Harmonizing global education

Many people worldwide cannot get schooling or training in conventional ways, and distance education is one route to them. Yet the methods used across different countries lack coherence, and educators have frequently dropped new technologies before those tools had time to mature. The result is that much of today's distance education fits poorly with the needs and customs of various regions. This volume asks researchers and practitioners to revisit the long history of technology-based teaching and communication, looking further into the past than is commonly considered necessary, in pursuit of distance education that is both efficient and suited to audiences everywhere.

The author draws on a varied set of historical episodes that may inform present-day practice. These include the Luddite uprising of British textile workers in 1811 and 1812, the emergence of cubism in painting and its parallels in musical aesthetics, and the ambitious ideas of Soviet multimedia pioneers in the early twentieth century. Throughout, the book stresses the value of earlier generations of communications scholarship. It argues that audience research on older media can still guide the design of online and social media learning.

The open universities of the present day grew out of these earlier efforts. The author contends that the future of open and distance education will depend on studying what worked and what did not in the past.