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Caleb Phillips begins advertising private (mail) correspondence courses in the Boston Gazette newspaper. Informal “correspondence educations” can be found thereafter, with varying degrees of quality and consistency (Ferrer, 2019). -
The postal system was established (Ferrer, 2019). This paves the way for the delivery of mail including the options for correspondence. -
Weaver and merchant Joseph-Marie Jacquard invents the punch card loom (computer). The punch card method of programming would later be used in early IBM computers (Ferrer, 2019) -
The opportunity to study “Composition through the medium of the Post” was advertised in 1833 in Sweden (Pearcy, 2014) -
Educational radio stations proliferated as over 200 educational radio stations were licensed (Wolfe, 2014) -
Ohio School of the Air was an early model of the use of radio as an educational medium. It was ended in 1940 (Wolfe, 2014) -
Experiments began in television programming (Wolfe, 2014) -
Iowa State University launched first regular educational television station (Wolfe, 2014) -
Western Reserve University offered credit courses delivered through television (Ferrer, 2019). -
Growth is seen in the cable and satellite delivery of TV (Wolfe, 2014). -
Emergence of computer-mediated distance education and development of two-way interactive video systems (Wolfe, 2014) -
Explosive growth of the internet makes computer-based learning more natural than the traditional sage-on-stage model and the quality of education improves all the time (Ferrer, 2019). -
A pivotal year, Tim Berners-Lee creates the first website on August 6. The first website address is: http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html. The site is still active today. Al Gore creates and helps pass the High-performance Computing and Communications Act (“The Gore Bill”). The World Wide Web (WWW) opens to the public, allowing for internet use and online education as we know them today. (Ferrer, 2019) -
Blackboard Course Management software launches, effectively opening the market to a wide range of online options that were previously considered too unwieldy to handle (Ferrer, 2019) -
The Journal of Asynchronous Learning Networks is established to publish and promote academic research on online education (Pearcy, 2014). -
The State of Florida approved the creation of the Florida Virtual School, the "nation's first and largest online public school," which by 2012 provided online learning for almost 150,000 students (Pearcy, 2014) -
Computer prodigy Aaron Swartz builds Creative Commons under the supervision of law professor Lawrence Lessig. Swarz was 15 years old at the time (Pearcy, 2014). -
At least 2 million higher-education students in the U.S. were engaged in distance education utilizing various ALN technologies where whole classes can engage in a continuous discourse and group project work independent of time, place, and synchronous constraints of participation (Hiltz, Starr Roxanne & Turoff, Murray 2015). -
Salman Khan created the Khan Academy, an online educational platform that provides more than 3,000 digital "lectures," many by Khan himself (a former hedge-fund manager who has never taught a class) (Pearcy, 2014) -
San Jose State University (SJSU) initiated a partnership Udacity, a company that promised to "deliver low cost, high-quality online education to the masses."' The Udacity courses, known as "massive open online courses" (MOOCs), were offered to SJSU's students as a potential replacement for traditional in-class formats (Pearcy, 2014). -
The number of online students grows to 6.6 million, with the highest enrollment at Liberty University in Virginia with 37,570 students. (Moody, 2019).