Borje Holmberg
in: Open Learning, June 1995



The evolution of the character and
practice of distance education

If by education we mean the acquisition of intellectual learning matter and 
cognitive skills, these were fairly exclusive activities until the middle of the 
nineteenth century or later. Formal education was for very long open only to 
financially or otherwise privileged groups - which is still the case in a number of 
developing countries - and was almost exclusively meant for children and 
youngsters. When in the nineteenth century organised adult education began in 
Europe and North America the methods of distance education gradually 
developed to meet needs not easily catered for by other means.


The background of early
distance education
While it was - and is - perfectly possible to learn in study groups and by private 
reading in one's spare time, the need for systematic study alongside paid work 
could only partly be met in these ways. For many study was - and is - possible 
only if it does not interfere with jobs by means of which adult students support 
themselves and their families. Only in thickly populated areas is it possible to 
organise study groups in the subjects required for university entrance, degree 
studies, professional qualifications or special training needs arising in industry 
and commerce.

Education and training became important social concerns in the latter half of 
the nineteenth century. This - combined on the one hand with liberal thinking 
concerned with the development of students' personalities, on the other hand 
with the necessities of livelihood - constitutes the background for the introduction 
of distance education at that time. It was the need for study longside paid work 
and for individual learning as opposed to classroom learning that was the great 
instigating force.  While presumably quite a few adults preferred individual study, 
this was in a great many cases the only learning opportunity open to would-be
students.

The only media available to distance education during the pioneering period 
and until the second half of the twentieth century were print, the written word and 
phonograph recordings. What emerged was what is today regarded as 
traditional correspondence education. It seerns worth stressing, however, that 
the two basic constituent elements of today's distance education, i.e. mediated 
subject-matter presentation and mediated student-tutor interaction, were the vital 
characteristics also of the very early actions to bring about education in 
situations when students and tutors do not meet.


The pioneers

Evidently, the needs referred to have occurred at other times in history than in 
the period indicated. People have studied in their spare time much earlier. There 
is even an indication that distance education may have been provided as early 
as 1728. In The Boston Gazette of 20 March, 1728, 'Caleb Phillipps, Teacher of 
the New Method of Short Hand' advertises that any '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' (Battenberg 1971, 
p.44).

A hundred years later we find more conclusive evidence of distance education 
in our sense. An advertisement in English in 'Lunds Weckoblad', No.30, 1833, a 
weekly published in the old Swedish university city of Lund, offers Ladies and 
Gentlemen' an opportunity to study 'Composition through the medium of the 
Post' (Baath 1980. p. 13 and Bath 1985, p.62). Another early attempt to organise 
distance education was made in England by  Isaac Pitman who reduced the 
main principles of his shorthand system to fit into postcards. He sent these to 
students, who were invited to transcribe into shorthand short passages of the 
Bible and send the transcription to him for correction. This teaching of shorthand 
combined with a study of the Scriptures began in the year 1840 when in the 
United Kingdom the uniform penny postage was introduced. In 1843 the 
Phonographic Correspondence Society was formed to take over these 
corrections of shorthand exercises. It was the beginning of what was later to 
become Sir Isaac Pitman Correspondence Colleges (Dinsdale 1953, p.573; Light 
1956; The Times of 24 December, 1952).

According to early tradition, organised distance education is assumed to have 
been introduced in Germany in the year 1856 by the Frenchman Charles 
Toussaint and the German Gustav Langenscheidt, who formed and organised a 
school in Berlin for language teaching by correspondence (Noffsinger 1926, 
p.4). What scope the correspondence actually had is uncertain; students were 
offered opportunities to submit questions, but, Baath writes, translating from the 
Toussaint-Langenscheidt prospectus, 'they were by no means encouraged to do 
so - "it would hardly be necessary", the prospectus said, "since everything is 
fully explained in the course" (Methode Toussaint- Langenscheidt 1901, p.10) . ' 
(Baath 1 985 , p.62; cf. also Delling 1978).   

A pioneer of some interest is mentioned by Mathieson as a representative of the          
'proto-correspondence study programs' that existed in the United States between 
1865 and 1890:

'The "mother" of American correspondence study was Anna Eliot Ticknor, 
daughter of a Harvard University professor, who founded and ran the Boston-
based Society to Encourage Study at Home from 1873 until her death in 1897 . 
The idea of exchanging letters between teacher and student originated with her 
and monthly correspondence with guided readings and frequent tests formed a 
vital part of the organization's personalized instruction. Although the curriculum 
reflected the "classical orientation", it is interesting that most of her students 
were women, a clientele then only beginning to demand access to higher 
education.'   (Mathieson 1971, p.l.)

