Week 2: Origins of Distance Education

     In his “Distance education in Transition,” Otto Peters identifies three periods in the history of distance education:

1. The first one was established when there was a need in singular projects, mainly in remote areas where people could not possibly attend schools or any other educational institutions face-to-face. This is when the railroads and roads were heavily used for correspondence (Peters, 2004).  In my opinion, whether it was sent by railroad or any other type of transportation, the 19th century education was very similar to distance education today. The waiting period was longer, and, maybe, the education techniques were not as developed, but the students still received the material they needed to learn. They simply needed to study, do their homework, and send it back to an instructor. The main inconvenience was time. Sometimes it could take weeks for correspondence to arrive. However, everything depended on a person. If they wanted to learn, they were absorbing everything they received in the mail. Perhaps they retained information even better, because they had so much time to revise and absorb it.
2. The second period was mainly commercial, but later it was correspondence education as well. The foundation of radio and television speeded up the process of receiving information. It started to look more like a normal communication rather than a one-way learning process. Again, it was very similar to today’s distance education, but slower and not as efficient as today (Peters, 2004)
3. The third period was the era of distance education by open universities. The invention of computers changed the world. This is the period when distance education started to look very much like online education today. More and more people developed their interest in distance education: Keegan, Wedemeye. If in 1965 only a small group attended the ICCE conference, at the 20th World Conference of ICDE more than 1200 experts from 85 countries attended (Peters, 2004).

     Distance Education of 19th century was a long, developmental project in process. However, the principles of preparing the material for the “students”, sending it out to them, and then receiving it back and providing feedback was very similar to distance education today. Now we have full blackboards and school sites that allow us to receive information almost instantly. Instructors still spend the time to send it out to students, and the students have to provide their time to learn and process that given information – very similar, yet, very different educational methods due to the progress in technology.

References
Peters, O. (2004). Distance education in transition: New trends and challenges (4th edition) (pp. 13-24). Oldenburg, Germany: BIS-Verlag der Carl von Ossietzky Universität Oldenburg. Retrieved from: http://www.box.com/shared/5x3tpynqqf


How Do You Define Distance Education?
     This is my initial definition of Distance Education: Distance education is a systematic process of interaction between instructors and students that allows two-way communication, instant or non-instant, that provides necessary learning material and expertise in a virtual environment employing technology.

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