page_title: Educational technology
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Educational technology / History
caption_attribution_description: English: A 19th century classroom with wooden benches, a piano and a blackboard, Auckland, New Zealand
context_page_description: Educational technology is the combined use of computer hardware, software, and educational theory and practice to facilitate learning. Educational technology creates, uses, and manages technological processes and educational resources to help improve user academic performance. The field has been described as a persisting initiative that seeks to bring learners, teacher, and technical means together in an effective way.
  In addition to experiential knowledge drawn from educational practice, educational technology is based on theoretical knowledge that emerges from various disciplines such as communication, education, psychology, sociology, artificial intelligence, and computer science, among others. It encompasses several domains including learning theory, computer-based training, online learning, and m-learning, where mobile technologies are used.
context_section_description: Helping people and children learn in ways that are easier, faster, more accurate, or less expensive can be traced back to the emergence of very early tools, such as paintings on cave walls. Various types of abacus have been used. Writing slates and blackboards have been used for at least a millennium. From their introduction, books and pamphlets have held a prominent role in education. From the early twentieth century, duplicating machines such as the mimeograph and Gestetner stencil devices were used to produce short copy runs (typically 10–50 copies) for classroom or home use. The use of media for instructional purposes is generally traced back to the first decade of the 20th century with the introduction of educational films (1900s) and Sidney Pressey's mechanical teaching machines (1920s).  The first all multiple choice, large-scale assessment was the Army Alpha, used to assess the intelligence and, more specifically, the aptitudes of World War I military recruits. Further large-scale use of technologies was employed in training soldiers during and after WWII using films and other mediated materials, such as overhead projectors. The concept of hypertext is traced to the description of memex by Vannevar Bush in 1945.
  Slide projectors were widely used during the 1950s in educational institutional settings. Cuisenaire rods were devised in the 1920s and saw widespread use from the late 1950s.
  In the mid-1960s, Stanford University psychology professors, Patrick Suppes and Richard C. Atkinson, experimented with using computers to teach arithmetic and spelling via Teletypes to elementary school students in the Palo Alto Unified School District in California.  Stanford's Education Program for Gifted Youth is descended from those early experiments.
  Online education originated from the University of Illinois in 1960. Although the internet would not be created for another nine years, students were able to access class information with linked computer terminals. The first online course was offered in 1986 by the Electronic University Network for DOS and Commodore 64 computers. Computer Assisted Learning eventually offered the first online courses with real interaction. In 2002, MIT began providing online classes free of charge. As of 2009, approximately 5.5 million students were taking at least one class online. Currently, one out of three college students takes at least one online course while in college. At DeVry University, out of all students that are earning a bachelor's degree, 80% earn two-thirds of their requirements online. Also, in 2014, 2.85 million students out of 5.8 million students that took courses online, took all of their courses online. From this information, it can be concluded that the number of students taking classes online is on the steady increase.
  In 1971, Ivan Illich published a hugely influential book called, Deschooling Society, in which he envisioned "learning webs" as a model for people to network the learning they needed. The 1970s and 1980s saw notable contributions in computer-based learning by Murray Turoff and Starr Roxanne Hiltz at the New Jersey Institute of Technology as well as developments at the University of Guelph in Canada. In the UK, the Council for Educational Technology supported the use of educational technology, in particular administering the government's National Development Programme in Computer Aided Learning (1973–77) and the Microelectronics Education Programme (1980–86).
  By the mid-1980s, accessing course content became possible at many college libraries. In computer-based training (CBT) or computer-based learning (CBL), the learning interaction was between the student and computer drills or micro-world simulations.
  Digitized communication and networking in education started in the mid-1980s. Educational institutions began to take advantage of the new medium by offering distance learning courses using computer networking for information. Early e-learning systems, based on computer-based learning/training often replicated autocratic teaching styles whereby the role of the e
caption: 19th century classroom, Auckland
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