Keywords

Introduction

The history of open, distance, and digital education (ODDE) has been shaped by two complementary forces. One has been the ambition of a few educators in each generation to open opportunities for learning for anyone unable to attend a conventional school or university. Since this includes almost the whole adult population, distance education has featured largely in professional continuing education and other forms of lifelong learning. The other driving force in the history of distance education has been the use of communication technologies that bridge the distance between learners and educators.

Seen from this perspective, the modern field has evolved from a fusion of three traditions. These are the correspondence tradition of the nineteenth and early twentieth century, the “industrialized” tradition of the later twentieth century, and the digital virtual classroom of the twenty-first century.

The Correspondence Tradition

The teacher-pupil relation in correspondence study becomes very real, very personal, and indeed very intimate, surpassing that which is possible in mass instruction. (Lighty, 1915)

Correspondence education, in which learners and teachers communicated by printed and written text, has been the dominant form of ODDE throughout history. This section summarizes some of the history between 1840 and 1970.

Correspondence education began in the middle of the nineteenth century, when the new technology of the railway made it possible for documents to be distributed at low cost to any destination. The first to use the mail for teaching were Isaac Pitman in the United Kingdom (UK), Charles Toussaint in France, Gustav Langenscheidt in Germany, H. S. Hermod in Sweden, and Anna Eliot Ticknor in the United States of America (USA). Correspondence teaching was a revolution in education. For the first time in history, it became possible to learn from a teacher without leaving home or moving to “a seat of learning,” i.e., a university or school. It is doubtful if any other invention since the printing press has done more to open the benefits of learning to the majority of the population.

After nearly two centuries, correspondence courses have changed in many ways, but their fundamentals remain and are universal. The typical course is a series of lessons sent to each student by mail, with each lesson including an assignment to be completed by the student and returned by mail to the teaching institution, nowadays most likely by electronic mail or via the learning management system. The assignment becomes the basis for a dialogue between instructor and student, which makes the lesson, in the words of William Lighty (above), “very real, very personal.” However, to create lessons that introduce many students to the same content in ways that also enable a high degree of individualization and person-to-person dialogue requires sophisticated instructional design capabilities. This is what differentiates the good correspondence course providers.

Most early correspondence courses were, as we would say today, “noncredit” continuing education courses, taken by young adults seeking advancement in trade and professions. The for-profit institutions that sprang up to provide such courses were “open,” to the extent that there were no entrance requirements other than the ability to pay a tuition fee. Examples in the UK include Skerry’s College (1878); Foulks Lynch (1884); University Correspondence College, Cambridge (1887); and the Diploma Correspondence College (1894).

Universities in the UK and in Europe were uninterested in correspondence education, with one exception. Beginning in 1858, the University of London – at that time an examining body, not a teaching institution – made its degrees available to anyone who passed its examinations, regardless of where and how they studied, including study by correspondence; from 1920 it provided its own correspondence courses, in commerce.

A different view prevailed in the USA. A law passed in 1862, the Land-Grant College Act, together with the 1887 Hatch Act, provided the foundation for a uniquely American university culture, more “open” than the European. In the words of Governor LaFollette of Wisconsin in 1900: “The state will not have discharged its duty to the University, nor the University fulfilled its mission to the people until adequate means have been furnished to every young man and woman to acquire an education at home in every department of learning” (Hansen, 1998, p. 29). The funding of what became known as Land-Grant universities depended on their progress in this democratizing mission, and for that reason correspondence education became a strategically important tool.

Correspondence teaching at the degree level was already established in several private colleges, most prominent being the University of Chicago, where “… even courses in science, usually taught in a laboratory were carried by the postman” (Storr, 1966, p. 201). By the year 1930, correspondence courses in 39 American universities enrolled “about two million students … four times the number of all the students enrolled in all the colleges, universities and professional schools” (Bittner & Mallory, 1933, p. 31). There was a boom also in courses taught by for-profit schools. Most famously, in Scranton, Pennsylvania, Thomas J. Foster established his Colliery Engineer School of Mines, renamed in 1891 the International Correspondence Schools (ICS), which by 1930 had four million enrollments. (ICS today practices under the name Penn Foster.) In 1902, ICS opened a school in the UK, which now operates as ICS Learn. Another boom – of fraudulent correspondence schools – led to the establishment in 1926 of the National Home Study Council (now the Distance Education and Training Council), set up to monitor the quality and business practices of for-profit schools.

