What Does Downton Abbey Have in Common With Online Education?

On the hit PBS series Downton Abbey, Gwen the housemaid manages to break out of her lower social class in the early 20th century by secretly taking a correspondence course to become a secretary. This new career gives her more money, independence, and a small degree of upward mobility in a rigid class system. Gwen’s departure from Downton Abbey and a life of being “in service” is an example of the one thing that never changes in human society: the desire to improve one’s lot in life.

The same is true for today’s online students, who are part of a rich history of distance learning. Correspondence education, which began as early as the 18th century and depended on print communication and the development of reliable postal services, is but the first example of this phenomenon. Some readers may remember seeing ads for correspondence art programs on matchbooks and in advertisement in the back pages of magazines.

It should be no surprise that today’s distance learning began with advances in remote communication forms, from the television to the computer, as scientists and researchers quickly grasped the educational potential of broadcasting. The history of online education is extensive, crossing international borders and exhibiting an enormous degree of ingenuity. You can find several extensive histories of online education on the Internet, but these are some of the highlights:

The 1950s: The Television Era

• In 1953, the first public television station in the United States was also the first TV station to broadcast college courses that could be taken for credit. The University of Houston offered up to 15 hours of courses on KUHT, the university’s station, with most of them airing at night to allow working adults the chance to expand their education.

The 1960s: Go-Go Boots, Hippies…and the Internet?

• Scientists at the University of Illinois, Urbana created PLATO (Programmed Logic for Automatic Teaching Operations), the first computer-assisted instructional system, in which students could listen to or watch a remote lecture and use a computer to access information during the lecture. These are the first “online” programs because, though there was no Internet yet, individual computers were linked to a larger “mainframe” computer housed at the university. PLATO included features that are common today: e-mail, online testing, chat mails, and more. The National Science Foundation became interested and supplied federal funding that helped PLATO expand into a larger and more interactive system.
• The 1960s also witnessed the creation of ARPANET, which was funded by the U.S. Department of Defense and is the ancestor of today’s Internet, because it was the first operational packet switching network, or network of digitized communication. Though many claim this system was created out of military needs during the Cold War, this has been disputed.
• Then, in 1969 the Open University was founded in Great Britain and offered a version of today’s “hybrid” courses. Students were sent print materials by mail, watched or listened to lectures on TV or the radio, and worked with a tutor over the telephone or in scheduled group session

The 1970s: Have a Nice Computerized Day

• The most significant development of the decade was the 1979 creation of USENET by two graduate students at Duke University. It resembled a bulletin board system (BBS) in that students could post messages to different categories of newsgroups. It is more like today’s systems because it did not rely on a central mainframe computer but instead relied on groups of different servers that saved and forwarded data to other servers. Coastline Community College, the first completely virtual college was opened in 1976. It operated largely via telecourses. Finally, the creation of PLATO drew the interest of some researchers at Xerox in the 1970s. These researchers later formed their own company: Apple Computer.

The 1980s: Pacman and Beyond!

• In the 1980s, computers became the rage, and not just in terms of digital watches.  Home computers entered the market, bringing the digital age off the university campus and into the nation’s living rooms. In the White Mountains of Ringe, New Hampshire, the Computer Assisted Learning Center (CALC) was founded in 1982 by Margaret Morabito, a visionary who was interested in how telecommunications could expand education to wider audiences. CALC offered computer-based courses for adults through the new computer networks offered by PC-Link, AppleLink, AOL, Delphi, GEnie, and CompuServe.
• In 1982, Carnegie Mellon University collaborated with IBM to create the Information Technology Center and the Andrew Project at Carnegie Mellon, to build “computer-aided instruction” from different computer monitors. By 1985, the Graduate School of Computer and Information Science at Nova Southeastern University awarded its first doctoral degree through online courses. These developments all lead to the start of the University of Phoenix in 1989, as what many claim to be the first entirely online virtual university, though it was not then accredited.

The 1990s and 2000s: Bubbles, Booms and Blackboard

• The 1990s was the era of what has been called the “dot.com bubble,” the explosive growth of speculative internet business development.  But what was a bubble for many businesses was a book for online education. Jones International University of Phoenix becomes the very first fully online university with accreditation, signaling a wider acceptance of internet-based virtual college education.
• Because of this, the 1990s saw the emergence of several more advanced forms of online education, including the development of Learning Management Systems, software applications for the distribution of course materials. One of the most common LMS is Blackboard, which was first developed in 1997, and quickly followed by the introduction of Moodle in 2001. The Mellon Foundation then funded the creation of Sakai, a software-based collaborative effort between private organizations, individuals, and colleges such as Indiana University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford University. The aim of Sakai was to build a Collaboration and Learning Environment (CLE) to offer material under an open source license, and it functions that way today.

Today, open source material and social media applications are the newest developments in online education. The continual innovations in online education technology testify to the increased acceptance of and demand for more online learning opportunities than we see today. In the world of online education, we are all Gwen the housemaid, taking advantage of new technologies to improve our lives. We’ve come a long way from matchbook “Draw Me!” contests, baby!