About the same time distance education was introduced in Japan. In an 
advertisement published in 1898 it was claimed that 'the method of 
correspondence education' had been 'invented' in Japan in 1882, which seems 
actualy to have been the year when a form of distance education was first 
applied in Japan (Hisano 1989, p.7 1 ) .  

At the end of the nineteenth century distance education was above all applied 
on the one hand to university and pre-university study, on the other hand to 
occupational training. The university extension movement promoted the use of 
distance education.

Among British pioneering organisations were Skerry's College, Edinburgh, 
founded in 1878 (preparing candidates for Civil Service Examinations), Foulks 
Lynch Correspondence Tuition Service, London, 1884 (specialising in 
accountancy), University Correspondence College, Cambridge, founded in 1887 
and preparing students for University of London external degrees (in 1965 this 
college was taken over by the National Extension College [Perraton 1978, p.l]), 
and the Diploma Correspondence College, now called Wolsey Hall, Oxford, 
founded in 1894, preparing students for university qualifications but also offering 
a wide range of courses on other subjects (Dinsdale 1953).

In the USA Illinois Wesleyan College, founded in 1874, the Correspondence 
University in Ithaca, N.Y., 1883, and the university extension department of 
Chicago University, 1890, were amongst the pioneers (Mathiesen 1971, p.3). It 
can be mentioned that William Harper of Chicago, who has been called the 
father of American distance education, offered instruction in Hebrew by mail in 
the 1880s (Vincent 1900).

The early use of distance-education methods in occupational training can be 
illustrated by an attempt to teach mining and methods of preventing mine 
accidents which was introduced by a course in 1891 constituting a systematised 
continuation of an instructional activity begun earlier in a question column in the 
Mining Herald, a daily newspaper published in the coal mining district of eastern 
Pennsylvania. The initiator of the correspondence course was the editor of this 
newspaper, Thomas J. Foster. His initiative met with great success, and the 
response his course won led to the production of first an extended course of the 
same type and then to the preparation of a number of correspondence courses 
in various fields  (Correspondence Instruction 1901). In fact, this was the 
beginning of the Intemational Correspondence Schools (ICS) in Scranton, 
Pennsylvania, and their subsidiaries and offshoots.

Later developments show that the provision of both academic and practical 
occupational study opportunities was to be typical of distance education in the 
20th century. Another pioneer illustrating this is Hermods in Sweden, founded in 
1898 and later to become one of the world's largest and most influential 
distance-teaching organisations (Gadden 1973).


Twentieth-century
developments
From these beginnings until around 1970 a steady expansion of distance 
education occurred without any radical changes but with gradually more 
sophisticated use of methods and media, for example, audio recordings in 
language teaching and in courses for blind people and the use of laboratory kits 
in subjects like electronics, radio engineering etc.   The founding of the British 
Open University in 1969 marks the beginning of a period in which degree-giving 
distance-teaching universities with full degree programmes, sophisticated 
courses, new media and systematic systems evaluation crop up in various parts 
of the world and confer prestige on distance education (Rumble and Harry 
1982). Whereas up to the 1960s the large-scale distance-teaching organisations 
had - with very few exceptions - been private correspondence schools (one of 
which - Hermods in Sweden - had since 1959 been an offlcial examining body 
for its own students), the new period saw publicly supported and established 
universities and schools becoming more and more important. An outstanding 
pioneer in this respect is the University of South Africa, which emerged as a 
development of the University of Good Hope, founded in 1873 as an examining 
body based on the model of the University of London. It started teaching at a 
distance in 1946. The University of South Africa was established as a distance- 
teaching university through a governmental decree of 1962 (Boucher 1973).

What above all gives us reason to regard the early 1970s as a period of 
change in distance education is the new public recognition since then usually 
given to this kind of education. With few exceptions, as in Scandinavia, 
authorities had until then been sceptical. The creation of the Open University in 
the United Kingdom can be seen as the beginning of a more prestigious era. The 
image of distance education in several countries changed from one of possibly 
estimable but often little respected endeavour to one of a publicly acknowledged 
type of education acclaimed as an innovative promise for the future. In the 1990s 
some 30 distance-teaching universities are active in various parts of the world.

