Through the Eyes of Students and Faculty: A Conceptual Framework for the Development of Online Courses

History And Definition Of Online Learning

As Marshall McLuhan (1964, p. 7) said so eloquently and succinctly, “The medium is the message.” He further described media as “extensions” of ourselves and believed that the message of any medium or technology is “the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs” (p. 8). As an example, he cites how first the development of the railway and then the invention and widespread use of the airplane accelerated the rate of transportation, creating new cities, new work possibilities, and new forms of leisure. These two inventions changed the very fabric of society around the world. Similarly, in the late 1980s, the Worldwide Web and its system of transport, the Internet, vastly accelerated the transmission of information around the world, making it virtually instantaneous and ubiquitous. There are many terms for online education. Some of them are: virtual education, Internet-based education, web-based education, education via computer-mediated communication, and distance education.

Distance education was defined as “the application of telecommunications and electronic devices which enable students and learners to receive instruction from some distant location” by the U.S Department of Educational Research and Improvement (Bruder, 1989, p. 30). There are two different viewpoints on the main purpose of distance education; the first argues that distance education is an instrument of instruction, whereas the second contends that distance education is a teaching method. There is a definition which combines both viewpoints and is commonly accepted by the distance education community (Casey, 2008). This definition is offered by Keegan (1988) as follows: