ADTED470:
Lesson 2: The Historical Context
Lesson 2: The Historical Context
Readings:
Review the Course Readings Guide for this lesson's readings and learning activities.
Learning Objectives:
By the end of this lesson, you should be able to:
- Describe the history of distance education in terms of distinctive stages of evolution.
- Describe the motivation of distance education pioneers for promoting this method of teaching.
- Explain the historical significance of the AIM project and also the Open University.
- Discuss contemporary events with references to historical antecedents.
Introducing the Historical Context
The first thing to note about the history of distance education is that this field has a very long history!! It is quite amazing to those of us who know the history of the field, to observe so many people who are fresh in the field, struggling to understand issues and asking questions about learning and teaching at a distance that have been resolved over and over again in the course of more than a century of experience.
Of course the technologies have changed, but do you think the challenges of being a learner or teacher after the arrival of the Internet are fundamentally different from what they were before? Of course not. There is so much to learn of a practical nature, as well as giving opportunity of reading about such interesting people, in distance education's history.
As you will see when we turn to the textbook, the earliest distance education occurred almost simultaneously in Europe and America near the end of the 19th century. At that time a few educators looked for ways of using newly developed communications technologies--the postal system--to open educational opportunity to a wide range of people who were previously denied such opportunity, usually because of their geographic isolation but also because of discriminatory practices of several kinds. Later, as radio and television technology became available, most countries of the world attempted to apply these means of communication for education, and today distance education continues to apply new technologies as they emerge.
Throughout the history that you are going to read about, there has been an interplay between the potential empowerment of educators and learners that arose from the emergence of new technologies and the motivation, or perhaps we could say passion, of a small number of visionaries who wished to use the technology to open opportunity and overcome inequality in the conventional educational provision. That in a nutshell is what distance education has been all about for the past century.
You might like to reflect on how the motivation to serve the under-served is consistent with what reflect on how this motivation to serve the under-served is consistent with what you have read about the philosophy of adult education, as compared with other fields in education. Also, you might want to reflect on the extent to which this mission is served today--or is it possible that the increased popularity of distance education has caused many to lose sight of that mission? Even (or especially) in the study of history you see, important questions come up.
Wedemeyer: the Father of the Field
You will read about Charles Wedemeyer in the textbook (Chapter 2); he was the person who conceived so many of the practices as well as the ideas that feature in modern distance education, including the concept of a systems approach to use a range of technologies in education (the AIM Project). You will also read about his key role in establishing the British Open University, which is one of the most sophisticated distance education systems in the world.
Visit the following websites:
- From Chautauqua to the Virtual University: A Century of Distance Education in the United States, which provides a lengthy history of distance education.
The International Movement
Distance education has been a global phenomenon, long before it was popular to talk about "globalization." Frequent exchanges among distance educators of different countries have occurred at least since the 1930's, particularly after the founding of the International Council for Correspondence Education in 1938.
One of your predecessors in the Adult Education program, Dr. Ellen Bunker, has written about the history of ICCE, based on her doctoral dissertation, in a chapter in the Handbook of Distance Education. You can find her chapter (History of Distance Education Through the Eyes of the International Council for Distance Education by Bunker, Ellen L.) through the eReserves in PSU Libraries. Reading this chapter will help you get a feel, not only for history, but for the remarkably international nature of distance education from its earliest days. Unfortunately the chapter is very short, so perhaps you might one day like to obtain Bunker's dissertation and read it for yourself. The references will give you a good key to further research on history if you want to do that at some time in future. You will also encounter the ICCE (now known as International Council for Open and Distance Education) in Lesson 11 but you could explore it now, of course, if you want to look it up online.
Viewpoint
Carefully reflect on Von Pittman's viewpoint about the future of distance education in the textbook and his comments in the audio clip below. Make reference to his comments in discussions and assignments where appropriate.
TRANSCRIPT
ADTED 470: Introduction to Distance Education
ViewPoint
On the telephone with...
Von Pittman, Ph.D.