In the twentieth century distance education has occurred in mainly two forms. 
One represents a large-scale approach with courses produced for hundreds and 
thousands of students (student bodies of up to 50,000 for one particular course 
are known [cf Holmberg 1995, p.151]) and with tutoring at a distance provided by 
a number of tutors who need have had no part in the development of the course. 
The second represents a small-scale approach with the course writer in charge 
also of the tutoring, in which case courses are developed for small target-
groups. Typical examples of the first type are the large correspondence schools 
and the distance-teaching universities, whereas the second type is typically 
represented by the Australian dual-mode universities (cf Keegan 1986, Chapter 
8).

In both these types the use of information technology and modern media has 
led to changes in the presentation of learning matter and, above all, in the 
student-tutor interaction. It has been claimed on the one hand that the 
introduction of computers and sophisticated media has meant a revolutionary 
metamorphosis of distance education, on the other hand that present-day stress 
on technology represents no more than a fad to be compared with the 
enthusiasm for programmed learning common in the 1960s. I reject both these 
views.

There can be no doubt that modem technology has led to great improvements. 
Search for information in databases and the emerging possibilities to apply 
hypertext approaches are no doubt promising elements in the presentation of 
subject matter, i.e. the one-way traffic. Telefax and electronic mail can obviously 
eliminate the harmful procrastination characteristic of student-tutor interaction in 
writing. This implies an improvement of distance education that is of an 
evolutionary rather than revolutionary character. There is no change in the basic 
conditions: students still mainly study individually at a distance from, i.e., not on 
the same premises as, their tutors, the communication is still brought about non- 
contiguously by media, now, however, at least in part of new kinds. Distance 
education has simply availed itself of the technical developments of modern 
society. (cf Mason andKaye 1989)


The target groups and their 
requirements
As indicated at the beginning of this paper adults with occupational, social and 
family commitments were the original target group of distance education, and 
this is the one still mainly catered for. These students wish to educate 
themselves in their spare time either to improve and update their professional 
knowledge or to widen their intellectual horizons generally, to learn for practical 
purposes, for instance, applications of computer technology or a foreign 
language, or to acquire knowledge and insight for its own sake. To the 
generations that were young when the first correspondence schools and similar 
distance-teaching organisations started their work, the opportunities they offered 
were very often the only chances available to compensate for faulty or 
insufficient early education. Distance education gave - and gives - gifted and 
hard-working people a possibility to study beside their jobs and other 
commitments. In some countries it had and may still have a pronounced 
careerist character. It served and serves upward mobility educationally, 
professionally and socially.

A new target group has emerged during the last few decades: university 
students taking individual courses by distance study as parts of degree curricula 
based on conventional study. Whereas prescribed pacing, the organisation of 
students in classes or groups as well as adaptation to university or school 
semesters and holidays are felt to be undesirable and unnecessary restrictions 
by the first-mentioned, larger category of students, they are largely acceptable 
and found natural by the new target group. In the latter case distance education 
is simply a form of distribution.


Understanding distance
education
The insistence on classes and pacing seems to represent a typical characteristic 
of a view of distance education that regards it as a substitute for education face 
to face. Conventional views of educational planning and organisation induce 
protagonists of this school of thought to impose the same restrictions on 
distance study as are usually unavoidable in traditional study: limited 
geographical coverage, classes of limited size, regular meetings, pacing, 
division of the year into terms of study, prescribed examination dates, vocations, 
etc. To the extent that, in systems adopting these limitations, the type of distance 
education applied is felt to be innovative, it is what Ross (1976) calls innovation 
within the accepted paradigm.

Once distance education is applied outside the organisational and 
administrative framework of conventional schools and universities, its potential 
for extra-paradigmatic innovation becomes evident. Its claim to be a mode of 
education in its own right is based on this potential. It is possible for each 
student to begin, interrupt, and complete the study as it suits him/her or as work 
health, and family conditions allow, to work at his/her own pace, and to disregard 
all the restrictions that apply to classroom teaching or group learning.

Thus there are at least two different schools of thought on distance education: 
one stressing individual study and individual, non-contiguous tutoring, the other 
aiming at parallelism with resident study and usually including class or group 
teaching face to face as a regular element. The former can and does serve mass 
education. It is in this context that the industrial approach described by Otto 
Peters is important (Peters 1973, 1989). It stresses rationalisation and division 
of labour in the interest of quality and economy. This approach is partly or fully 
applied by the large distance-education organisations, whereas small-scale 
distance education as a rule favours procedures more in line with traditional 
face-to-face education. Distance education using its full potential as indicated 
must necessarily be regarded as a separate kind of education which can hardly 
be described, understood and explained in terms of conventional education.

