Georgia School of Construction

Distance education dates to at least as early as 1728, when "an advertisement in the Boston Gazette...'Caleb Phillips, Teacher of the new method of Short Hand" was seeking students for lessons to be sent weekly. Modern distance education has been practiced at least since Isaac Pitman taught shorthand in Great Britain via correspondence in the 1840s.

The development of the postal service in the 19th century led to the growth of commercial correspondence colleges with nationwide reach. The University of London was the first university to offer distance-learning degrees, establishing its External Programme in 1858. The Society to Encourage Studies at Home was founded in 1873 in Boston, Massachusetts. In Australia, the University of Queensland established its Department of Correspondence Studies in 1911.

Another pioneering institution was the University of South Africa (originally the University of the Cape of Good Hope), which has been offering Correspondence Education courses since 1873. In New Zealand, university-level distance education or extramural study began in 1960 at Massey University. The largest distance-education university in the United Kingdom is the Open University, founded 1969. Spain's Public UNED (which is not an Open University) was founded in 1972. In Germany, the FernUniversit��t in Hagen was founded 1974. There are now many similar institutions around the world, often with the name Open University (in English or in the local language). More than a dozen of them have grown to become 'mega-universities', a term coined to denote institutions with more than 100,000 students.

The first president of the University of Chicago, William Rainey Harper developed extended education and was considered one of the founders of "learning by correspondence programs". The University of Chicago instituted the first Extension Service in the United States through the use of mail, reaching out to a vast group of students internationally.

Charles Wedemeyer of the University of Wisconsin��Madison is considered one of the fathers of modern distance education in America.

From 1964 to 1968, the Carnegie Foundation funded Wedemeyer's Articulated Instructional Media Project (AIM) which brought in a variety of communications technologies aimed at providing learning to an off-campus population. According to Moore's recounting, AIM impressed the British who imported these ideas and used them to create the first Open University, now called United Kingdom Open University (UKOU), to distinguish it from other open universities which have emerged. UKOU was established in the late 1960s and used television and radio as its primary delivery methodologies, thus placing it in the forefront of applying emerging technologies to learning. All "open universities" use distance-education technologies as delivery methodologies.

In addition, there are many private and public, non-profit and for-profit institutions offering courses and degree programs through distance education. The most successful example during this period was Coastline Community College, launched by Bernard Luskin having no campus and offering distance education telecourses through KOCE TV in Orange County, California. Levels of accreditation vary; some institutions offering distance education in the United States have received little outside oversight, and some may be fraudulent diploma mills. In many other jurisdictions, an institution may not use the term "University" without accreditation and authorization, normally by the national government. Online education is rapidly increasing among mainstream universities in the United States, where online doctoral programs have even developed at prestigious research institutions.

In the twentieth century, radio, television, and the Internet have all been used to further distance education. Computers and the Internet have made distance-learning distribution easier and faster.

In 1996, cable pioneer Glenn Jones and Bernard Luskin launched Jones International University as the first accredited fully online university accredited by a regional accrediting association. JUI is accredited by the North Central Association of Schools and Colleges. In 2006, the Sloan Consortium reported that more than 96 percent of the largest colleges and universities in the United States offered online courses and that almost 3.2 million U.S. students were taking at least one online course during the fall 2005 term.

GeorgiaCC follows in this tradition, awarding college degrees to students who choose to attend school without going to class. Read on to learn how distance learning has changed and improved.

A number of technologies were tried to make distance learning more accessible and user-friendly. Slides and movies, introduced before the 1920s, were at first thought to be a breakthrough, but they did not catch on as vehicles for distance education. Instructional radio was tried in the 1930s but, like slides and films did not represent a major change in correspondence courses.

International Correspondence Schools (ICS Learn) is perhaps the oldest educational institute that provides correspondence and distance learning courses[citation needed]. ICS Learn was established in 1890 in the UK (under the registration number "LONDON 898 213"). In 1890 the first student was enrolled on a formal course and International Correspondence Schools was later incorporated in Scranton at 1901. The USA branch of ICS has recently been renamed to Penn Foster Career School but it still works under the initial name in the UK and Canada.

Once access to television was common, some students were able to enhance their distance learning experiences by watching and listening to instructors via television. In fact, today��s public television networks are rooted in instructional TV efforts that began in the late 1950s.

Conference telephone calls in the 1960s made it possible for students to interact with the teacher and with other students. Advancements in the 1970s and 1980s included the use of video to record lectures that were sent to students for later viewing on a VCR.

The advent of the Internet in the 1990s opened the door to big changes in distance education. It became relatively inexpensive to deliver sophisticated course content via the Internet. E-mail and chat allowed easy communication among students and between students and the instructor. Web cameras provided the opportunity to enhance content with live or recorded images.

The Internet also made the mechanics of online learning much easier to implement. Students were able to see their grades instantly. Instructors were able to make global changes to lectures and reading lists as needed. Students could take tests and quizzes online, and in some cases, receive grades right away.

Students at GeorgiaCC enjoy a level of access to their instructors, their classmates and the content of their courses that was impossible to anticipate even 25 years ago. Online and in-class programs are now virtually identical. The material covered, the assignments and the requirements for success are the same wherever a student takes a class.

To find out how you can get started, click here or call us today at 770-918-2577.