Here's the second in my series on the history of distance education. Yesterday's post examined some conceptual issues of 'distance'. Today we look at the roots of distance education.Arguably the first distance education course was delivered in the first century, in Asia Minor. The writings of St Paul (known as epistles) were in effect a form of instruction delivered to remote groups of people (early Christian churches) distributed by courier across what is now Israel, Turkey, Greece and Italy (more here). Yet this was very much a didactic, one-way mode of knowledge transmission. There was no latitude for interaction, and therefore no dialogue occurred between student and teacher.
In an organised format, one of the earliest occurances of distance education emerged in Victorian England. When Isaac Pitman established the first organised correspondence course in England in 1840, he achieved it on the back of two technologies – the printing press and the newly arrived national Penny Postal service.
Pitman’s correspondence school taught shorthand to a distributed nationwide audience predominantly of office workers. Pitman’s use of the nationwide postal service advanced the work of previous correspondence courses giving educators the ability to engage in two-way communication with their students wherever they were located in the country. This was an asynchronous (time delayed) form of communication, and the process took time, but the Victorians were not afflicted by the impatience and clock watching habits we now see in contemporary society. Life was much more sedate. Within a few short years of commencing distance delivery, Pitman's correspondence school had enrolled over 100,000 students. Even by today's standards, this was a phenomenal number of students. In 1892, Pitman was knighted by Queen Victoria for his services to education and his visionary plan to 'educate one and all'.
This early success prompted many others to attempt similar feats, and soon the organised correspondence course was burgeoning. In the US, Anna Eliot Ticknor set up the Society to Encourage Study at Home' which was predominantly aimed at women (for more on this story follow this link). Other similar organisations soon began to spring up. Geographical distance had been breached, and students were able to glean feedback on their progress from their instructors wherever they were. It was not so much the time spent waiting that was an issue for students in correspondence courses – rather it was the depth of richness of feedback they received that made all the difference between success and failure. Such two way interaction over distance via correspondence became the basis for much of what was to follow. Even today, in the advent of digital technology, ubiquitous communications and web based learning, the vast majority of distance education is still reliant on mailed out, paper based material and the humble correspondence course.
Pitman’s correspondence school taught shorthand to a distributed nationwide audience predominantly of office workers. Pitman’s use of the nationwide postal service advanced the work of previous correspondence courses giving educators the ability to engage in two-way communication with their students wherever they were located in the country. This was an asynchronous (time delayed) form of communication, and the process took time, but the Victorians were not afflicted by the impatience and clock watching habits we now see in contemporary society. Life was much more sedate. Within a few short years of commencing distance delivery, Pitman's correspondence school had enrolled over 100,000 students. Even by today's standards, this was a phenomenal number of students. In 1892, Pitman was knighted by Queen Victoria for his services to education and his visionary plan to 'educate one and all'.
This early success prompted many others to attempt similar feats, and soon the organised correspondence course was burgeoning. In the US, Anna Eliot Ticknor set up the Society to Encourage Study at Home' which was predominantly aimed at women (for more on this story follow this link). Other similar organisations soon began to spring up. Geographical distance had been breached, and students were able to glean feedback on their progress from their instructors wherever they were. It was not so much the time spent waiting that was an issue for students in correspondence courses – rather it was the depth of richness of feedback they received that made all the difference between success and failure. Such two way interaction over distance via correspondence became the basis for much of what was to follow. Even today, in the advent of digital technology, ubiquitous communications and web based learning, the vast majority of distance education is still reliant on mailed out, paper based material and the humble correspondence course.
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