HYSTORY OF DISTANCE EDUCATION

Abstract

The most outstanding factors responsible for the birth and subsequent development of open and distance teaching/learning were: socio-political advances, need for all-life-long learning, high costs of conventional systems, advances in the field of education sciences and technological changes. Distance teaching has evolved covering three different stages that could be named: correspondence, telecommunication and telematic. These three great stages are analysed in this article, differentiating by continents and countries, from the second half of XIX century up to date, marking the great historical hits of this modality of teaching/learning.