=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-2522/paper27
|storemode=property
|title=Investigation of some Aspects of the History of Distance Learning
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2522/paper27.pdf
|volume=Vol-2522
|authors=Victor V. Selivanov,Olga Y. Savchenko
}}
==Investigation of some Aspects of the History of Distance Learning==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2522/paper27.pdf
41
Investigation of some Aspects of the History
of Distance Learning*
Victor V. Selivanov[0000-0003-4316-0859], Olga Y. Savchenko[0000-0001-7443-1952]
V.I. Vernadsky Crimean Federal University, Yalta, Russia
vvselivanov@ukr.net
zlukka03@mail.ru
Abstract. The article examines a few issues of e-education, also called e-learning and online
learning. Distinctive features of this form of education are the physical separation of teachers and
students during the sessions and the use of various technologies to facilitate communication be-
tween student and teacher. Distance learning is traditionally focused on non-traditional students,
such as full-time employees of enterprises and organizations, military personnel, as well as non-
residents or individuals in remote regions who cannot attend lectures in an audience. Also, this
article discusses the dynamics of the development of distance education, which is an indicator of
the relevance of e-learning.
Keywords: model, education, process, development, technology, universities,
goals.
1 Introduction
The development of civilization is the history of continuous learning of something new,
human life is a constant process of knowing oneself, the world around and its places in
it. Early, education implied close personal contacts of students with a mentor. With
motivation, such tutorials gave excellent results but education remained a privilege for
the elect. The problem of accessibility of education was solved by the appearance of
distance learning.
2 Consideration of the development of distance education in
retrospect
The history of studying at a distance begins with the end of the XVIII century. It was
during this period in European countries that a new term appeared - “correspondent
education”, which was introduced by Isaac Pitman, who taught students of shorthand
in the UK. The students received educational material, talked with teachers and passed
exams by mail.
* Copyright 2019 for this paper by its authors. Use permitted under Creative Commons License
Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).
42
More and more universities in the world offer distance learning opportunities. A pi-
oneer in this area is the University of Phoenix [7], which was founded in Arizona in
1976 and by the first decade of the 21st century became the largest private school in the
world with more than 400,000 students. He was one of the first to introduce distance
learning technology, although many of his students spend some time in classrooms in
one of the dozens of campuses in the United States, Canada, and Puerto Rico. The exact
figure for the number of foreign students enrolled in distance education has not been
published, but the number of enrolled students in the two largest state universities that
actively use distance learning methods gives some digital guidelines: at the beginning
of the 21st century, the Indira Gandhi National Open University with headquarters
apartment in New Delhi [4], has received over 1.5 million students, and more than
500,000 students have studied at the Central University of Radio and Television of
China with headquarters in Beijing Comrade.
Students and educational institutions master distance learning for various reasons.
Universities win by expanding the number of students, since there is no need to build
classrooms and student dormitories, and students can work where and when they want,
combining work with higher education. School systems offer special courses, such as
language learning with a small number of students in groups and Advanced Placement
classes [2], without the need to create multiple classrooms. In addition, students study-
ing at home have access to centralized learning.
Various terms are used to describe the phenomenon of distance learning. Strictly
speaking, distance learning (student activity) and distance learning (teacher activity)
together make up a distance education system. Common options include e-learning or
online learning, used when the internet is the medium; virtual learning, which usually
refers to courses held outside the classroom with primary or secondary school students
(and also usually using the Internet); distance learning, a long-used method in which
individual training is carried out using mail; and direct education, the standard system
of education in Europe in a regular university.
Distance education is characterized by four main characteristics. First, distance
learning is by definition carried out through higher education institutions; This is not a
self-learning or non-academic learning environment. Higher education institutions may
or may not offer traditional classroom teaching, but they are eligible for accreditation
by the same government institutions like universities that use traditional teaching meth-
ods.
Secondly, the geographical separation inherent in distance education divides pupils
and teachers. Accessibility and convenience are important advantages of this learning
method. Well-designed programs can also bridge the intellectual, cultural, and social
differences among students.
