In 2008, virtual learning environments are rapidly becoming more mainstream and popular. Classes taught entirely online as well as hybrid classes are aggressively competing for traditional brick and mortar students, and the results are starting to show. As virtual learning environments become more commonplace and accepted, it becomes harder to remember what the earliest days of virtual learning were like. Some people remember the days of distance education courses (which are definitely still around), in which course materials were mailed through students. Surprisingly, these types of courses got their start, in America at least, almost 300 years ago. According to a Wikipedia article, an enterprising gentleman in 1728 began mailing out shorthand courses to students all over the Eastern seaboard. Consider the advertisement for these courses, which sound very similar to those written today about online courses!: “Persons in the Country desirous to Learn this Art, may by having the several Lessons sent weekly to them, be as perfectly instructed as those that live in Boston.”

Fast-forward to 1906, when The University of Wisconsin-Extension was founded – the first true distance learning school. During the 1900s, improving technology increasingly began to play bigger roles in distance education and virtual learning opportunities. In 1953, when television was still quite young, the University of Houston offered the first televised college courses which could be taken for credit. The courses came on at night, so that working people could still take the courses. The University of Chicago followed suit in 1959 with its Sunrise Semester, which were also courses delivered via television. In 1960, PLATO was developed, which allowed students to communicate with professors using on-line notes as well as study assigned lessons on a computer. In 1969, Stanford University jumped onboard and offered twelve engineering courses via television. In 1974, an international school of sorts was held in a very remote Italian resort and which used the then state-of-the-art CAI computer assistance program.

The virtual learning environment really started to pick up in the late 70s and early 80s; in 1979, “the world’s first public viewdata service” was opened in London in a small cluster of mini computers. The experiment didn’t take hold, but those who were there to witness it probably felt the same sense of amazement and awe as those who saw the first Internet pages a decade later. A number of technologies were developed in the 70s which allowed students to read content on computers and to respond to it on the computer, though not in today’s online format. However, the information could be saved and viewed by their teachers.

By the mid1980s, a number of distance education courses were available all over the world, though only small numbers of students signed up initially. The University of Phoenix began offering online courses in 1989 in San Francisco. With the advent of the Internet in the 1990s, online courses and virtual environments really began to grow, and the developments are too numerous to cover here. And the developments in the first decade of the 21st century continue to come at a faster and faster rate. Virtual learning environments have an exciting future ahead of them, and as is true of any relatively new technology, it will be question and doubted as it continues to grow and improve.

Tags: Learning Technologies, Online Education