Last time we about how the emergence of convenient PCs has helped the evolution of educational software, including virtual teachers. The latter turned out to be quite advanced prototypes of modern chatbots, but they were never implemented en masse.
Time has shown that people are not ready to give up “live” teachers, but this has not put an end to educational software. In parallel with electronic tutors, technologies developed, thanks to which today you can study anytime, anywhere - if only you have the desire.
Of course, we are talking about online education.
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Internet for university
In the 90s, the first web enthusiasts and experimenters willingly took up the development of educational technologies, taking advantage of the capabilities of the World Wide Web. So, in 1995, University of British Columbia professor Murray Goldberg decided to modernize his courses using web technologies and realized that the network could quickly create educational materials and make them available to an unlimited audience. The only thing missing was a platform that would combine all these functions. And Goldberg presented such a project - work began in 1997 , the world's first course management system for higher education.
Of course, this system was far from ideal. It was criticized for its complex interface, “clumsy” codebase and browser compatibility problems. However, from a functional point of view, WebCT had everything we needed. Students and teachers could create discussion threads, chat online, exchange internal emails, and download documents and web pages. Specialists and experts in the educational community began to call such online services a virtual educational environment (Virtual Learning Environment, ).
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In 2004, WebCT was used by 10 million students from two and a half thousand universities and colleges located in 80 countries. And a little later - in 2006 - the project was bought by competitors from . And today, the products of this company are actually one of the industry standards - a large number of the world's leading educational institutions still work with them.
By that time, several innovations had been introduced into this product. For example, a package of standards and specifications SCORM (Sharable Content Object Reference Model), which combines technologies for data exchange between the client of an online learning system and its server. Just a couple of years later, SCORM became one of the most common standards for “packaging” educational content, and it is still supported and actively used in various .
Why VLE
Why did virtual teachers remain a local story, while VLE systems reached the global level? They provided simpler and more flexible functionality, were cheaper to develop and maintain, and were more convenient for users and teachers. An online learning management system is, first of all... an online system, a website. It does not have a “massive” software core that needs to understand incoming cues and think how to respond to them.
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In fact, all such a system should have is the ability to download content and broadcast it to groups of users. What is important is that VLE solutions were not opposed to “live” teachers. They were not intended as a tool that would ultimately put tens of thousands of university employees out of work; on the contrary, such systems were supposed to simplify their activities, expand professional opportunities and increase the level of availability of materials. And so it happened, VLE systems provided convenient access to knowledge and helped modernize the work on educational courses at hundreds of universities.
Everything for everyone
During the distribution of WebCT, a beta version of the online platform began working . In 2002, it was difficult to overestimate the significance of this event - one of the world's leading universities opened free access to 32 courses. By 2004, their number exceeded 900, and a significant part of educational programs included video recordings of lectures.
A few years later, in 2008, Canadian academics George Siemens, Stephen Downes, and Dave Cormier launched the first-ever Massive Open Online Course (MOOC). 25 paid students became their listeners, and another 2300 listeners received free access and connected via the network.
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The topic of the first MOOC turned out to be the most suitable - these were lectures on connectionism, which relates to cognitive science and studies mental and behavioral phenomena in networks. Connectionism is based on open access to knowledge, which “should not be hindered by time or geographical restrictions.”
The course organizers used the maximum of Internet technologies available to them. They held webinars, blogged, and even invited listeners into the virtual world of Second Life. All these channels were later used in other MOOCs. In 2011, Stanford University launched three online courses, and three years later, more than 900 such programs were offered to students in the United States alone.
The most important thing is that startups have taken up education. American teacher Salman Khan own “academy”, where millions of users study. The Coursera portal, which was launched in 2012 by two Stanford professors, had amassed 2018 million users by 33, and by August 2019, 3600 courses from 190 universities were posted on the portal. Udemy, Udacity and many other services have opened the door to new knowledge, careers and hobbies.
What's next
Not all technologies lived up to initial expectations. For example, many experts and teachers predicted the explosive popularity of virtual reality systems, but in fact, most students did not want to take pilot VR courses. But it’s too early to draw conclusions; a small number of educational institutions have experimented with these technologies, and in some areas VR has still found its audience - future engineers and doctors are already practicing surgical operations on virtual simulators and studying the design of complex mechanisms. By the way, we will talk about such developments and startups in the following materials at the beginning of next year.
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As for MOOCs, experts call this approach to educational software the most breakthrough in this area over the past 200 years. Indeed, it is already difficult to imagine a world without online education. Whatever goals you set for yourself, whatever topics interest you, all the necessary knowledge is available at just one click. On this note, we conclude our story of educational software. Believe in yourself and everything will be possible!
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Source: habr.com