The foundations of Distance Education can be traced back to the late 1800's. One of the first forms of distance education was correspondence course study. Sir Issac Pittman founded Sir Isaac Pitman's Correspondence Colleges in England in the mid 1840s. Correspondence courses took advantage of the then new rural free delivery of mail to deliver course material to students.
Students worked independently on course material and interaction between faculty and students was limited to one-way communications. Within a few decades, correspondence courses were developed in Germany, Canada, Australia, the Soviet Union, Japan, and the United States (Matthews, 1999).
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William Rainey Harper (1856-1906) was an early pioneer in both education and distance education in the United States. He is known for helping establish the first college-level correspondence courses by mail while serving as the first president of the University of Chicago. He implemented an extension program at the University of Chicago creating the world's first university distance education program. Rainey was an outspoken advocate of correspondence study and predicted that some day correspondence students will far outnumber classroom students (Simonson). |
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Early students of distance education consisted largely of students located in rural or remote areas that did not have geographical access to educational institutions. Another major population of distance learners in the United States were members of the military. The number of correspondence courses increased significantly after World War II when many veterans hurried to complete the education they had missed while in the service" (Sherron & Boettcher, 1997).