Thirdly, interactive telecommunications connect people in the study group and with
the teacher. Electronic messages such as e-mail are most commonly used, but tradi-
tional forms of communication, such as a regular mail system, can also play a role in
the learning process. Regardless of the environment, teacher interaction with students
is necessary for distance learning, as for any other education. Communication between
students, teachers, and learning resources are becoming less dependent on physical
proximity, as communication systems become more complex and widely available.
43
Thus, it is legitimate to conclude that the Internet, mobile phones and e-mail contributed
to the rapid growth of distance learning.
Finally, distance learning, like any education, creates a learning group, sometimes
called the learning community, which consists of students, teachers, and learning re-
sources, that is, books, audio, video, and graphic displays, which allow the learner to
access the content of the subject. Social networks on the Internet promote the idea of
building a virtual community. On sites like Facebook and YouTube, users create pro-
files, identify members (“friends”) with whom they keep in touch, and create new like-
minded communities. In the conditions of distance education, such networks can create
connections between students and thereby reduce their sense of isolation.
Considering the process of development of distance education, I would like to draw
attention to a rather long history of distance learning, which began with the creation of
correspondence schools in the 19th century.
Geographical isolation from schools and scattered religious congregations stimu-
lated the development of religious distance learning in the United States in the 19th
century. For example, the Sunday School Assembly at Lake Chautawka in the western
state of New York [3] began in 1874 as a training program for Sunday school teachers
and church ministers. Going beyond its religious background, the program gradually
expanded to include a non-denominational course on home-based reading and distance
learning. His success led to the founding of many such schools throughout the United
States, the so-called chautauqua movement.
There was a fairly high demand for this type of training from industry, government
and the military. This situation has pushed the distance learning system to new levels
of development.
In Europe, mail courses were created by the middle of the 19th century, when the
Society for Modern Languages in Berlin offered correspondence courses in French,
German and English. In the United States, companies such as Strayer's Business Col-
lege from Baltimore (now Strayer University) were founded, which was founded in
Maryland in 1892 and included correspondence courses by mail to meet the needs of
employers, especially in training women for secretarial duties. In most non-religious
correspondence courses by mail, special attention was paid to the teaching of spelling,
grammar, writing business letters and bookkeeping. In addition, new areas of distance
learning have appeared: from the development of esoteric mental abilities to work in a
beauty salon. The undisputed leader in distance education in American higher educa-
tion at the end of the 19th century was the University of Chicago, where William Raine
Harper [9] used the methods he developed as director of the education system at Chau-
tauqua for several years, starting in 1883.
From this time period, one can speak of the development of early educational theo-
ries and technologies, such as behaviorism and constructivism.
During the first half of the 20th century, the use of educational technologies in the
United States was strongly influenced by two developing schools of educational phi-
losophy. Behaviorism, led by American psychologist John B. Watson [8], followed by
B. F. Skinner, who ignored all subjective mental phenomena (for example, emotions
and mental images) in favor of objective and measurable behavior. A constructive ap-
44
proach emerged based on the ideas of progressive education put forward by the Amer-
ican philosopher John Dewey [1], who stressed the need for the education of "the whole
child" to achieve intellectual, physical and emotional growth and argued that learning
is best carried out by children. rather than striving to memorize the facts. Constructiv-
ism, the leading figure of which was the French developmental psychologist Jean Piaget
[5], argued that learning arises as a result of the construction of mental models based
on experience. These theories have led to different methods of using the media in the
classroom, where behaviorism concentrates on changing student behavior and con-
structivism on learning based on processes and experience.
One of the first technological assistants in education was the lantern slide (for exam-
ple, the Linnebach Lantern), which was used in the 19th century chautauqua classes
and lyceum schools for adults, as well as in mobile public lecture shows around the
world to project images on any comfortable surface; such visual aids have proven par-
ticularly useful in educating an illiterate audience. By the beginning of the 20th century,
learning theories began to focus on visual approaches to learning, in contrast to the
practice of oral reading, which still dominated traditional classrooms.
