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These courses-by-mail required the creation of instruction that could be delivered to the learner by mail, completed independently, and sent back to the institution. The product needed to be evaluated to determine if it was worthy of whatever accreditation was offered. There was little, if any, communication between the student and the instructor.
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The first correspondence course was offered through U.S. Mail to secretaries for training in shorthand through the Phonographic Institute in Cincinnati, Ohio, making learning available to those who otherwise would not have had access to it
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Correspondence University established in Ithaca, NY training primarily women in secretarial skills.
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Colliery School of Mines established to train male mine workers in safety procedures.
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University of Chicago began offering degrees through correspondence study.
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Correspondence courses were plentiful, but their quality was often questionable. This led to the need for standards in order to ensure the high quality of the instruction and eliminate potentially unethical behavior.
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Radio broadcasting greatly increased the potential reach of both traditional and correspondence-based education, and changed the delivery method of the instruction from print to verbal. The issue of learner accountability was apparently a difficult instructional hurdle, however, as only one college-level course for credit was offered via radio by 1940.
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Radio licenses granted by the FCC to the University of Salt Lake City, University of Wisconsin, and University of Minnesota for the purpose of providing educational programming.
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The Distance Education and Training Council was established "to foster and preserve high quality, educationally sound and widely accepted distance education and independent learning institutions." (Quote from DETC website)
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University of Iowa began television broadcasts of college-level courses.
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Mass communication devices provided many options for the delivery of instruction, but the majority of this communication was one-way—from instructor to student. Instruction had to be planned and delivered while keeping in mind the difficulty or even absence of individual communication between the learner and the instructor.
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Funded by the Ford Foundation, Penn State University used Closed Circuit TV to transmit instruction to a broader audience, primarily to reduce classroom over-crowding. Poor production quality and limited interaction opportunities made the system unpopular, issues that research indicated plagued television coursework in general.
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The AIM project was the beginning of the recognition of both the importance of instructional practices for this new multimedia format in education and that the instruction would likely need to be different from traditional instruction to be effective. This occurred during the same time period that the term instructional development began to be used, and Barson developed his ID Model intended to improve college courses.
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The FCC created the Instructional Television Fixed Service (ITFS) to provide educational institutions with an inexpensive system for delivering educational content.
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University of Wisconsin created the Articulated Instructional Media (AIM) project to provide a repository of distance education research, practices, and guidance for those creating multimedia instruction for long-distance learners.
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Most courses delivered via instructional television instruction had disappeared, primarily due to poor quality of instruction, often merely a lecture delivered via television.
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Open University was established in the United Kingdom, revitalizing distance education by offering a variety of courses and formats.
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140 television stations are interconnected to create the Public Broadcasting Service for the purpose of the non-commercial use of television and radio.
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Coastline Community College, the first university without a physical campus, created and delivered televised college courses.
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Intel engineers Federico Faggin, Ted Hoff, and Stanley Mazor create the microprocessor, putting everything the computer needed for "thinking" on one small chip.
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Knowles defined self-directed learning as where learners must take the initiative to identify their needs, goals, resources, and even assess their own learning. Some researchers argued, however, that learners will seek guidance from the learning organization so no learner is completely self-directed.
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The first electronic mail message is sent at Intel.
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As technology advanced, so did opportunities for both the delivery of instruction and communication between students and instructors from a distance. Instructors were now becoming aware of who the learners actually were. Despite this, early efforts to include two-way technologies in distance education were focused on ensuring the instructors did not need to change their teaching in any way.
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Joseph Oshins proclaims that telecourses have failed to reach their potential in higher education and that television is “a dangerously poor way to teach” (p. 8).
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National Technological University offered educational programs and training via satellite, sometimes live. This allowed students to communicate with the instructor via teleconference during the instruction, finally alleviating the one-way communication issue that had challenged distance education since its inception.
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University of Phoenix established an online campus and began offering degree programs.
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Moore defined distance education interaction as consisting of learner-instructor, learner-learner, and learner-content interactions. Increased interaction in online environments, and the tone of these interactions, reduced learners’ feelings of isolation.
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E-mail, listservs, discussion boards, and online course delivery systems dramatically changed the way people communicated, including instructors and students in distance education. As technology advanced, courses designed for face-to-face implementation became more difficult to implement without significant changes in the instructional design.
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Tim Berners-Lee completed the first successful transmission via the Internet.
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Bates introduced an instructional design model aimed at developing instruction for distance learning, specifically aimed at increasing flexibility and interaction. This model recognized that there are unique considerations for developing online instruction.
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Nine percent of classrooms in the U.S. had Internet access.
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As availability of video and web-based conferencing improved, distance education became very much a two-way street as students and instructors had the ability to communicate in real-time regardless of the distance separating them.
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Advanced technologies have gradually turned distance education from an extremely independent endeavor into a more collaborative one, impacting how instruction is designed for this context.
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Shearer indicated that offering courses at a distance requires considering many factors unique to distance education, like audience characteristics and location, costs of delivery, availability of necessary technology, even potentially the political environment.
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An increasing amount of research on instructional design focused on the use and effectiveness of various web-based tools, particularly on the interactions between students, instructors, and content, in distance and blended education.
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ID research on distance education focused on topics related to affordances of asynchronous versus synchronous environments and the effectiveness of various instructional methods and available tools for enhancing learning outcomes in online environments.
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A survey by Pew Internet Research indicates that 32% of Americans have accessed the Interntet on a mobile device such as a SmartPhone. As this technology becomes more ubiquitous, it provides the opportunity for distance education to become even more mobile.
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Almost every classroom in the U.S. has Internet access.
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60% of people in rural communities and 70% of people in urban communities have broadband Internet access in the U.S. About 78% of adults in the U.S. use the Internet. The percent of adults who do not access the Internet at all has remained relatively unchanged since 2008.
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Article on eLearning CaucusTwo members of Congress formed a caucus on eLearning in order to promote research and best practice with respect to online learning.
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New rules imposed by the U.S. Department of Education require universities to be accredited in every state where they have students, potentially limiting online education options for students in some states that have more stringent requirements.
