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• Early history of distance learning
  • Early educational theories and technologies
• Modern distance learning

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Distance learning, also called distance education, e-learning, and online learning, form of education in which the main elements include physical separation of teachers and students during instruction and the use of various technologies to facilitate student-teacher and student-student communication. Distance learning traditionally has focused on nontraditional students, such as full-time workers, military personnel, and nonresidents or individuals in remote regions who are unable to attend classroom lectures. However, distance learning has become an established part of the educational world, with trends pointing to ongoing growth. In U.S. higher education alone, more than 5.6 million university students were enrolled in at least one online course in the autumn of 2009, up from 1.6 million in 2002.

An increasing number of universities provide distance learning opportunities. A pioneer in the field is the University of Phoenix, which was founded in Arizona in 1976 and by the first decade of the 21st century had become the largest private school in the world, with more than 400,000 enrolled students. It was one of the earliest adopters of distance learning technology, although many of its students spend some time in classrooms on one of its dozens of campuses in the United States, Canada, and Puerto Rico. A precise figure for the international enrollment in distance learning is unavailable, but the enrollment at two of the largest public universities that heavily utilize distance learning methods gives some indication: in the early 21st century the Indira Gandhi National Open University, headquartered in New Delhi, had an enrollment in excess of 1.5 million students, and the China Central Radio and TV University, headquartered in Beijing, had more than 500,000 students.

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Students and institutions embrace distance learning with good reason. Universities benefit by adding students without having to construct classrooms and housing, and students reap the advantages of being able to work where and when they choose. Public-school systems offer specialty courses such as small-enrollment languages and Advanced Placement classes without having to set up multiple classrooms. In addition, homeschooled students gain access to centralized instruction.

Characteristics of distance learning

Various terms have been used to describe the phenomenon of distance learning. Strictly speaking, distance learning (the student’s activity) and distance teaching (the teacher’s activity) together make up distance education. Common variations include e-learning or online learning, used when the Internet is the medium; virtual learning, which usually refers to courses taken outside a classroom by primary- or secondary-school pupils (and also typically using the Internet); correspondence education, the long-standing method in which individual instruction is conducted by mail; and open learning, the system common in Europe for learning through the “open” university (see below).

Four characteristics distinguish distance learning. First, distance learning is by definition carried out through institutions; it is not self-study or a nonacademic learning environment. The institutions may or may not offer traditional classroom-based instruction as well, but they are eligible for accreditation by the same agencies as those employing traditional methods.

Second, geographic separation is inherent in distance learning, and time may also separate students and teachers. Accessibility and convenience are important advantages of this mode of education. Well-designed programs can also bridge intellectual, cultural, and social differences between students.

Third, interactive telecommunications connect individuals within a learning group and with the teacher. Most often, electronic communications, such as e-mail, are used, but traditional forms of communication, such as the postal system, may also play a role. Whatever the medium, interaction is essential to distance education, as it is to any education. The connections of learners, teachers, and instructional resources become less dependent on physical proximity as communications systems become more sophisticated and widely available; consequently, the Internet, mobile phones, and e-mail have contributed to the rapid growth in distance learning.

Finally, distance education, like any education, establishes a learning group, sometimes called a learning community, which is composed of students, a teacher, and instructional resources—i.e., the books, audio, video, and graphic displays that allow the student to access the content of instruction. Social networking on the Internet promotes the idea of community building. On sites such as Facebook and YouTube, users construct profiles, identify members (“friends”) with whom they share a connection, and build new communities of like-minded persons. In the distance learning setting, such networking can enable students’ connections with each other and thereby reduce their sense of isolation.

Early history of distance learning

Correspondence schools in the 19th century

Geographical isolation from schools and dispersed religious congregations spurred the development of religious correspondence education in the United States in the 19th century. For example, the Chautauqua Lake Sunday School Assembly in western New York state began in 1874 as a program for training Sunday school teachers and church workers. From its religious origins, the program gradually expanded to include a nondenominational course of directed home reading and correspondence study. Its success led to the founding of many similar schools throughout the United States in the chautauqua movement.

