The Journey of Education from Paper to Paperless Learning

Education, be it for the basic levels or for the advanced higher levels, has always been associated with the institutions. the better the institution, the better is the education and better are the chances of changing your life. but the tuition also increases to a point that many of the lower income group cannot afford. So breaking the cycle of poverty is not an option for them.

This is where distance learning comes. Even though it is gaining an unprecedented popularity in the present, it has always been around, under the garb of Correspondence education, helping those who wanted to learn and move ahead.

There were many institutions where the teacher sent the assignments through mail to their student and the students had to mail back the completed assignments. However, the formal beginning of the correspondence education began in 1840 when Sir Isaac Pitman started offering classes on short hand completely through the correspondence mode. Within a few decades  Correspondence university came up.

The popularity and the extent of the distance education increased exponentially in the next century with the introduction of the radio and then the television. By 1900 so many distance learning institutions were established that their standard became a concern. In order to ensure their standard, the National Home Study Council was set up.

With the coming of the 20^th century, the platform of imparting education changed from the paper to the audio and visual via the radio and television. About 202 licenses were given to the various educational institutions for radio broadcasting. Experiments were also conducted by the various educators to introduce the use of the telephone to encourage real tile interaction between the students and the teachers. However, it did not succeed.

One of the first educational courses to be imparted completely via the television was the Sunrise Semester that started in 1959 and was broadcast from Chicago. The coastline community college came up that handled the filming of various educational courses to be broadcast to the various educational institutions and the public T.V channels. The courses had to follow the same curricula followed on the traditional schools and colleges.

IBM was the first company to design a distance learning course COURSEWRITER which had to be delivered via the computer. With this the computer came onto the scene in a big way and this is when distance learning became truly paperless.  

Hundreds and thousands of students are now enrolled in the distance learning courses and are having their lives transformed without having to spend a fortune on it.