History of Distance Education

By GatorUA
  • Period: to

    Timeline of the History of Distance Education

  • Shorthand lessons via Correspondence

    According to Kentnor, Caleb Phillips placed an advertisement in the Boston Gazette (Kentnor, 2015, p. 23).

  • Chautauqua Movement

    According to Kentnor, "chautauquas" were summer gatherings for training Sunday school teachers. This summer program eventually spawned the first adult education program and correspondence school in the country established in 1878 (Kentnor, 2015, p. 23).

  • National University Extension Association

    Kentnor states that the National University Extension Association was formed in 1915 to "develop and advance ideals, methods, and standards in continuing education and university extensions" (Kentnor, 2015, p. 24).

  • Ohio School of the Air Radio Program

    Kentnor details the beginnings of the use of radio for "School of the air" programs offering daily science, literature, history, and music programming by the Ohio State Department of Education in the fall of 1928 (Kentnor, 2015, p. 25).

  • Television for Educational Purposes

    Kentnor states that somewhere between 1932 and 1937 the University of Iowa experimented with the use of television for educational purposes (Kentnor, 2015, p. 27.).

  • University of Maryland's College of Special and Continuation Studies

    UMGC was founded in 1947

  • Corporation for Public Broadcasting

    The Public Broadcasting Act of 1967 established the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (Kentnor, 2015, p. 27.).

  • US Army Training Support Center Correspondence Course Program

    Duncan states, "many also did not know that one of the most prominent leaders for modern day technology-based distance education was the Department of Defense." (Duncan, 2005) and had started in 1976 as a correspondence course program started in 1976 (Duncan, 2005).

  • University of Phoenix and Compuserve

    Kentnor states that the University of Phoenix was one of the first online educational programs offered online through the internet via Compuserve (Kentnor, 2015, p. 28.).

  • Department of Defense's Advanced Distributed Learning

    Duncan states that in 1997, the Department of Defense began the process to use distance learning to educate and train its forces (Duncan, 2005).

  • UMGC offers its first online college courses

    (UMGC, n.d.)

  • Department of Defense Instruction (SCORM)

    Duncan states that Shareable Content Object Reference Module (SCORM) allowed course developers to use SCORM to scale content into smaller learning modules that could be tagged and accessed by something similar to the Dewey decimal system of libraries (Duncan, 2005).

  • Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs)

    Yuan and Powell state that the original aim of Massive Open Online Courses, or MOOCs, was to "Open up education and provide free access to university level education for as many students as possible" (Yuan & Powell, 2013).

  • Open Education Resources (OERs)

    Yuan and Powell gives 2009 as the start of the United Kingdom's Open education Resources which was a pre-cursor to Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs) (Yuan & Powell, 2013).