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700 BCE
End of the Oral Era
One of the earliest means of formal teaching was simply the human speech. For the ancient Greeks, speech were the means by which people learned and passed on learning. However, after adopting many forms of writing, many educators decided to set their findings in paper, stone and leather "books". -
Period: 500 BCE to
The Written Era
From the 10th commandments sent to Moses to instructors hand-writing their own books to modern teachers writing on their boards, the written era is when the spread of education truly picked up speed. -
400 BCE
Adopting the handwritten texts
By the fifth century B.C, written documents existed in considerable amount in ancient Greece. However, some philosophers were staunchly against writing in education. -
1000
Indian Slate Boards.
The writing slate was in use in Indian schools as mentioned in Alberuni's Indica (Tarikh Al-Hind), written in the early 11th century. -
1440
Invention of the printing press.
A goldsmith named Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press in Germany, starting the printing revolultion and fittingly revolutionizing education. -
Adoptation of blackboards
The first classroom uses of large blackboards are difficult to date, but they were used for music education and composition in Europe as far back as the 16th century. The term "blackboard" is attested in English from the mid-18th century. -
BBC begins educational radio programs
The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) begins broadcasting educational radio programs for schools in 1924. -
Period: to
Adoptation of various projectors
By end of World War Two, the U.S. Military started using overhead projectors for training, and their use became common for lecturing until being largely replaced by electronic projectors and presentational software. -
PLATO in use
A group of students using the PLATO program for language acquisition. -
Period: to
PLATO
PLATO was a generalized computer assisted instruction system originally developed at the University of Illinois and, by the late 1970s, comprised several thousand terminals worldwide on nearly a dozen different networked mainframe computers. PLATO was a highly successful system, lasting more than 40 years, and incorporated key on-line concepts: forums, message boards, online testing, e-mail, chat rooms, instant messaging, remote screen sharing, and multi-player games. -
First Learning Management Systems
In 1995, the Web enabled the development of the first learning management systems (LMSs), such as WebCT (aka Blackboard). -
The COVID-19 Lockdowns
The COVID-19 pandemic affected educational systems across the world. In March 2020 and many educational institutions and universities underwent closure. Most countries decided to temporarily close the educational institutions and switch to "Remote Learning".