The Last 25 Years of Distance Eduation

I recently attended the 25th Annual Conference on Distance Teaching and Learning in Madison, Wisconsin, August 4-7th, 2009.

http://www.uwex.edu/disted/conference/
You can access session handouts and keynote videos from the website.

Michael G. Moore, a professor at Pennsylvania State University was the opening keynote for the conference. Since this was the 25th year of this conference the overall theme was looking back on the last 25 years of Distance Education and looking forward to the next.

Moore’s keynote discussed the history of distance education in a nutshell, pointing out the remarkable accomplishments and contributions of Charles Wedemeyer. It is quite incredible, looking back to the mid-sixties on how Wedemeyer was so insightful on the vision of today’s e-learning. Wedemeyer wrote the book, “Learning at the Back Door” in 1954, addressing the challenges of teaching students who may not be “traditional.” I thought it was funny that Moore pointed out that you can purchase a copy of the book for a $1 on Amazon, although, when I investigated the cheapest I found was $12, and that was for the updated 1981 edition. You can, however, purchase an electronic version of the original at http://uwpress.wisc.edu/books/1954.htm. I just got my copy from the library to review.

Similar to the opening keynote, I attended an information session led by Rick Shearer, also from Pennsylvania State University. Rick discusses just how far we have come in the last 25 years. It is actually a little bit comical to look at these giant contraptions that were used in Distance Ed in the early years. I don’t know if any of you ever heard of PLATO, probably one of the first learning management systems, created at University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana. The only reason why I know about is a friend of mine was taking classes at U of I in the early nineties and we bought our first modem so he could connect to it. The whole thing was rather mind blowing at first to me. I remember contemplating the point and usefulness of “email”. Later down the road, when I was just starting my master’s degree, my program actually felt the need to teach us “Hyper-card.” Although, this was popular in its time it was certainly getting chased away by newer, fancier technology like Flash. One of the courses that I took (for my master’s degree) was part of a video teleconference so other campuses could tap into the live class. As I reflect over just the past 10 years it is quite incredible to see how far we’ve come and how fast technology changed. I’m fairly young but I could actually say “I remember when email came onto the scene, heck, I remember a time before cell phones, and we had rotary dials on the land phone!”

Rick, the presenter, reminded me of other early learning management systems, such as Prometheus, Web course in a Box, and a young Blackboard etc. I think about where we are now. We have lots of choices for LMS. Moodle is ever so popular along with other open source systems. Many people ask “why would they make it free and open to anyone?” Well, it is just like the question back in the day where you might have said “why would I email someone when I can just pick up the phone?” Of course, now we have a tidal wave of Web 2.0 tools and we are well on the way to the concept of Web 3.0. It is all about making life easier and getting things faster and better; and that includes learning too. The future of distance education will bring learning to everyone’s fingertips. But my big question is when will education be completely free?

Rick ends his presentation with these areas to consider for the future of DE.
• Access
• Scale/economies
• Individualization and mobile
• Student generated content
• Cost
• Knowledge building- dialogue