The first significant technological innovation was made by American inventor
Thomas Edison [11], who invented the 1877 Phonograph foil.
This device made it possible to create the first language laboratories (rooms
equipped with audio or audiovisual devices for use in language learning). After the First
World War, university-owned radio stations became commonplace in the United States,
and by 1936, more than 200 such stations broadcast recorded educational programs.
Edison was also one of the first to produce films for the classroom. Many colleges
and universities experimented with the production of educational films before the First
World War, and during the war educational films were widely used to train a diverse
and often illiterate population, soldiers on various topics - from military equipment to
personal hygiene. Improvements in filmmaking, in particular, the ability to create
"walkie-talkies", were used immediately before and during World War II for technical
training and for propaganda purposes. While the propaganda itself may have been Tri-
umph of the Will (1935), one of a series of films made by Leni Riefenstahl for the
German fascist government in the 1930s, similar films were shot by all the main bel-
ligerents. In the United States, the army ordered Hollywood filmmaker Frank Capra to
produce seven films, the well-known series “Why We Fight” (1942–45), to teach Amer-
ican soldiers what was at stake.
TV training courses began to be developed in the 1950s, first at the University of
Iowa. By the 1970s, community colleges throughout the United States had created
courses for broadcasting on local television stations. Various computer education ex-
periments also began in the 1950s, such as programmed or computerized instruction, in
which computers are used to present teaching materials consisting of text, audio, and
video, as well as to evaluate student performance. Most of the early studies were con-
ducted at IBM, where the latest theories of cognitive science were incorporated into the
application of educational technologies. The next major achievement in the field of
educational technologies was the connection of computers via the Internet, which made
it possible to develop modern distance learning.
45
What can we attribute to modern educational technologies? Firstly, it is an online
course.
By the beginning of the 21st century, more than half of all two-year and four-year
institutions of higher education in the United States offered distance learning courses,
mainly via the Internet. With over 100,000 different online courses to choose from,
about a quarter of American students took at least one such course every semester. The
general target population groups for distance learning are professionals seeking re-cer-
tification, employees who upgrade employment skills, disabled people, and active mil-
itary personnel.
Although the theoretical trend that began in the 1990s seems to have been more de-
pendent on video, audio, and other multimedia, in practice most of the successful pro-
grams used electronic texts and simple text messages. The reasons for this are some-
what practical — individual instructors often bear the burden of creating their own mul-
timedia — but also reflect a developing understanding of the main advantages of dis-
tance learning. Now it is seen as a way to facilitate communication between teachers
and students, as well as between students, eliminating time constraints associated with
the exchange of information in traditional classrooms or during teachers' working
hours. Similarly, self-learning software educational systems, although they are still
used for certain narrow types of training, have limited flexibility in responding and
adapting to individual students, which usually require some interaction with other peo-
ple informal educational settings.
Modern distance learning courses use web-based course management systems that
include digital reading materials, podcasts (recorded sessions for electronic listening or
viewing at a student’s leisure time), e-mail, multi-threaded (connected) discussion fo-
rums and chat rooms in virtual (computer) classes. Both proprietary and open-source
systems are common. Although most systems are usually asynchronous, which allows
students to access most functions at any time, they also use synchronous technologies,
including live video, audio, and general access to electronic documents at scheduled
times. Shared social spaces in the form of blogs, wikis (websites that can be changed
by all participants in the audience) and jointly edited documents are also used in edu-
cational institutions, but to a lesser extent than similar spaces available on the Internet
for communication.
