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 (also known as online learning, remote learning or remote education) through an online school. A distance learning program can either be completely online, or a combination of both online and traditional in-person (also known as, offline) classroom instruction (called hybrid or blended).
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.Von V. Pittman, Correspondence Study in the American University: A Second Historiographical Perspective, in Michael Grahame Moore, William G. Anderson, eds. Handbook of Distance Education pp 21-36 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.Joseph F. Kett, Pursuit of Knowledge Under Difficulties: From Self-Improvement to Adult Education in America (1996) pp 236-8J.J. Clark, "The Correspondence School—Its Relation to Technical Education and Some of Its Results", Science (1906) 24#611 pp 327-8, 332, 333. Clark was manager of the school's text-book department. There was a stark contrast in pedagogy:
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.Kett, Pursuit of Knowledge Under Difficulties, p 240 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.
International Conference The International Conference for Correspondence Education held its first meeting in 1938. The goal was to provide individualized education for students, at low cost, by using a pedagogy of testing, recording, classification, and differentiation.Ellen L. Bunker, "The History of Distance Education through the Eyes of the International Council for Distance Education", in Michael Grahame Moore, William G. Anderson, eds. Handbook of Distance Education pp 49-66 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.
Open universities
The Open University (OU) in the United Kingdom was founded by the then Labour government led by Harold Wilson. Based on the vision of Michael Young, planning commenced in 1965 under the Minister of State for Education, Jennie Lee, who established a model for the Open University as one of widening access to the highest standards of scholarship in higher education and setting up a planning committee consisting of university vice-chancellors, educationalists, and television broadcasters, chaired by Sir Peter Venables. The British Broadcasting Corporation's (BBC) Assistant Director of Engineering at the time, James Redmond, had obtained most of his qualifications at night school, and his natural enthusiasm for the project did much to overcome the technical difficulties of using television to broadcast teaching programs.
The Open University revolutionized the scope of the correspondence program and helped to create a respectable learning alternative to the traditional form of education. It has been at the forefront of developing new technologies to improve distance learning service as well as undertaking research in other disciplines. Walter Perry was appointed the OU's first vice-chancellor in January 1969, and its foundation secretary was Anastasios Christodoulou. The election of the new Conservative government under the leadership of Edward Heath in 1970 led to budget cuts under Chancellor of the Exchequer Iain Macleod (who had earlier called the idea of an Open University "blithering nonsense"). However, the OU accepted its first 25,000 students in 1971, adopting a radical open admissions policy. At the time, the total student population of conventional universities in the United Kingdom was around 130,000.
Athabasca University, Canada's open university, was created in 1970 and followed a similar, though independently developed, pattern. The Open University inspired the creation of Spain's National University of Distance Education (1972) and Germany's University of Hagen (1974). There are now many similar institutions around the world, often with the name "Open University", as in Italy (in English or in the local language).
Most open universities use distance education technologies as delivery methods, though some require attendance at local study centers or at regional "summer schools". Some open universities have grown to become mega-universities.
COVID-19 pandemic
The COVID-19 pandemic resulted in the closure of the vast majority of schools worldwide for in-person learning. The pandemic also exposed gaps in teachers' preparedness to use digital pedagogy effectively, including challenges with interactive instructional design and unfamiliarity with platforms such as Zoom and Teams. COVID-19 increased the value of distance education although its policies were implemented and formulated among several universities much earlier. Many schools moved to online remote learning through platforms including—but not limited to—Zoom, Blackboard, Cisco Webex, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, Skype, D2L, GoTo Meeting and Edgenuity. A recent study showed that Google Classroom was the most used platform by students followed by Microsoft Teams and Zoom, respectively. The less-used platforms included Blackboard Learn, DingTalk, Tencent, and WhatsApp. However, the most preferred platforms by students were Microsoft Teams followed by Google Classroom and Zoom. Although Google Classroom was the most used by students as decided by their lectures, Microsoft Teams was the most preferred by those students.