Evolution of Distance Education

                                                      Evolution of Distance Education
         When we think about distance education in North America, the first image that might come to mind is online learning of the kind that is offered by University of Maryland University College. However, current online teaching and learning practice of distance education have a much longer history, in fact, dating back to Apostle Paul preaching the gospel by writing his epistles which were sent out to Asia Minor (Peters, 2004, p. 14).
          Peters, Moore, and Holmberg (2006) laid the foundation for discussing distance education so many years later.  Otto Peters started out as a pedagogue attempting to analyze educational approaches when he came across “correspondence education” (Bernath, 2006).   In the 1960s there were no academics for distance learning, so he intended to write a negative on the status of educational approaches.  Since Professor Peters was not involved in correspondence education, he was able to analyze it standing from the outside looking in.  Human and educational behavior is such that new forms of pedagogies are not readily accepted until they can be theoretically proven.  As such, the experts in the field felt that Peters’ framework applying industrial revolution to “correspondence education” was a de-naturalized form of face-to-face education (Peters, 2010).

Assignment 1