Distance education was also used extensively in teaching children. As a forerunner of what is today called “blended learning” and was then called supervised correspondence study “the local high school secures the lessons, provides periods in the regular school day for study, supervises the pupils’ work, and returns the lessons to the correspondence study center” (Broady, Platt, & Bell, 1931, p. 9). A conference on such supervised correspondence study held in Victoria, Canada, in 1938 was the founding of today’s International Council for Open and Distance Education (ICDE) (Bunker, 2003). The Proceedings of ICDE conferences from 1938 until the present are a valuable source of information about correspondence education around the world (https://sites.psu.edu/acde/resources/international-museum-of-distance-education/).

Elsewhere in the world, correspondence courses featured prominently in several English-speaking countries with rural populations dispersed over large regions.

In Canada, courses began at Queen’s University (1889), McGill University, and the universities of Saskatchewan (1912) and Alberta (1920). Their focus was the training of schoolteachers, while courses for children were run by the provincial departments of education. Eventually, correspondence courses were available from all ten provincial governments, thirteen universities, four institutes of technology, and from private schools. The prominent role played by government schools in Canadian correspondence education is revealed in a 1968 report, showing 87,692 students in schools run by the provincial governments compared to 16,048 in university courses (MacKenzie & Christensen, 1971, p. 281).

In Australia, the state of Victoria began courses for student teachers in 1910, the same year that courses in commercial subjects such as “health, meat or food inspectors or as local government clerks” began in New South Wales (ICCE, 1938, p. 26). The University of Queensland began its program in 1911. The Correspondence School at Blackfriars in Sydney was established in 1916, and by 1938 it had 6500 pupils and 150 teachers (ICCE, 1938, p. 20). In 1937, a Melbourne newspaper described “Victoria’s largest school” of 2,300 correspondence pupils who “learn their lessons in lighthouses and circus tents, in lonely farmhouses and in mission stations,” adding that “the teachers know each pupil more intimately than if he were one of a large class in a city school” (Preston & Campbell, 2019). In 1994 this school was renamed the Distance Education Centre of Victoria and in 2019 as the Virtual School of Victoria. From the 1930s, Australia’s state education departments used broadcast radio programs and two-way shortwave radios to supplement their correspondence teaching.

The New Zealand Correspondence School Te Kura was established in 1922 to provide lessons to primary school children. The enrolment in 1938 was 2750 (ICCE, 1938, p. 57). Each university had a small program, until 1960, when Massey University began a national program. The Technical Correspondence School was set up after World War II to provide resettlement training for military personnel returning from service and later became the Open Polytechnic of New Zealand. A film “A Letter to the Teacher” offers an entertaining demonstration of the merits of correspondence teaching for children (NZonscreen, 1957).

In the Republic of South Africa (RSA), the history of correspondence education is dominated by one institution. The University of South Africa (UNISA) began its correspondence courses in 1946. The most prominent of African students during the years of apartheid were Nelson Mandela himself who obtained his BA degree and Robert Mugabe who earned a BA in Education. UNISA was always big. By 1970, six million parcels were mailed each year to 22,000 students taught by over 400 full-time academic staff (Diehl, 2011, p. 113). After its democratic system was set up in 1994, South Africa became one of the few countries to produce a national policy for open and distance education (SAIDE, 1995), assisted in the early years of its implementation by the World Bank’s Telematics for African Development Consortium.

China’s correspondence education began in the early 1900s when Yuanji Zhang, a publisher, established his Commercial Press Correspondence School (Jiang, 1954, p. 395, cited by Kang, 2010, p. 37). About the same time, America’s International Correspondence Schools of Scranton established a branch in Shanghai (Jiang, 2008). The first university to offer correspondence courses was Renmin University of China, in 1953. A national program, with students in fourteen provinces, was started in 1958 by Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications. By 1985, correspondence courses were offered by about one-third of all higher education institutions, with correspondence students making up one-third of total enrollment in higher education (Kang, 2010, p. 48).

