Online Learning History
Let's build up a complete history of key milestones in internet-based learning. Each event should be a heading that includes the date.
1960 - PLATO
PLATO (Programmed Logic for Automatic Teaching Operations) system developed at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The system remains in operation until the mid-1990s. Wikipedia background on PLATO.
1969 - Founding of the Internet
US DoD commissions ARPANET. Hobbes Timeline
1971 - Ivan Illich's Learning Webs
Ivan Illich describes a computer-based education network in his book Deschooling Society
1979 - USENET begins
US DoD commissions ARPANET. Hobbes Timeline
1982 - Computer Assisted Learning Center (CALC)
The Computer Assisted Learning Center (CALC) was founded in 1982 in Rindge, New Hampshire, as a small, offline computer-based, adult learning center. The center was based on the same premise as today: to provide affordable, quality instruction to individual learners through the use of computers. Origins of CALCampus
1984 - CSILE
CSILE, an educational knowledge media system, developed by Scardamalia & Bereiter at Ontario Institute for Studies in Education. ... CSILE based on Zimmerman's (1989) self-regulated learning (CSILE term is intentional learning) and constructivists' view of learning. It emphasizes on building a classroom culture supportive of active knowledge construction that can extend individual intentional learning to the group level. The purpose is to make students think and reflect their thought process which provoke question asking and answering in a public forum. The ultimate goal is to get students involved in knowledge itself rather than improve one's mind, a World 3 view , which shifts from individual mastery learning to improve the quality of public collective knowledge (Scardamalia, et al., 1994). - from [1]
1987 - M/EU (Mind Extension University)
In 1987, Jones launched M/EU, a cable channel carrying varied educational programming... The advent of the Internet helped facilitate communication in these telecourses.[2]
1992 - CAPA (Computer Assisted Personalized Approach)
The system was developed at Michigan State University and was first used in a small (92 student) physics class in the Fall of 1992.[3]
1994 - Lotus Development Corporation acquires the Human Interest Group
The system evolves into the Lotus Learning Management System and Lotus Virtual Classroom, now owned by IBM.
1994 - Open University Virtual Summer School
In August and September 1994, a Virtual Summer School (VSS) for Open University undergraduate course D309 Cognitive Psychology enabled students to attend an experimental version of summer school 'electronically', i.e. from their own homes using a computer and a modem. VSS students were able to participate in group discussions, run experiments, obtain one-to-one tuition, listen to lectures, ask questions, participate as subjects in experiments, conduct literature searches, browse original journal publications, work in project teams, undertake statistical analyses, prepare and submit nicely formatted individual or joint written work, prepare plenary session presentations, and even socialize and chit-chat, all without ever leaving their homes.
1994/95 - CALCampus.com
CALCampus was the first to develop and implement the concept of a totally online-based school through which administration, real-time classroom instruction, and materials were provided, originating with the QuantumLink campus. This was a significant departure from earlier methods of distance education because no longer was the individual distance learner isolated from the teacher and from classmates. Origins of CALCampus
1995 - Mallard web-based course management system developed at the University of Illinois
Mallard overview. See also CyberProf[5] (also copyrighted in 1995 from University of Illinois)
1995/6 - WOLF / Learnwise
WOLF (Wolverhampton Online Learning Framework)[6] developed at Wolverhampton University's DELTA institute under the guidance of Stephen Molyneux. [7] This went on to be released commercially by Granada Learning as Learnwise [8]
1997 (about) - Pioneer developed by MEDC (University of Paisley)
Pioneer was an online learning environment developed initially for colleges in Scotland. Pioneer was web-based and featured:
online course materials (published by the lecturers themselves) integral email to allow communications between students and tutors forum tools chat tools timeatable
The main driver for Pioneer was Jackie Galbraith.
When MEDC was closed, the Pioneer development team moved to SCET in 1998 taking Pioneer with them when it became SCETPioneer.
SCETPioneer was used by Glasgow Colleges and a number of other colleges in Scotland.
SCET merged with the SCCC and became Learning and Teaching Scotland
1997 - Deployment of Nathan Bodington VLE
Development of Nathan Bodington VLE at Leeds University begins from the Bionet TLTP project
Dates of Bodington development appear here
1997 - Blackboard was founded in 1997
1998 - Martin Dougiamas begins preliminary work on Moodle
This paper contains some early thoughts
1998 - Blackboard released its first software product
An online learning application developed at Cornell University[10]
August, 2002 - Moodle 1.0 is released
See Also
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_virtual_learning_environments
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer-assisted_language_learning CALI History in this
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_learning#See_also
Foundations of Distance Education
1997 Conference: Trends & Issues in Online Instruction
http://www.usdla.org/html/journal/SEP01_Issue/article01.html mentions: Unix courses @ Nova University early 70s and National Technological University (NTU)