The Innovative Evolution of Online Learning from Rudimentary to Sophisticated Teaching Approaches
By MFSabia
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In 1728, distance education was in its infancy with the establishment of the first distance learning course in Boston, Massachusetts by Caleb Phillips who ran an ad in the Boston Gazette offering to teach students shorthand through correspondence. This course is the first well-documented example of correspondence education using letter exchange and opened the accessibility of the course to students anywhere in the United States (Kentnor, 2015).
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Isaac Pitman pioneered modern distance education, as we know it, in 1840 with the creation of his correspondence learning course. Pitman taught shorthand through teacher-student communications via correspondence through mailed postcards (Verduin & Clark, 1991). This event laid the foundation for the application of the correspondence educational format at institutions, as well as for future distance educational practices (Kentnor, 2015).
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In 1873, Anna Eliot Ticknor founded the first correspondence school in the United States called The Society to Encourage Studies at Home. The creation of other correspondence schools soon followed (Bergmann, 2001; Kentnor, 2015).
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Beginning in 1874, Lewis Miller and John Heyl Vincent led the Chautauqua movement to apply the correspondence learning format for adult learners in the form of assemblies and seminars. Their approach had blended learning qualities with general education being supplemented with readings and assignments completed by learners through correspondence (Kentnor, 2015).
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By 1878, the promotion and acceptance of correspondence education produced by the Chautauqua Movement gave way for John Heyl Vincent to found a correspondence school and adult education program located in New York named the Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle. By 1883, Chautauqua University was formed and later become the model for the foundation of other institutions such as the University of Chicago (Scott, 1999).
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Grounded in prior theories of transmissions, Guglielmo Marconi invented the spark-gap transmitter in 1894 enabling the use of wireless radio transmissions and patented his invention three years later (Nassa, 2011). The creation of wireless radio technology led to considerations by educators of how that new form of communication could be applied in distance education to expand their reach to a larger population of students (Kentnor, 2015).
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In 1906, the University of Wisconsin-Extension created a distance-teaching unit, and by 1919, professors from the university started the first federally licensed radio station for educational broadcasting called WHA (Avery, 2017; Kentnor, 2015).
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In 1929, there was a significant decrease in radio stations at educational institutions from 176 to 35 stations as a result of the Great Depression. By 1930, the National Committee on Education by Radio (NCER) was formed to protect the rights to educational broadcasting, assist with the development of radio education in schools and for adults, and help with securing licenses, technical procedures, and conducting research for radio education (Avery, 2017).
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In 1952, the Federal Communications Commission mandated in a document titled "Sixth Report and Order" for 242 television channels to be reserved for use and licensure for educational purposes by state and local educational systems, colleges, universities, and community organizations. By 1966, the number of reserved channels was increased to 632 channels (Kentnor, 2015).
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From 1960 to 1985, the U.S. Department of Defense funded the creation of the first workable prototype of the Internet called the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET). By the 1970s, Robert Kahn and Vinton Cerf created the Transmission Control Protocol and Internet Protocol (TCP/IP), which set standards for the transmission of data between multiple networks and was adopted by ARPANET in 1983 to begin development of what is known today as the modern Internet (Mowery & Simcoe, 2002).
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In 1970, Coastline Community College implemented the first fully televised college courses broadcast by KOCE-TV (Casey, 2008; Pandey, 2013).
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While the origins of the computer can be traced back to the 1800s, the first personal computer was not introduced until the 1970s. In 1974, the introduction of personal computers came in the form of kits called the MITS Altair 8800, developed by Ed Roberts who coined the term "personal computer" (Cass, 2018).
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By 1976, the education system got its first fully virtual college named Coastline Community College, which combined computer-assisted instruction with television courses (Pandey, 2013).
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In 1982, Margaret Morabito founded the Computer Assisted Learning Center (CALC) as an offline computer-based, adult learning center. This learning system became the basis for the foundation of CALCampus in the 1990s to provide online-based learning (Morabito, 1999).
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In the 1980s, computer usage for educational purposes was gaining ground with corporations using it as an educational medium to train their employees. By 1989, the development of online educational programs emerged due to the growth in personal internet access and the creation of consumer online services such as CompuServe, which was used by the University of Phoenix. These events laid the groundwork for online education via the Internet (Kentnor, 2015).
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In 1990, computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee is responsible for the invention of the World Wide Web (Berners-Lee, 2010; Pearcy, 2014). With the unveiling of the World Wide Web, The University of Phoenix became one of the first educational institutions to offer online degree programs via the World Wide Web (Kentnor, 2015).
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In 1992, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation created the Asynchronous Learning Networks (ALN) to provide funding to institutions offering online education and for exploration of educational alternatives for distance education. These efforts by the foundation were meant to assist with improving the quality of online education (Kentnor, 2015).
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CALC Online Campus expanded to other telecommunication networks including AOL and CompuServe over a 10 year period, and in 1995, the institution changed its name to CALCampus taking the Internet domain calcampus.com (Morabito, 1999). According to Morabito (1999), CALCampus is the first totally online-based school that included real-time classroom instruction and provision of course materials.
