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Arguments about the role of technology in education go back at least 2,500 years (Bates, 2019).
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There were a significant number of written records in ancient Greece by the fifth century B.C. According to the Bible, Moses used chiseled stone to convey the ten commandments in a form of writing, probably around the 7th century B.C. (Bates, 2019). -
One of the earliest means of formal teaching was oral –through human speech– .
In the past, oral communication was used to preserve and transmit stories, folklore, histories, and news (Bates, 2019). -
Slate boards were in use in India in the 12th century AD (Bates, 2019).
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The printing press, which was invented in Europe in the 15th century, was a truly revolutionary technology that greatly increased the accessibility of written knowledge, much like the Internet does today (Bates, 2019). -
Blackboards/chalkboards became used in schools around the turn of the 18th century (Bates, 2019). -
Improvements in transport infrastructure in the 19th century, and in particular the creation of a cheap and reliable postal system in the 1840s, led to the development of the first formal correspondence education, with the University of London offering an external degree program by correspondence from 1858 (Bates, 2019).
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The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) began broadcasting educational radio programs for
schools in the 1920s. Television was first used in education in the 1960s. In 1969 the British government established the Open University (Bates, 2019). -
At the end of World War II, the United States Army began using overhead projectors for training, and they became popular for lecturing before being largely replaced by electronic projectors and presentational software (Bates, 2019). -
In 1954, B.F. Skinner experimented with teaching machines that used programmed learning based on the behaviorism theory. Skinner’s teaching machines were one of the first forms of computer-based learning (Bates, 2019). -
PLATO was a generalized computer-assisted instruction system created at the University of Illinois in the late 1970s. The system was extremely successful and lasted for nearly 40 years (Bates, 2019).
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In the 1970s, the Open University revolutionized the use of print for teaching by creating specially designed, highly illustrated printed course units that integrated learning activities with the print medium using advanced instructional design principles (Bates, 2019).
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In the 1980s, CoSy, an off-the-shelf software program, was created at the University of Guelph in Canada. It enabled online threaded group discussion forums, which were the predecessor of the forums found in learning management systems today (Bates, 2019). -
Arpanet in the U.S.A was the first network to use the Internet protocol in 1982 (Bates, 2019).
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When AI first emerged in the middle of the 1980s, it was primarily used to teach arithmetic (Bates, 2019). -
In 1988, the Open University in the United Kingdom offered a course, DT200, that as well as the OU’s traditional media of printed texts, television programs and audio-cassettes, also included an online discussion component using CoSy (Bates, 2019).
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The Word Wide Web was formally launched in 1991 (Bates, 2019).
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Mosaic, the first web browser, was released in 1993 (Bates, 2019). -
In 1995, the Web enabled the development of the first learning management systems (LMS) (Bates, 2019). -
With the development of web-based learning management systems in the mid-1990s, textual communication, although digitized, became, at least for a brief time, the main communication medium for Internet-based learning, although lecture capture is now changing that (Bates, 2019).
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In 1995, the first completely online courses began to appear; some used learning management systems (LMSs), while others simply loaded text as slides or PDFs (Bates, 2019). -
Google, created in 1999 and Youtube started in 2005 also has become a popular platform for short educational videos that can be downloaded and integrated into courses (Bates, 2019). -
By 2008, create the first ‘connectivist’ Massive Open Online Course (MOOC), a community of practice that linked webinar presentations and/or blog posts by experts to participants’ blogs and tweets, with just over 2,000 enrollments (Bates, 2019). -
In 2012, two Stanford University professors launched a lecture-capture based MOOC on artificial intelligence (Bates, 2019). -
Bates A. W. (2019) Teaching in a Digital Age. Tony Bates Associates LTD.
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