Director of Independent Study and Extension
Associate Professor
University of Missouri Columbia
(recorded August 20, 2004)
Hi, this is Von Pittman. I’m the Director of the Center for Distance and Independent Study at the University of Missouri, Columbia. I occasionally teach a course on DE here and I’ve also taught at the University of Iowa.
One of my favorite things I usually talk about when teaching distance education is taking a look at the dimension of personality. We usually study the history if we study it at all of distance education by looking at it as the history of technology or maybe of institutional change but rarely of personality. I’d like to at least plant a few names that you may look for as you’re studying.
Of course, you’ll hear William Rainy Harper, the founding president of the University of Chicago who brought correspondence study into prestigious higher education institution and thus made it possible for other people. But the man who really had to translate his vision into reality was named Hervy Mallory. I know his name looks like a misprint, but it’s actually Hervy Mallory. He worked for 30 years fighting battles with the administration and the faculty at the University of Chicago to keep Harper’s vision of correspondence study alive. In the state of WI, which is critical to understanding distance education in the U.S., is the home of much of the innovation. It became part of a political movement, the progressive era movement in the political machine of the LaFallit family, the man who translated the political vision of the Wisconsin idea. That is of a university that served all citizens of the state, was named William Litey. He wanted to make the correspondence study approach as rigorous and as respectable as any other form of teaching. He worked with some people, including his boss, who wanted to make a lot of money teaching vocational education courses, he held out for highly rigorous academic courses and thus contributed to the growth of the field as a good field of teaching the liberal arts college.
Helen Williams labored an obscurity for 30 years at the University of Iowa and yet she programmed the first and best radio courses of the era in the 1920s. We know more about her than the other experiments because she kept very good records which are in the special collections room at the University of Iowa.
In the post WW II era, there are two names that you should have heard of or will hear of during your studies. They did quite different things, but their names are linked together. Charles Wiedemeyer at the University of Wisconsin, and Gayle Childs, who is a man anyway, from the University of Nebraska. They were among the very first scholars of correspondence study and thus of distance education. They tracked down other studies as obscure as they may have been and synthesized them and wrote a book together which was one of the best books of its era on correspondence study, one of the few I might add.
A man named Thomas Russell, a professor at North Carolina State University, published a book in 1997 called “The No Significant Difference Phenomenon,” which contrasts and compares distance education in terms of educational outcomes with conventional outcomes and he rounded up studies that tested all sorts of distance education; television, computer, and correspondence study, everything that he could find studies on, even something called “the teaching machine,” which is pretty much lost to history.
There are also teachers, instructors of note in distance education. Annie McClain taught correspondence study ONLY. That is, she taught sociology by correspondence study only at the University of Chicago for 20 years helping to entrench correspondence teachers there. She also did some publishing about her teaching experiences.
The great mathematician, poet and all around genius, Jacob Bernowski, conducted, or was at least the on-camera presence of the first very good and highly influential broadcast tele-course called “The Essence of Man.” I believe that course was essential to the whole later development of broadcast tele-courses. He was magnificent. There’s no other way to put it in conducting that series.
James Burke, a professor from England, did the same thing in a series called Connections, which had hundreds of thousands of enrollments through various colleges in the U.S.
Not all the personalities that we would look at in the study of distance education are positive. We need to look at the critics also. Forestein Deblin, who was arguably the best economist that the U.S. has ever turned, out criticized correspondence study as one facet of a corporate takeover of higher education which he despised. He despised William Rainy Harper also and this was part of his attack on Harper.
Abraham Flexner, an educational critic, was given credit for his work that essentially reformed American medical education, wrote a book that was harshly critical of correspondence study because he believed was demeaning to professors to teaching that way and cheapening the product of the University.
And today, of course, our best known critic of all forms of distance education is David Noble, a professor of York University at Toronto. So, these are the kinds of people that are worth looking at if we want to understand where distance education is today. It has had its champions and it has had its critics and they have all had something to teach us. Instead of looking at distance education only as a history of technology or maybe as a history of institutional change in higher education, it’s worth a look at how personality-driven the development of distance education was also.