatives around the world is Creative Commons’ AttributionNoncommercial-Share" (VlǎDoiu, 2011).
Alike 3.0 license" (VlǎDoiu, 2011). -
OpenCourseWare
MIT OCW 1800 Event
In 2001, "MIT announced a ten year initiative on open courseware, called OpenCourseWare OCW), which, at that time, was the largest such undertaking. Since the beginning, OCW has aimed to both create public Web sites for about 2000 courses, and to make available their related lecture notes, syllabuses, exams, simulations, video lectures, etc." (VlǎDoiu, 2011). -
Digital Library
In 2007, OER Commons launched its popular digital library. "A very consistent repository for open instructional resources is Open Education Resources (OER) Commons... which is a project created by The Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education (ISKME), which is an independent, non-profit research institute, established in 2002, and focused on knowledge sharing and educational innovations" (VlǎDoiu, 2011). -
CCK08
In 2008, "The Connectivism and Connective Knowledge course (CCK08) was the first to incorporate open learning with distributed content, making it the first true MOOC. It attracted 2200 participants worldwide" (Downes, 2011). -
Khan Academy
"In 2009, Salman Khan created the Khan Academy, an online educational platform that provides over three thousand digital "lectures," many by Khan himself (a former hedge-fund manager who has never taught a class). The videos are free
and available to anyone from anywhere, and have been downloaded from YouTube over 150 million times" (Pearcy, 2014). -
The Year of the MOOC
2012 was "the year of the MOOC" after several MOOCs that were associated with well-known universities are launched including Coursera, Udacity and edX (Pappano, 2012).