In Sweden, Hermods Kerrespondensintitut, founded by H. D. Hermod in 1898, was the largest correspondence school in Europe in the 1960s enrolling 100,000 students a year. Hermods was Europe’s pioneer of blended learning, which it called the “Robertsfors Method,” with tutorial centers across Sweden to provide face-to-face support of the correspondence lessons. For much of its history Hermods’ costs were borne by philanthropists, but in 1975 it became a for-profit company (Hermods, 2021).

In Russia, there were correspondence programs in the nineteenth century, but after the Soviet revolution, the method acquired strategic importance as a means of mass education and became integrated into the national educational system ( Zawacki-Richter & Kourotchkina, 2012). In 1931 a special correspondence section was created in the Ministry of Education, and “correspondence institutes” were established in universities. By 1963 “The number of correspondence students … exceeded that of regular day enrollments …. 1.3 million in regular day classes … 1.4 million in correspondence education.” “ In the postwar period the preparation of educational specialists in the sciences was carried out largely through the correspondence graduate work” (Mackenzie & Christensen, 1971, pp. 351–352). It was reported that British Prime Minister Harold Wilson’s interest in distance education – which led to his championing the idea of an Open University – was influenced by his visits to Russia, where he learned that 60% of Russian engineers earned their degrees through correspondence and radio courses (MacArthur, 1974, cited in Diehl, 2011, p. 48).

Radio and Television: A Bridge Between Correspondence Study and the Open Universities

Radio and television broadcasting helped to open educational opportunity in many countries but were most effective when married to correspondence teaching, most notably in the open universities of the 1970s.

The gold-standard for educational radio and television broadcasting was set in the 1970s by the UK’s Open University (OUUK) (see more below) in its partnership with the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). The highest quality achieved in the USA was in the courses produced during the 1980s under the auspices of the Annenberg Foundation in partnership with the federal Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB). Some of these productions, such as “Destinos” and “Economics U$A,” may still be viewed online (Annenberg Learner, 2021).

Radio broadcasting in the USA fell short of expectations. Between 1910 and 1930, at least thirteen universities offered university credit for classes on radio, and yet by 1940 all had collapsed (Pittman, 1986). Among reasons for this failure was the unwillingness of academics to accept the technical direction needed to produce a quality program. Frequently, a broadcast was merely the live transmission of a lecture from a traditional classroom.

The situation with television was not much better. Although broadcasts from the universities began in the 1930s, they were little more than televised classroom presentations. In 1956 the Chicago City Colleges established a TV College, the first to offer a baccalaureate degree through a telecourse, but it was not until the 1980s that television became a serious teaching medium. Dissatisfied with what had been characterized as “dull grey professors reading their dull grey notes on dull grey screens” (Brock, 1987, p. 36), several community colleges banded together to share production costs and so produce courses that exploited the strengths of the television medium – location footage, a variety of expert opinion, movement, and drama. Among the most successful were the thirty-seven colleges of the Southern California Consortium, the Dallas County Community College District in Texas, and the University of Mid-America, a consortium of eleven institutions in seven Midwestern states. In 1981 the Adult Learning Service (ALS) was established. This was a partnership between colleges and universities, local and national non-commercial broadcasters, and was America’s “first nationally coordinated initiative designed to make college credit courses and other formal learning opportunities available through television to adults” ( Brock, 1987, p. 34). Over 1200 post-secondary institutions – one-third of all in the USA – participated in offering 200 college-level courses, including those of the Annenberg/CPB Project, delivered to 600,000 students.

In Great Britain, in contrast to the USA, universities had no more interest in educational broadcasting than in correspondence teaching. The national broadcaster, the BBC, began a Schools Radio service in 1928, and by the 1970s around 90% of schools tuned into its programs (BBC School Radio, 2011). Radio programs for adults were directed at listening groups set up by organizations like the Women’s Institutes, the YMCA, and the public libraries (BBC Yearbook, 1939). Television programming ceased during the Second World War, so television for schools only started in 1957 (BBC, 2021).

In China, Tianjin Radio and Correspondence University was founded in 1958, Beijing Television College and Shenyang Television University (TVU) in 1960, and Guangzhou TVU in 1961.

