The History of Online Course Development:
Distance Learning Courses

New Technology
The advent of computers and the Internet has triggered yet another revolution in distance education where enrollment has exploded, due, in part, to the addition of online education tools. This has particularly helped the “non-traditional” student group: from professionals seeking to improve their job skills to homemakers with children at home to physically disabled university students who cannot attend class.  Last year the American Federation of Teachers commissioned an extensive study of current distance learning programs and projected that this year 85 percent of two- and four-year colleges would offer distance learning courses and that enrollment would increase from 500,000 in 1998 to over 2 million in 2002 (Kriger, 2001). In this report A Virtual Revolution: Trends in the Expansion of Distance Education, Thomas J. Kriger determined four reasons for the most recent increase in distance learning:

1. Projected enrollment growth
2. Shrinking public funding for higher education
3. Student demand for improved access for non-traditional students
4. Distance Learning’s potential for profit (p. 3)

Kriger also suggests that educators are motivated by the challenge to provide education in a new medium. It is this expansion in distance learning that has fed higher education’s overwhelming optimism in technology.

In fact, new technology has historically been incorporated by distance learning educators long before other educational institutions have adopted it. For instance, before the introduction of the personal computer, many university-based distance learning courses incorporated such innovations as radio programs, television broadcasting, and telephone conferences with instructors (“A Brief History,” 2002). Consequently, at universities where distance learning programs were already in place, the addition of online components and the development of fully online distance learning courses seemed a natural progression. Innovations with collaboration have also taken place through distance learning that have led to wide variety of for-profit as well as non-profit distance learning ventures. Indeed, Kriger defines four new categories of organizations that offer fully online distance education courses, as shown in Table 1.

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