-
12 BCE
Slate Boards
Slate boards were in use in India in the 12th century AD. -
7 BCE
Written Communication
Writing in education also has a long history. According to the Bible, Moses used chiseled stone to convey the ten commandments in a form of writing, probably around the 7th century BC. Even though Socrates is reported to have railed against the use of writing, written forms of communication make analytic, lengthy chains of reasoning and argument much more accessible, reproducible without distortion, and thus more open to analysis and critique than the transient nature of speech -
5 BCE
Oral Communication
One of the earliest means of formal teaching was oral. For the ancient Greeks, oratory and speech were the means by which people learned and passed on learning. Homer’s Iliad and the Odyssey were recitative poems, intended for public performance. To be learned, they had to be memorized by listening, not by reading, and transmitted by recitation, not by writing. -
15
Printing Press
The invention of the printing press in Europe in the 15th century was a truly disruptive technology, making written knowledge much more freely available, very much in the same way as the Internet has done today. -
18
Blackboards/Chalkboards
blackboards/chalkboards became used in schools around the turn of the 18th century. -
Broadcasting and Video
Broadcasting is the distribution of audio or video content to a dispersed audience via any electronic mass communications medium, but typically one using the electromagnetic spectrum (radio waves), in a one-to-many model. The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) began broadcasting educational radio programs for schools in the 1920s. -
Radio Broadcast
The first adult education radio broadcast from the BBC in 1924 was a talk on Insects in Relation to Man, and in the same year, J.C. Stobart, the new Director of Education at the BBC, mused about ‘a broadcasting university’ in the journal Radio Times (Robinson, 1982). -
Computer Technologies
In essence the development of programmed learning aims to computerize teaching, by structuring information, testing learners’ knowledge, and providing immediate feedback to learners, without human intervention other than in the design of the hardware and software and the selection and loading of content and assessment questions. -
Computer-Based Learning
B.F. Skinner started experimenting with teaching machines that made use of programmed learning in 1954, based on the theory of behaviourism. Skinner’s teaching machines were one of the first forms of computer-based learning. -
Television
Television was first used in education in the 1960's, for schools and for general adult education. -
Open University
In 1969, the British government established the Open University (OU), which worked in partnership with the BBC to develop university programs open to all, using a combination originally of printed materials specially designed by OU staff, and television and radio programs made by the BBC but integrated with the courses. -
Satellite Broadcasting
Satellite broadcasting started to become available in the 1980's. -
Computer Networking
Arpanet in the U.S.A was the first network to use the Internet protocol in 1982. -
World Wide Web
The Word Wide Web was formally launched in 1991. The World Wide Web is basically an application running on the Internet that enables ‘end-users’ to create and link documents, videos or other digital media, without the need for the end-user to transcribe everything into some form of computer code. -
Mosaic
The first web browser, Mosaic, was made available in 1993. -
Google
Google was created in 1999. -
YouTube
YouTube started in 2005 and was bought by Google in 2006. YouTube is increasingly being used for short educational clips that can be downloaded and integrated into online courses. -
Apple
Apple Inc. in 2007 created iTunesU to became a portal or a site where videos and other digital materials on university teaching could be collected and downloaded free of charge by end users. -
Massive Open Online Course
By 2008, George Siemens, Stephen Downes and Dave Cormier in Canada were using web technology to 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. The courses were open to anyone and had no formal assessment.