Radio has been widely used in literacy and adult basic education projects. UNESCO reported programs in nineteen African countries, seven South American, four Asian, three European, and five North American. Among many examples, in Congo Brazzaville, radio courses were followed by 53,147 persons, including those in “organized radio club groups” (Maddison, 1971, p. 6). In Mexico, programs were broadcast by 150 radio stations, and “about two million people are estimated to have derived real benefit from the courses” (Maddison, 1971, p. 10).

In the USA, a form of television that received much attention during the 1960s and 1970s was called Instructional Television Fixed Service (ITFS). This was a closed-circuit distribution system with a radius of about 25 miles (40 kms), used by school systems to share specialist teachers and cover low enrollment subjects.

The “Industrialized” Tradition and Open Universities

in traditional education, the teacher teaches; in distance education, the institution teaches. (Keegan, 1980, p. 19)

This section describes two experiments that tested the concept of “articulating” technologies and specialists into a teaching system, thus contributing to the invention of open universities.

In writing about new perspectives on correspondence teaching, Wedemeyer and Childs (1961) devoted a chapter to the idea of linking technologies and people with different skills into a teaching system and quoted a speaker at the 1960 meeting of the National University Extension Association, R. C. Carpenter of the Pennsylvania State University, whose questions uncannily predicted the shape of distance education in the future open universities.

What would result if the activity of correspondence studies were staffed … and serviced by highly qualified faculty members fully assigned and dedicated to correspondence work … if a concerted effort was made to design and produce the highest quality of course materials … if radio, television and practical audio-visual materials were used to compose a new platform … and utilize small student groups to reinforce learning? …. If correspondence could be freed from restrictive academic machinery … and given a chance for full development? (Wedemeyer & Childs, 1961, p. 73)

Two experiments were of prime importance in testing this idea about linking technologies. They have been widely overlooked in official histories, although their results helped determine the eventual shape of the OUUK and thus of modern distance education.

In the UK itself, the key project was a course in economics, taught by the department of adult education at the University of Nottingham in 1964. It consisted of 13 lessons, each of which linked a television program, printed study guide, and access to a local tutor. Key players in the project were department director, Professor Harold Wiltshire and course writers John Bayliss and Walter James. Television programs were broadcast on a commercial television channel. Assignments were mailed to the university and returned after evaluation and comment (Wiltshire & Bayliss, 1966).

In the USA, also in 1964, another project was underway, at the University of Wisconsin. The Articulated Instructional Media Project (AIM) offered courses in a variety of subjects, using correspondence and broadcast technologies, but also a wider range of technologies, such as audio tapes, home experiment kits, and mobile laboratories. However, the historical importance of AIM is not its technologies but its invention of a new way of organizing teaching. This was based on the idea that as well as linking (i.e., “articulating”) a variety of technologies – it was also necessary to link the knowledge and skills of a variety of experts. Thus, AIM tested the idea of deconstructing the teaching process into its many component skills and re-assembling them into a system. Courses were first designed and then taught, not by individual teachers but by teams of specialists. Course design teams included specialists in instructional design and in each technology, together with content experts and specialists in learning and learner support – who later became known as tutors (Wedemeyer & Najem, 1969). Viewed from the perspective of the teacher-centered, “sage on the stage” tradition of higher education, this was revolutionary, demonstrating that “in traditional education, the teacher teaches; in distance education, the institution teaches” (Keegan, 1980, p.19).

In 1965 the creator and director of AIM, Charles Wedemeyer, arrived in England to meet with Nottingham’s Wiltshire, Bayliss and James, and to these and others, he pointed out what he considered to be three flaws in his own project and the lessons to be learned. AIM, he said:

had no control over its faculty, and hence its curriculum: it lacked control over its funds; and it had no control over academic rewards (credits, degrees) for its students. The implications were clear: a largescale, non-experimental institution of the AIM type would have to start with complete autonomy and control. (Wedemeyer, 1982, p. 23)

In September 1967, the Planning Committee of the OUUK began its work, with Wiltshire as a prominent member. In 1969 the university’s first Vice-Chancellor Walter Perry invited Wedemeyer back to England to join him in planning the new distance teaching university. A unique and historically invaluable film of conversation between Wedemeyer, Perry, and James is available at International Museum of Distance Education & Technology | American Center for the Study of Distance Education (distanceeducationmuseum.com).

