America’s Virtual Journey of Discovery

Part 1: How America learned to learn online

Born at the tail end of Generation X, mine was the last to fully understand education as a face-to-face experience. By the time I started my undergraduate work in the mid-1990s (five years after the official start of the Internet) the concept of ‘distance-learning’ was already advancing exponentially in terms of technology and application. Utilized initially at the high school and vocational level, it used closed-circuit broadcasting to enable individuals to observe traditional classroom environments without having to be there. Its’ value lay in the ability to increase the size of a class/audience regardless of the physical distance between prospective students. Its’ limitations lay primarily in the inability of those distance learners to participate in learning activities fully and in real-time.

But by the beginning of the new millennium, those limitations had been largely overcome and ‘distance learning’ was transformed into ‘online education’. Rather than simply a point of access, “online education is defined as a form of distance education that uses computers and the Internet as the delivery mechanism, with at least 80% of the course content delivered online.” The transformation of education through the integration of online information sources with delivery and instruction took place at lightning speed…