Friday, December 29, 2023

Distance education

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Not to be confused with homeschooling or out-of-school learning.

Distance education, also known as distance learning, is the education of students who may not always be physically present at school,[1][2] or where the learner and the teacher are separated in both time and distance.[3] Traditionally, this usually involved correspondence courses wherein the student corresponded with the school via mail. Distance education is a technology-mediated modality and has evolved with the evolution of technologies such as video conferencing, TV, and the Internet.[4] Today, it usually involves online education and the learning is usually mediated by some form of technology. A distance learning program can either be completely a remote learning, or a combination of both online learning and traditional offline classroom instruction (called hybrid[5] or blended).[6] Other modalities include distance learning with complementary virtual environment or teaching in virtual environment (e-learning).[3]

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.[1] A number of other terms (distributed learning, e-learning, m-learning, online 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.[7]

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.[8]

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.[9] This scheme was made possible by the introduction of uniform postage rates across England in 1840.[10]

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.[11]

The first correspondence school in the United States was the Society to Encourage Studies at Home which was founded in 1873.[12]

Founded in 1894, Wolsey Hall, Oxford was the first distance-learning college in the UK.[13]

University correspondence courses

United Kingdom

The University of London was the first university to offer distance learning degrees, establishing its External Program in 1858. The background to this innovation lay in the fact that the institution (later known as University College London) was non-denominational and the intense religious rivalries at the time led to an outcry against the "godless" university. The issue soon boiled down to which institutions had degree-granting powers and which did not.[14]

The London University in 1827, drawn by Thomas Hosmer Shepherd

The compromise that emerged in 1836 stated that a new, officially recognized organization, the "University of London," would be given the sole authority to conduct the examinations leading to degrees, which would act as an examining body for the University of London colleges, originally University College London and King's College London, and award their students University of London degrees. As Sheldon Rothblatt states: "Thus arose in nearly archetypal form the famous English distinction between teaching and examining, here embodied in separate institutions."[14]

With the state giving examining powers to a separate entity, the groundwork was laid for the creation of a program within the new university that would both administer examinations and award qualifications to students taking instruction at another institution or pursuing a course of self-directed study. Referred to as "People's University" by Charles Dickens because it provided access to higher education to students from less affluent backgrounds, the External Program was chartered by Queen Victoria in 1858, making the University of London the first university to offer distance learning degrees to students.[15][16] Enrollment increased steadily during the late 19th century, and its example was widely copied elsewhere.[17] This program is now known as the University of London International Programme and includes Postgraduate, Undergraduate, and Diploma degrees created by colleges such as the London School of Economics, Royal Holloway, and Goldsmiths.[16]

Australia and South Africa

The vast distances made Australia especially active; the University of Queensland established its Department of Correspondence Studies in 1911.[18]

In South Africa, the University of South Africa, formerly an examining and certification body, started to present distance education tuition in 1946.

William Rainey Harper encouraged the development of external university courses at the new University of Chicago in the 1890s.

United States

In the United States, only a third of the population lived in cities of 100,000 or more population in 1920; in order to reach the rest, correspondence techniques were adopted.

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.[19]

In 1892, Harper encouraged correspondence courses to further promote education, an idea that was put into practice by the University of Chicago, U. Wisconsin, Columbia U., and several dozen other universities by the 1920s.[20][21] 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.[22][23] 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.[24]

Education was a high priority in the Progressive Era, as American high schools and colleges expanded greatly. For men who were older or were too busy with family responsibilities, night schools were opened, such as the YMCA school in Boston that became Northeastern University. Private correspondence schools outside of the major cities provided a flexible, focused solution.[25] Large corporations systematized their training programs for new employees. The National Association of Corporation Schools grew from 37 in 1913 to 146 in 1920. Private schools that provided specialized technical training to everyone who enrolled, not just employees of one company, began to open across the nation in the 1880s. Starting in Milwaukee in 1907, public schools began opening free vocational program.[26]

International Conference

The International Conference for Correspondence Education held its first meeting in 1938.[27] The goal was to provide individualized education for students, at low cost, by using a pedagogy of testing, recording, classification, and differentiation.[28][29] Since then, the group has changed its name to the International Council for Open and Distance Education (ICDE), with its main office in Oslo, Norway.[30]

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