Other institutions that featured prominently as models during that planning included the University of South Africa (UNISA), the UK’s National Extension College, and the University of New South Wales at Armidale, Australia (Sherow & Wedemeyer, 1990).

More than any other institution, the OUUK proved the viability of a systems model of distance education. What Nottingham and AIM demonstrated on a small scale, it demonstrated on a grand scale the effectiveness of pedagogical practices that were revolutionary in the freedoms they permitted the learner. These included not only access to instruction in places of the learner’s choosing but a previously unheard-of freedom to choose content and even to choose among alternative teaching methods. Such freedoms became possible in a program of many courses, all structured in modules, in which the student can earn “credits” to accumulate toward a degree. The credit system that was an integral part of American higher education represented a massive reform in British practice. Not only could the student build a personal study package from the various courses offered but could also postpone study for a period, or even fail a course yet complete the degree – all eminently sensible options for adult, part-time learners, but foreign to the brutally competitive and selective higher education systems of Europe. Another American practice adopted (and spread) by the OUUK was that of “formative evaluation,” determining a student’s grade on a course by evaluating performance throughout the duration of the course, instead of evaluating solely on performance in a final examination.

Given the genesis of the OUUK in the idea of a University of the Air, it is noteworthy that the core teaching method was correspondence instruction – at first using traditional paper documents and later using digital technology. It should also be noted that since blended learning is such a popular concept today, face-to-face meetings between students and instructors at local study centers were designed into the budgets of every course.

With the success of the OUUK, many other countries followed in setting up similar national publicly funded, autonomous, distance teaching universities. They included: Spain (1972), Israel (1974), Germany (1974), Pakistan (1974), Canada – Alberta (1975), Costa Rica (1977), Venezuela (1977), Thailand, (1978), the Netherlands (1981), Sri Lanka (1981), Korea (1982), Turkey (1982), Japan (1983), Indonesia (1984), India (1985), Taiwan (1987), Jordan (1987), and Portugal (1988).

In China, the Radio and TV University (RTVU) was established by (then) Vice-Premier Xiaoping Deng, who is said to have been impressed by what he heard about the OUUK, described to him by former British Prime Minister Edward Heath (Wei, 2008, p. 45). The Central Radio and Television University (CRTVU) and 28 provincial RTVUs began teaching in 1979 with 115,200 students enrolled in diploma programs and 302,700 students in single courses (Yin, 1986).

Not all countries set up autonomous distance teaching universities, and in those that did not, distance education programs were embedded in their traditional institutions. Such programs could not enjoy the economies of scale that are essential to amortize the large investments needed to support high quality in designing and delivering technology-based programs. In some countries, institutions banded together to share their resources. Examples include: Federation Interuniversitaire de L’Enseignement a Distance in France, the Consorzio Per L’Universita a Distanza in Italy, and Contact North in Ontario, Canada. In Brazil, a unique consortia saw institutions from across the country contribute their specialists to virtual course teams assembled by the Ministry of Education to tackle a teacher education problem, the result being a high-quality distance education program that, in its first year, trained 27,000 rural school teachers (Moore, 2016).

In the USA, several consortia were set up, and most eventually broke up. One, a consortium of nine Midwestern universities called the University of Mid-America, put forward plans for an American Open University modelled on the British example, but their plans were thwarted (McNeil, 1993). Similarly, a proposed consortium of providers to build an “Open School” in Wedemeyer’s own state of Wisconsin (Wedemeyer, Woods, & Moore, 1971) met political resistance and was stillborn.

Instead of building new systems, America experienced a frenzy of activity in satellite videoconferencing, more teaching by “dull gray professors reading their dull gray notes on dull grey screens.” Examples include the National University Teleconferencing Network, a network of 250 universities, colleges, vocational and technical schools, and the National Technological University which delivered courses from some 50 institutions to downlinks in 500 locations. Many business corporations used satellite delivered teleconference programs for staff training. For example, IBM’s Interactive Satellite Education Network had originating studios in four cities and receiving sites in twenty others. Teleconferencing was promoted for schools when a 1987 Act of Congress authorized $100 million to support the so-called Star Schools network, which covered 3,000 schools in 45 states.

