Distance education

Distance education, also known as distance learning, is the education of students who may not always be physically present at school, or where the learner and the teacher are separated in both time and distance; today, it usually involves online education through an online school. A distance learning program can either be completely online, or a combination of both online and traditional in-person classroom instruction.

Massive open online courses (MOOCs), offering large-scale interactive participation and open access through the World Wide Web or other network technologies, are recent educational modes in distance education. A number of other terms (distributed learning, e-learning, m-learning, virtual classroom, etc.) are used roughly synonymously with distance education. E-learning has shown to be a useful educational tool. E-learning should be an interactive process with multiple learning modes for all learners at various levels of learning. The distance learning environment is an exciting place to learn new things, collaborate with others, and retain self-discipline.

Historically, it involved correspondence courses wherein the student corresponded with the school via mail, but with the evolution of different technologies it has evolved to include video conferencing, TV, and the Internet.

History

One of the earliest attempts at distance education was advertised in 1728. This was in the Boston Gazette for "Caleb Philipps, Teacher of the new method of Short Hand", who sought students who wanted to learn the skills through weekly mailed lessons.

The first distance education course in the modern sense was provided by Sir Isaac Pitman in the 1840s who taught a system of shorthand by mailing texts transcribed into shorthand on postcards and receiving transcriptions from his students in return for correction. The element of student feedback was a crucial innovation in Pitman's system. The postage stamp made this scheme for remote education possible, and these efforts were scalable because of the introduction of uniform postage rates across England in 1840.

This early beginning proved extremely successful and the Phonographic Correspondence Society was founded three years later to establish these courses on a more formal basis. The society paved the way for the later formation of Sir Isaac Pitman Colleges across the country. The first correspondence school in the United States was the Society to Encourage Studies at Home which was founded in 1873. Founded in 1894, Wolsey Hall, Oxford was the first distance-learning college in the UK.

University correspondence courses

United Kingdom

The University of London was the first university to offer degrees to anyone who could pass their examinations, establishing its External Programme in 1858. It had been established in 1836 as an examining and degree-awarding body for affiliated colleges, originally University College London and King's College London but with many others added over the next two decades. The affiliated colleges provided certificates that the student had attended a course. A new charter in 1858 removed this requirement, allowing men (and women from 1878) taking instruction at any institution or pursuing a course of self-directed study to sit the examinations and receive degrees. The External Programme was referred to as the "People's University" by Charles Dickens as it provided access to higher education to students from less affluent backgrounds. Enrollment increased steadily during the late 19th century, and its example was widely copied elsewhere. However, the university only provided examinations, not instructional material, leading academics to state that "the original degree by external study of the UOL was not a form of distance education".

The External Programme is now known as the University of London Worldwide, and includes postgraduate and undergraduate degrees created by member institutions of the University of London.

Australia and South Africa

The vast distances made Australia especially active; the University of Queensland established its Department of Correspondence Studies in 1911.

United States

William Rainey Harper, founder and first president of the University of Chicago, celebrated the concept of extended education, where a research university had satellite colleges elsewhere in the region.

In 1892, Harper encouraged correspondence courses to further promote education, an idea that was put into practice by the University of Chicago, the University of Wisconsin, Columbia University, and several dozen other universities by the 1920s. Enrollment in the largest private for-profit school based in Scranton, Pennsylvania, the International Correspondence Schools grew explosively in the 1890s. Founded in 1888 to provide training for immigrant coal miners aiming to become state mine inspectors or foremen, it enrolled 2500 new students in 1894 and matriculated 72,000 new students in 1895. By 1906 total enrollments reached 900,000. The growth was due to sending out complete textbooks instead of single lessons, and the use of 1200 aggressive in-person salesmen. There was a stark contrast in pedagogy:

The regular technical school or college aims to educate a man broadly; our aim, on the contrary, is to educate him only along some particular line. The college demands that a student shall have certain educational qualifications to enter it and that all students study for approximately the same length of time; when they have finished their courses they are supposed to be qualified to enter any one of a number of branches in some particular profession. We, on the contrary, are aiming to make our courses fit the particular needs of the student who takes them.