It was the demand by industry, government, and the military for vocational training, however, that pushed distance learning to new levels. In Europe, mail-order courses had been established by the middle of the 19th century, when the Society of Modern Languages in Berlin offered correspondence courses in French, German, and English. In the United States, companies such as Strayer’s Business College of Baltimore City (now Strayer University), which was founded in Maryland in 1892 and included mail-order correspondence courses, were opened to serve the needs of business employers, especially in the training of women for secretarial duties. Most nonreligious mail-order correspondence courses emphasized instruction in spelling, grammar, business letter composition, and bookkeeping, but others taught everything from developing esoteric mental powers to operating a beauty salon. The clear leader in correspondence course instruction in American higher education at the end of the 19th century was the University of Chicago, where William Rainey Harper employed methods that he had used as director of the Chautauqua educational system for several years starting in 1883.

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Early educational theories and technologies

Behaviourism and constructivism

During the first half of the 20th century, the use of educational technology in the United States was heavily influenced by two developing schools of educational philosophy. Behaviourism, led by the American psychologist John B. Watson and later by B.F. Skinner, discounted all subjective mental phenomena (e.g., emotions and mental images) in favour of objective and measurable behaviour. The constructive approach arose from ideas on progressive education advanced by the American philosopher John Dewey and others, who emphasized the education of the “whole child” to achieve intellectual, physical, and emotional growth and argued that learning is best accomplished by having children perform tasks rather than memorize facts. Constructivism, whose leading figure was the French developmental psychologist Jean Piaget, asserted that learning arises from building mental models based on experience. These theories led to different techniques for the use of media in the classroom, with behaviourism concentrating on altering student behaviour and constructivism focusing on process- and experience-based learning.

Technological aides to education

One of the first technological aides to education was the lantern slide (e.g., the Linnebach lantern), which was used in the 19th century in chautauqua classes and lyceum schools for adults and in traveling public-lecture tent shows throughout the world to project images on any convenient surface; such visual aides proved particularly useful in educating semiliterate audiences. By the start of the 20th century, learning theories had begun concentrating on visual approaches to instruction, in contrast to the oral recitation practices that still dominated traditional classrooms.

The first significant technological innovation was made by the American inventor Thomas Edison, who devised the tinfoil phonograph in 1877. This device made possible the first language laboratories (facilities equipped with audio or audiovisual devices for use in language learning). After World War I, university-owned radio stations became commonplace in the United States, with more than 200 such stations broadcasting recorded educational programs by 1936.

Edison was also one of the first to produce films for the classroom. Many colleges and universities experimented with educational film production before World War I, and training films were used extensively during the war to educate a diverse and often illiterate population of soldiers in a range of topics from fighting technique to personal hygiene. Improvements in filmmaking, in particular the ability to produce “talkies,” were put to use just before and during World War II for technical training and propaganda purposes. While the most artistically acclaimed propaganda production may have been Triumph of the Will (1935), one of a series of films made by Leni Riefenstahl during the 1930s for the German Nazi government, similar films were produced by all the major belligerents. In the United States the army commissioned Hollywood film director Frank Capra to produce seven films, the widely acclaimed series Why We Fight (1942–45), in order to educate American soldiers on what was at stake.

Instructional television courses began to be developed in the 1950s, first at the University of Iowa. By the 1970s community colleges all across the United States had created courses for broadcast on local television stations. Various experiments in computer-based education also began in the 1950s, such as programmed or computer-assisted instruction, in which computers are used to present learning materials consisting of text, audio, and video and to evaluate students’ progress. Much of the early research was conducted at IBM, where the latest theories in cognitive science were incorporated in the application of educational technology. The next major advancement in educational technology came with the linking of computers through the Internet, which enabled the development of modern distance learning.