Digital Technology: From the Virtual Classroom Back to Independent Study

With distance education embedded in conventional institutions, the concept of distance education as a personal tutorial was replaced by a focus on social interaction in virtual classrooms.

With the ubiquity of digital devices and the vast majority of educational institutions having some kind of embedded distance teaching program, distance education of a kind entered the educational mainstream. The role of the distance educator was no longer primarily that of a personal tutor but became one of managing learning as a social activity. Of course, these were not face-to-face groups, but “virtual groups,” of individuals in different locations connected through digital networks. Managing learning as a social activity meant that teachers could perform more as they did in a traditional classroom, and virtual classes could be administered much like traditional classes in institutions’ organizational structures. This trend gained momentum and foundational underpinning from the popular and widely disseminated theory of constructivism (Jung, 2019). Consequently, the virtual classroom became the dominant model of distance education in the twenty-first century.

The history of the virtual class can be traced back to the first computer-based educational networks in the early 1980s. These included BITNET (“Because It’s Time Network”), founded by the City University of New York (CUNY) and Yale University, the (US) National Science Foundation Network (NFSNET), Australia’s Academic and Research Network (AARNet), the UK’s Joint Academic Network (JANET), and the China Education and Research Network (CERNET). Although these networks were used more for research than for teaching, a trickle of research studies began to build awareness of their potential as a medium of distance education. Examples of such early reports are those by Hiltz and Turoff (1981) about students’ attitudes in the Electronic Information Exchange network and that of Siegel et al. (1986) who described communication efficiency, user participation, and interpersonal behavior. The late 1980s also saw experiments at the Pennsylvania State University that explored the pedagogy of teaching in virtual groups, focusing on group dynamics, constructivist pedagogy, and what later became known as “social presence” (on this, see Garrison, Anderson, & Archer, 2003).

Following the invention of the World Wide Web, the Web browser Mosaic, high-speed networks, and handheld communications devices, the 1990s saw a scramble by universities and many school systems to set up their own web-based distance education programs. Some of these succeeded, such as Penn State’s World Campus (2000), Oregon State University (2000), and University of Florida (2001). Others failed. The UK E-University closed in 2004, University of Illinois’ Global Campus in 2009, and Columbia University’s Fathom Knowledge Network in 2012. In universities and school systems that did not set up a dedicated system, classroom teachers were simply told to go online and teach. The quality of most such programs was, inevitably, dismal. This was dramatically exposed during the Corona virus pandemic of 2020–2021 when teachers were ordered to teach homebound students in what was called “remote learning,” using live-streaming applications like Zoom and Skype. Faced by universal dissatisfaction with the results, politicians and administrators deflected attention from their failure to provide training and resources with promises of a swift return to the brick-and-mortar classroom. One invention that ameliorated the resulting chaos was the Learning Management System. For institutions that had established systems like Blackboard and WebCT, it was possible to not only distribute study materials but also give teachers support in basic instructional design, such as writing learning objectives, managing learner-learner interaction, and handling of assignments.

The end of the twentieth century saw the first steps in educational application of virtual reality. The Quantum Computer Service (later America Online) established a multiusers environment that allowed as many as 500 participants to interact through avatars – graphical representations of bodies and objects. Other early virtual learning environments included the Virtual Reality Multiuser Dungeon (VRMUD) and the Virtual European School Project (Bouras, Philopoulos, & Tsiatsos, 2001). Several desktop and web-based multiuser environments that “mimic a real university” are described by Monahan, McArdle, and Bertolotto (2008).

The first decade of the twenty-first century saw the universal take-up of what became known as Web 2.0, the social web. Using online platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, Snapchat, LinkedIn, and Pinterest, students could, in theory, participate in creating and distributing their own knowledge through such activities as blogging, tagging, and podcasting. The first decade of the twenty-first century also saw the invention of another form of web-based distance learning, Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs). Beginning at the University of Manitoba in 2008, and boosted in the public eye by offerings from Stanford University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MOOCs soon became commercialized, leading companies being Udacity and Coursera. Udacity, by the end of 2012, had 370,000 students studying 18 different courses, while Coursera boasted 62 university partners in 11 countries. Most MOOC courses were for technical and professional training and continuing education (Brown, 2013).