This discussion overlaps with views of control and independence. Those 
strongly influenced by conventional education stress control whereas those 
regarding distance education as a wholly separate mode usually favour far- 
reaching student independence. While Harper in the 1880s seems to have 
imposed pacing on students (Vincent 1886), Hermods from the beginning 
allowed them freedom in this respect  ('One student may complete a course in 
three months and another the same course in two years' [Korrespondens 2 
1901, p.29]), and Lighty of Wisconsin in 1915 is very explicit in insisting on 
student independence:

'He (the student) has a fairly definite idea as to what he needs and wants, and 
often an almost equally definite idea as to what he does not want. He has to be 
convinced by logic and experience, and not by rule of order, of the position of 
the teacher, for none of the ordinary compulsions operating in the intramural 
instruction are effective here. The student makes up his mind quite promptly on 
an early, if not the first, examination of the lessons or course as to whether it is 
worth his while...
With the type of student suggested, it follows that there must be changed 
standards of success and failure for extramural students. A man may go through 
half or a third of a course and get all he needs or wants to satisfy his original 
purpose. It would be folly to apply conventional pedagogue standards...'
(From the Proceedings of the first conference [National University Extension] as 
reprinted in Mackenzie and Christensen 1971, p.21.)

Occasionally the value of attempts to promote student autonomy is queried. 
Garrison and Shale ask 'whether autonomy is desirable. realistic, or even 
possible to attain', and believe that 'the usual notion of independence runs a 
serious risk of obscuring the true nature of education' (Garrison and Shale 1990, 
p.124). They state their position as 'independence is not an essential 
characteristic of distance education' (p. 129). (See also Willen 1981, pp.249-50.)

The potential of distance education is exploited more or less fully in relation to 
student autonomy vs. institutional control of students. A careful study of student 
autonomy and its limits in distance education was carried out in 1990 by Monika 
Weingartz. Using as her empirical basis the data collected in a FernUniversitt 
international study comprising some 200 distance-teaching organisations (see 
Graff and Holmberg 1988), she identified an autonomy score, a score of 
individual control, one of goal-oriented control and one of control by additional 
media. Her study shows that almost 25 per cent of the organisations studied 
endeavour to promote a high degree of autonomy, while some 70 per cent of 
them apply highly individualised control methods. i.e. personal tutoring and 
counselling. Weingartz' analysis includes contract learning. She concludes that 
selected individual control measures are essential for student autonomy, that 
independent study does not imply unlimited freedom but a differentiated 
guidance of learners engaging students and tutors together and that the need for 
tutoring and counselling diminishes as students become more independent 
(Weingartz 1990, p.81). Isaacs writing on computer-assisted learning comes to a 
similar conclusion: 'In courses aimed at making students more independent as 
learners a degree of control is placed in their hands; students learn control by 
practising control' (Isaacs 1990, p.86). On the independence and control 
concepts see Boud (1988); Baynton (1992); Candy(1987) andElton(1988).

The picture that emerges reveals a continuum of approaches from almost 
entirely independent study to fairly strictly controlled learning. The 
individualisation that has contributed to independence is still a much appreciated 
reality (cf 'each student constitutes his/her own class' in Korrespondens 2 1901, 
p.14) and can now be supplemented by tele or computer conferencing, i.e. group 
work at a distance.


Conclusion

Distance education is a separate mode of education in its own right. Its typical 
characteristics were from the beginning and are still mediated student-tutor 
interaction and mediated subject-matter presentation, media being necessary as 
students either do not meet tutors face to face at all or do so only to a limited 
extent. This has constantly favoured individual learning. Students chose and 
choose distance education either because they genuinely prefer this mode or 
because they cannot - for reasons of job, family, geographical distance, finance 
etc. - make use of conventional education. While at the beginning of this century 
the only media applied were print, written communication and, occasionally, 
phonograph recordings, today's distance education has a wealth of 
sophisticated media at its disposal. A new dimension was added when tele and 
computer conferencing were introduced as they open possibilities for non-
contiguous group interaction. What is above all typical of distance education, 
however, is its almost unique one-to-one relationship between one student and 
one tutor.

Distance education at the end ofthe twentieth century is a product of an 
evolutionary development rooted in early attempts to teach and learn by 
correspondence. Students' work on their own at a distance from tutors demands 
a degree of independence, which can be - and often also has been - consciously 
promoted by the organisations that support students. i.e. correspondence 
schools, distance-teaching universities and similar bodies.

Borje Holmberg
Erneritus Professor,
Louna, Sweden

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