Distance education

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

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

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

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]

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.

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]

Open universities

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.[31]

Walton Hall, renovated in 1970 to act as the headquarters of the newly established Open University (artist: Hilary French)

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[32] 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").[33] 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.[34]

Athabasca University, Canada's open university, was created in 1970 and followed a similar, though independently developed, pattern.[35] The Open University inspired the creation of Spain's National University of Distance Education (1972)[36] and Germany's FernUniversität in Hagen (1974).[37] There are now many similar institutions around the world, often with the name "Open University" (in English or in the local language).[31]

The University of the Philippines Open University was established in 1995 as the fifth constituent

University of the Philippines System
and was the first distance education and online university in the Philippines. Its mandate is to provide educational opportunities to individuals aspiring for higher education and improved qualifications but were unable to take advantage of traditional modes of education because of personal and professional obligations.

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.[38]

COVID-19 pandemic

Filipino homeschooling students – blended (printed-digital modular) distance learning with self-learning materials during the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic in San Miguel, Bulacan

The COVID-19 pandemic resulted in the closure of the vast majority of schools worldwide for in-person learning.[39][40] Many schools moved to online remote learning through platforms including—but not limited to—Zoom, Blackboard, Cisco Webex, Google Classroom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, D2L, and Edgenuity.[41][42] Concerns arose over the impact of this transition on students without access to an internet-enabled device or a stable internet connection.[43] Distanced education during the COVID-19 pandemic has interrupted synchronous learning for many students and teachers; where educators were no longer able to teach in real-time and could only switch to asynchronous instruction, this significantly and negatively affected their coping with the transition,[44] and posed various legal issues, especially in terms of copyright.[45] A recent study about the benefits and drawbacks of online learning found that students have had a harder time producing their own work.[46] The study suggests teachers should cut back on the amount of information taught and incorporate more activities during the lesson, in order for students to create their own work.[46]

Though schools are slow to adapt to new technologies,

online classes perform just as effectively as participants in conventional learning classes.[47] The use of online learning is becoming a pathway for learners with sparse access to physical courses so they can complete their degrees.[49] Furthermore, digital classroom technologies allow those living remotely to access learning, and it enables the student to fit learning into their schedule more easily.[citation needed
]

Technologies

Internet technology has enabled many forms of distance learning through open educational resources and facilities such as e-learning and MOOCs. Although the expansion of the Internet blurs the boundaries, distance education technologies are divided into two modes of delivery: synchronous learning and asynchronous learning.

In synchronous learning, all participants are "present" at the same time in a virtual classroom, as in traditional classroom teaching. It requires a timetable.

direct-broadcast satellite (DBS), internet radio, live streaming, telephone, and web-based VoIP.[50]

Web conferencing software helps to facilitate class meetings, and usually contains additional interaction tools such as text chat, polls, hand raising, emoticons etc. These tools also support asynchronous participation by students who can listen to recordings of synchronous sessions. Immersive environments (notably

SecondLife) have also been used to enhance participant presence in distance education courses. Another form of synchronous learning using the classroom is the use of robot proxies[51] including those that allow sick students to attend classes.[52]

Some universities have been starting to use robot proxies to enable more engaging synchronous hybrid classes where both remote and in-person students can be present and interact using telerobotics devices such as the Kubi Telepresence robot stand that looks around and the Double Robot that roams around. With these telepresence robots, the remote students have a seat at the table or desk instead of being on a screen on the wall.[53][54]

In asynchronous learning, participants access course materials flexibly on their schedules. Students are not required to be together at the same time. Mail correspondence, which is the oldest form of distance education, is an asynchronous delivery technology, as are

audio recordings, print materials, voicemail, and fax.[50]

The two methods can be combined. Many courses offered by both open universities and an increasing number of campus-based institutions use periodic sessions of residential or day teaching to supplement the sessions delivered at a distance.[55] This type of mixed distance and campus-based education has recently come to be called "blended learning" or less often "hybrid learning". Many open universities use a blend of technologies and a blend of learning modalities (face-to-face, distance, and hybrid) all under the rubric of "distance learning".

Distance learning can also use interactive radio instruction (IRI), interactive audio instruction (IAI), online virtual worlds, digital games, webinars, and webcasts, all of which are referred to as e-Learning.[55]

Radio and television

External audio
audio icon Air college talk., 2:45, 2 December 1931, WNYC[56]

The rapid spread of film in the 1920s and radio in the 1930s led to proposals to use it for distance education.[57] By 1938, at least 200 city school systems, 25 state boards of education, and many colleges and universities broadcast educational programs for public schools.[58] One line of thought was to use radio as a master teacher.

Experts in given fields broadcast lessons for pupils within the many schoolrooms of the public school system, asking questions, suggesting readings, making assignments, and conducting tests. This mechanizes education and leaves the local teacher only the tasks of preparing for the broadcast and keeping order in the classroom.[59]

The first large-scale implementation of radio for distance education took place in 1937 in Chicago. During a three-week school closure implemented in response to a polio outbreak that the city was experiencing, superintendent of Chicago Public Schools William Johnson and assistant superintendent Minnie Fallon implemented a programs of distance learning that provided the city's elementary school students with instruction through radio broadcasts.[60][61][62]

A typical setup came in Kentucky in 1948 when John Wilkinson Taylor, president of the University of Louisville, teamed up with NBC to use radio as a medium for distance education. The chairman of the Federal Communications Commission endorsed the project and predicted that the "college-by-radio" would put "American education 25 years ahead". The university was owned by the city, and local residents would pay the low tuition rates, receive their study materials in the mail, and listen by radio to live classroom discussions that were held on campus.[63] Physicist Daniel Q. Posin also was a pioneer in the field of distance education when he hosted a televised course through DePaul University.[64]

Charles Wedemeyer of the University of Wisconsin–Madison also promoted new methods. From 1964 to 1968, the Carnegie Foundation funded Wedemeyer's Articulated Instructional Media Project (AIM) which brought in a variety of communications technologies aimed at providing learning to an off-campus population. The radio courses faded away in the 1950s.[65] Many efforts to use television along the same lines proved unsuccessful, despite heavy funding by the Ford Foundation.[66][67][68]

From 1970 to 1972 the Coordinating Commission for Higher Education in California funded Project Outreach to study the potential of tele-courses. The study included the

Public Broadcasting Service
came into being and the "wrapped" series, and individually produced tele-course for credit became a significant part of the history of distance education and online learning.

Internet