An intriguing development in the early years of the twenty-first century was a revived interest in independent study, now referred to as personalized learning, reflected in such documents as the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) report on Personalization in the School System (OECD, 2006). Notable among the pedagogical tools that support such personalization of learning were techniques associated with learner analytics, adaptive learning, competency-based education, and assessment of prior learning. It appears that the same digital technologies that spurred the development of online courses that mimicked the classroom might also offer tools to facilitate the kind of individualized learning that characterized the oldest form of distance learning, namely, the correspondence course.

A Note on History of Theory and Scholarship

The idea of distance education as a special field of study and research can be traced to G. B. Childs and Charles A. Wedemeyer (Diehl, 2019) in the USA and to Börje Holmberg and Otto Peters in Europe. Holmberg’s (1960) treatise on teaching by correspondence was an early expression of a pedagogy of distance education, and his proposition that teaching by correspondence was a “guided didactic conversation” is widely cited as one of the founding theories. For his part, Peters published, as early as 1967 (in German), his theory of “industrialized education” (Peters, 2007). This theory, although independently arrived at, had much in common with Wedemeyer’s theory of teaching as an articulated system. Wedemeyer also redefined correspondence education as “independent study,” to show that learners are not only independent of teachers geographically but also, in those circumstances, may control much of their own learning (Wedemeyer, 1971). This idea of the learner’s potential autonomy was taken up by M. G. Moore and linked to Peters’ ideas about structure and Holmberg’s concepts about dialog, in what became known as the theory of transactional distance (Moore, 1973, 2012). An exhaustive history of theory is found in Black (2004, 2019). Also refer to the chapter on theories in this handbook.

The history of distance education research and scholarship owes much to the research centers and scholarly journals that were established during the 1970s and 1980s. Research centers included: the Institute of Educational Technology (IET) at the OUUK; the DIFF at Tübingen, Germany; Central Institute for Distance Education Research (ZIFF) at the FernUniversität, Hagen, Germany; Centre for Distance Education (CDE) at Athabasca University, Canada; and the American Center for the Study of Distance Education (ACSDE) at the Pennsylvania State University, USA. The first scholarly journals, also established in the 1980s, were Distance Education, published by the Australian and South Pacific External Studies Association – the predecessor of the Open and Distance Learning Association of Australia, Inc. (ODLAA), the Journal of Distance Education by the Canadian Association of Distance Education, the OUUK’s Open Learning, and the American Journal of Distance Education, founded at the Pennsylvania State University.

Conclusion: The New Must Be Informed by the Old – Lessons from History

If we, as distance educators today, are to have a rich knowledge base on which to construct, understand, and evaluate future choices, we must consider the important work done by distance educators from the last century. …. As stated by Thomas Mann (1965), the best response to the question of what to do in situations presenting many new choices is to “assist the new without sacrificing the old.” (Bunker, 2003, p. 63)

The history of distance education provides many lessons to guide future practice and research. One is that, recognizing that every learner is different, educators must break free from the ancient preoccupation with the classroom and use well-tested instructional design and communication technologies to address that diversity. The lesson for researchers is that while continuing to inquire about the social dynamics of learning, more research is needed into the personal dynamics of learning, i.e., what goes on inside each student.

However, there is one lesson from history that stands out above all others. It is that only modest gains can be achieved by adopting new technology without changing teaching itself, from a single-person craft to a team process within a delivery system, and this requires broad and deep reform of educational institutions, especially their budgets and human resource management. Consequently, the most important historical research in the near future will be the study of institutional change, and the reform of national educational systems. In this, lessons may be learned from study of past successful innovations, and even more from the many failures. Why did the American Open University fail, and why was Wisconsin’s Open School not implemented? What can be learned about successful national planning from Brazil’s Proformacao teacher education project and South Africa’s ODL policy, and why were these not sustained? Questions like these are questions about policy, leadership, and politics, and on the answers to these questions depends the future of distance education.