Secondly, it is web services. Along with the growth of modern institutional distance
learning, personal educational services have appeared, based on web technologies or
facilitated, including e-learning, e-tutoring and research assistance. In addition, there
are many educational assistance companies that help parents choose and contact local
tutors for their children, while companies handle contracts. The use of distance learning
and tutoring programs has increased, especially among parents who consider it neces-
sary to organize homeschooling for their children. Many universities have some online
tutoring services [10] for corrective help with reading, writing, and basic math, and
some even have online tutoring programs to help doctoral students in the process of
writing a dissertation. Finally, many online personal assistant companies offer a wide
range of services for adults who want to receive continuing education or professional
development.
46
One of the most notable types of educational institutions that use distance learning
is the so-called open university. Opened in the sense that almost everyone can study
there, regardless of age. Since the middle of the 20th century, the open university move-
ment has been gaining momentum around the world, reflecting the desire for greater
access to higher education for various groups, including non-traditional students, such
as the disabled, military, and prisoners.
The origin of the movement can be traced back to the example of the University of
London, which began offering degrees for foreign students in 1836. This paved the way
for the growth of private correspondence colleges, which prepared students for the Uni-
versity of London exams and allowed them to study on their own to get a degree without
formal admission to the university. In 1946, the University of South Africa, with head-
quarters in Pretoria, began offering correspondence courses, and in 1951 it was con-
verted to training courses only for foreign students. The idea of creating the “University
of Air” proposed in the UK was supported in the early 1960s, which led to the creation
of the Open University in 1971 in the so-called new city of Milton Keynes. By the end
of the 1970s, 25,000 students were enrolled at the university, and since then their num-
ber has increased to hundreds of thousands a year. Open universities have spread around
the world and are characterized as “mega-universities” because their enrollment can
exceed hundreds of thousands or even millions of students in countries such as India,
China, and Israel.
Being one of the most successful non-traditional institutions with a research compo-
nent, the Open University is a major source of both narrow scientific and pedagogical
literature in the field of open universities. The university relies heavily on prepared
materials and a system of teachers. Initially, the printed text was the main means of
education for most Open University courses, but this changed somewhat with the ad-
vent of the Internet and computers, which allowed the distribution of written assign-
ments and materials via the Internet. For each course, a student is assigned a local tutor,
who is usually contacted by phone, mail, or email to help with questions related to
educational materials. Students can also attend face-to-face local classes conducted by
their mentor, and they can form self-help groups with other students. Assigned assign-
ments and discussion sessions are the main aspects of this educational model. Teachers
and interaction between individual students are designed to compensate for the lack of
in-person lectures at the Open University. To emphasize aspects of teaching and indi-
vidual learning, the Open University prefers to describe it as “supported open learning”
rather than distance learning. Naturally, the organization of distance education is faced
with certain academic problems, the solution of which will allow developing it in the
future.
From the very beginning, correspondence courses acquired a bad academic reputa-
tion, especially those provided by commercial organizations. Back in 1926, as a study
commissioned by Carnegie Corporation showed, fraud was widespread in the corre-
spondence schools of the United States and there were no adequate standards to protect
the public. Although the situation later improved due to the introduction of accrediting
agencies that set standards for the provision of distance learning programs. In addition,
there were always problems with the quality of educational experience and the verifi-
cation of students' work. The introduction of distance learning in traditional educational
47
institutions has given rise to fears that one-day technologies will completely destroy
ordinary educational audiences and people-teachers.
Since many distance learning programs are offered by commercial institutions, dis-
tance learning has become associated with the commercialization of higher education.
As a rule, critics of this trend point to the potential exploitation of students who are not
able to enroll in traditional colleges and universities. There is a certain temptation in
commercial schools to lower academic standards for higher incomes and a corporate
administrative approach that emphasizes “market models” in educational curricula. In
addition, the development of courses and curricula designed to attract wider demo-
graphic groups to generate more institutional revenue — all to some extent confirms
the decline in academic standards.
