Distance learning: who's doing it now?

Distance learning is nothing new. In 1938, the International Council for Correspondence Education was founded in Canada. In the same year, they held their first world conference, attended by 87 delegates. Only three of them weren't from America or Canada.
The rise and rise of distance learning

By 1950, the situation hadn't improved much – attendees came from just one or two countries – so in a desperate attempt to make sure that the conference lived up to its international title, the organisers invited people to participate by audio presentation. It was a revolution.

Something else was changing correspondence education that would draw it closer to what we now recognise as distance learning. Back then, when Australia was the world's forerunner – 100,000 people had taken correspondence courses there in the years after the war – most of it had been in primary education. Gradually, the emphasis began to move towards adult and further education. Men and women from the armed services were among those seeking to retrain themselves.

Though the UK's Open University (OU) wasn't established until 1969, its history stretches back much further. In fact, as early as 1925, when the BBC was a fledgling broadcaster, JC Stobart was its first director of education. A year later he wrote a memo to colleagues that advocated a "wireless university".

On 9 February 1971, the OU was broadcast on TV for the very first time. Tuning in were many of its 25,000 students that were enrolled in one of four multi-disciplinary courses in the arts, social sciences, science or maths.

A Mooc point?

But there's a new game in town when it comes to distance learning: Massive Open Online Courses (Moocs).

The term, which refers to courses that are free and open to an unlimited number of students, was coined in 2008 at the National Institute for Technology in Liberal Education based at Southwestern.

These free courses have grown rapidly. In the space of less than four years, Time magazine was celebrating the "Ivy League for the Masses" while the New York Times was heralding 'The Year of the Mooc'.

In March 2013, one Mooc provider (a for-profit one) had 2.8 million registered learners – far more than the 1.8 million people that have taken a course at the Open University in its whole 39-year history. On the other hand, on average, fewer than 7% of those who sign up to a Mooc complete the course.

(Source: The Guardian)