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In 1995, Murray Goldberg developed WebCT (Web Course Tools), which was meant to be a low-cost, asynchronous course delivery and management system. By 1999, WebCT was used by over 1,350 institutions with 6 million student accounts across 55 countries (Burgess, 2003; Ubell, 2000). In 2006, WebCT was purchased by and merged with Blackboard (Bradford, Porciello, Balkon, & Backus, 2007).
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In 1997, Matthew Pittinsky and Michael Chasen founded Blackboard Inc. in order to provide a standardized platform for course management and delivery for the administration of online courses and degree programs (Bradford et al., 2007). By 2006, Blackboard Inc. and WebCT completed their merger, which meant their company controlled roughly 80% of the course management systems market in North America (Bradford et al., 2007).
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In 1997, the "Interactive Learning Network" (ILN) was part of the CourseInfo company's product line, and the first system to work in relation to a database MySQL. The system also had access controls and security features for course content. This network was installed at several academic institutions such as Yale Medical school and Cornell University. In 1998, CourseInfo's ILN product line served as the foundation for Blackboard's e-learning product line (Chaubey & Bhattacharya, 2015)
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Since the creation of the World Wide Web in the 1990s, online education began to grow. According to a report produced by the researchers of the Babson Survey Research Group and Quahog Research Group, in 2002 approximately 71.7% of colleges offered at least one online class (Allen & Seaman, 2013) and 9.6% of students were enrollment in online education (Allen & Seaman, 2017).
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In 2004, Google LLC created Google Scholar to allows users to easily search indexing/abstracting databases across the Internet for scholarly information (e.g., peer-reviewed, primary/secondary sources) about any topic. Moreover, it grants users access to millions of free, open access primary documents via websites from journal/book publishers, government/institutional research groups, ResearchGate, publication repositories, and linking to university/college libraries (Jacsó, 2005).
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In 2005, YouTube was launched, which gave educators another valuable resource to provide educational, current event, editorial, and personal videos that could enhance learners' experiences (Burke & Snyder, 2008). By 2009, YouTubeED was offering thousands of lectures and other materials to view for free from a plethora of institutions including Stanford, Harvard, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT; Gilroy, 2010).
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In 2006, the first Massive Open Online Courses System (MOOC) was created, and a few years later, Dave Cormier, from the University of Prince Edward Island, Canada, coined the term MOOC. By 2012, MOOCs gained prevalence as learning environments that centralized activities on a single platform to provide instructional videos and regular assessments, being used by many public and elite universities, (Bonk, Lee, Reeves, Reynolds, & Thomas, 2016; Liyanagunawardena, Adams, & Williams, 2013).
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In 1999, iTunes was created by Bill Kincaid and released by software company Casady & Greene. By 2000, Apple Inc. purchased the rights to iTunes, and in 2007 launched iTunes University (iTunes U), which offered lectures for download including content from prestigious schools such as Stanford University, UC Berkeley, Duke University, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Brown & Green, 2007; Lonn & Teasley, 2009; McKinney, Dyck, & Luber, 2009).
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In 2011, the Babson Survey Research Group and Quahog Research Group reported 65% of institutions noted online education as a necessary component for long-term strategic plans and critical for maintaining competitiveness in the education market (Allen & Seaman, 2011).
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The Babson Survey Research Group and Quahog Research Group participated in a joint effort to track online education in the United States over a 10 year period. In 2013, the researchers reported that 64.4% of higher education institutions offered degree programs that were completely online (Allen & Seaman, 2013).
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From 2002 to 2015, there was a 20% growth in students choosing distance education over on-campus education, which is projected to continue to increase in the next decade (Allen & Seaman, 2017).
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In 2015, Blackboard Inc. released a mobile device application called "Blackboard for Students" to enable students to access their courses using a handheld device (e.g., smartphone, tablet). The application allows students to view course material, submit work, post on discussion boards and review grades. In 2017, the company released a faculty counterpart of the mobile application called "Blackboard Instructor" (Blackboard Inc., 2017b).
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Blackboard Inc. (2017a), the developers for one of the most commonly used management systems in online education, reported in 2017 that they serve over 16,000 clients in 90 countries and have approximately 100 million users.
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Today, over 6 million students in the United States are enrolled in at least one online course, and given the rate of growth over the last 15 years is expected to continue to increase in the future (Allen & Seaman, 2017). Educational institutions are using an array of technology to enhance learners’ experiences including mobile devices, video streaming tools, and social media platforms (e.g., YouTube, Facebook, etc.; Cook & Sonnenberg, 2014).
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The evolution of online education is ongoing. Educators and researchers continue to search for ways to improve educational strategies through the application of technological advancements accessible now and in the future. As technology continues to advance, ongoing investigations are expected to assist in better meeting the needs of students and improve the overall performance, success, and retention of students in the years to come (Allen & Seaman, 2017; Kentnor, 2015).
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In 2014, the e-learning market worldwide was approximately 165 billion U.S. dollars, and 2017 projections show that the e-learning market worldwide is estimated to surpass 243 billion dollars by 2022 (Statista, 2017).