It is important to emphasize that modern distance learning technologies in education
are an important element of the organization of education of students with special needs
in inclusive audiences. Here, special requirements are placed on the availability of in-
frastructure, the development of new teaching materials based on new needs, the for-
mation of new methods for assessing the results of the educational process. With such
an organization of the educational process, it is quite possible to ensure the satisfaction
of the individual learning needs of all students, along with special attention to those
who are vulnerable to marginalization and isolation. Inclusive distance education as an
approach to the learning process implies that all students with or without special needs
will be able to study together through access to a common, flexible education system.
As the study shows, among the prevailing barriers to the successful implementation
of distance education are limited government support, ineffective policies and legisla-
tion, a shortage of qualified teachers and support staff, political instability and the eco-
nomic crisis. In addition, the inefficient use of assistive distance technologies is also
viewed as the main obstacle preventing the proper organization of inclusive education.
In accordance with the foregoing, distance education is the most important compo-
nent in the development and empowerment of individuals, their inclusion in education,
regardless of the various socio-economic differences and differences in “abilities” and
“needs”. In the system of university education, special attention should be paid to “ed-
ucation for all”. The right of all students to meaningful education based on individual
needs and abilities should be ensured.
The use of assistive technology devices will help reduce, if not eliminate possible
interference, and circumvent the information deficit to help individual students to ac-
tively participate in the learning process and in solving related problems. Assistive tech-
nology in general sets out a continuum of tools, strategies, and services that must meet
the needs, abilities, and objectives of the person and includes an assessment of the needs
of the individual with special needs.
One of the areas of the use of assistive technologies in inclusive distance education
is the creation of specialized audiences in individual universities to meet the various
training needs.
Creating such technological audiences has great potential in providing access to a
common curriculum and additional information for all students. Auxiliary technology
of distance education, in this case, is a general direction, which includes assistive and
48
rehabilitation devices for people with increased needs. It includes almost all the neces-
sary components that can be used to compensate for the lack of certain abilities, using
low-tech devices, such as crutches or a special pen for writing. Or more technological
elements, such as hearing aids and glasses. High-tech devices, such as computers with
specialized software, are also used to help ensure dyslexic reading.
The auxiliary technologies of modern distance education serve to bridge the gap be-
tween abilities and needs by actually assisting in ensuring the process of teaching stu-
dents in one common “distance audience”, including students with physical and mental
disabilities. These technologies help students master the learning material by removing
barriers that prevented them from being at the same level as their peers.
3 Conclusions
Distance learning, whether in commercial or traditional universities, uses two basic
economic models designed to reduce labor costs (faculty). The first model involves the
replacement of labor with capital, while the second is based on the replacement of the
faculty with cheaper labor. Proponents of the first model argue that distance learning
provides economies of scale by reducing staff costs after the initial investment in things
like web servers, electronic texts, and multimedia applications, as well as online pro-
grams for interacting with students. However, many institutions that have implemented
distance learning programs through traditional teaching and administrative structures
have found that the recurring costs associated with these programs may actually make
them more expensive to establish than traditional courses. The second basic approach,
the “work for work” model, is to divide the role of teachers into functions of prepara-
tion, presentation, and evaluation, and to ensure the performance of some teaching
functions by less paid employees. Open universities tend to do this by creating course
committees and hiring part-time teachers to help students with learning difficulties and
to evaluate their knowledge, leaving actual teaching responsibilities in the classroom,
if any, to professors. These distance learning models suggest that the biggest change in
education will be associated with changing roles for teachers and completely different
student experiences.
The emergence of massive open online courses (MOOC) in the first and second decades
of the 21st century was a major shift towards distance learning. MOOCs are character-
ized by an extremely large number of students — tens of thousands — using short vid-
eotapes and short videos. The format of open online courses was used in the early stages
of some universities, but it did not become widely popular until such providers as
Coursera, edX, Khan Academy and Udacity appeared. Although the original purpose
of MOOC was to provide informal learning opportunities, there were experiments using
this format to obtain diplomas and certificates from universities.
All of the above does not in any way reduce the values of distance education in the
world of modern information technology. And some errors and shortcomings of this
system can be avoided by using the experience of previous generations of teachers and
scientists.
49
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