Fun Facts About Distance Education
Imagine if you received your Voxy lesson and activities by mail. You read your article, completed the activity, put it in an envelope and shipped it back to Voxy for grading. You then waited weeks in anticipation for grades and new lessons. Wouldn’t that be fun?
Learning by mail was the earliest form of distance education (DE), it was called: “correspondence instruction”. In 1873, a female educator, Anna Ticknor, started her society to encourage women to study from home using correspondence instruction, and then in 1983 New York State granted Chautauqua College of Liberal Arts the right to grant degrees through correspondence. Wow, the beginning of a revolution. Of course, like all educational reform, it was heavily debated; many academic professionals were worried about its efficacy. William Rainy Harper a professor of Hebrew at Yale University was authorized to award degrees for DE by mail. He himself often debated the ability of DE and believed that it could never measure up to oral instruction. It would be interesting to hear Dr. Harper’s thoughts about Voxy’s language learning model.
And then came radio. Between the World Wars the government granted universities and schools broadcasting rights. Some may argue radio and television do not fall into distance education because it is one-way communication. Nonetheless, these two technologies should be mentioned, they did revolutionize how people learn from a distance. You may have also learned a lot from PBS or your local TV channel, even though you’ve never been on Sesame Street or ridden a magic school bus.
Wikipedia dates the virtual classroom as far back as 1945. However New York Institute of Technology was the first to launch a virtual campus in 1984. Looks like NYC has been at the forefront of distance education (note Voxy is located in NYC). Today, online learning is so common that all major universities around the world offer online classes. Thanks to the Internet, people are able to take classes regardless of time and place.
A distance education timeline wouldn’t be complete without mentioning mobile learning, often characterized as “anytime anywhere” learning. Voxy has covered this topic on this blog and distance education via mobile. From waiting for learning material in the mail to reaching in my pocket to get it: my, how times have changed!