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Historical Foundations
Michael Molenda
Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana
CONTENTS
Introduction .........................................................................................................................................................................5
Historical Foundations of What? ........................................................................................................................................5
The Very Beginning...................................................................................................................................................5
Precursors of the Modern Era ...................................................................................................................................5
Early Visual Media............................................................................................................................................................. 6
Slide Projection..........................................................................................................................................................6
Silent Films in Education ......................................................................................................................................... 6
Visual Instruction Movement............................................................................................................................................. 6
Audio-Visual Instruction .....................................................................................................................................................7
Educational Radio ...............................................................................................................................................................7
Initiation of Radio Services.......................................................................................................................................7
Educational Radio in Japan.......................................................................................................................................7
Educational Radio in North America........................................................................................................................8
Educational Radio Programming ..............................................................................................................................8
Educational Media in World War II....................................................................................................................................8
Educational Media in the Post-War Period ....................................................................................................................... 9
Research on Media ....................................................................................................................................................9
Basic Research...........................................................................................................................................................9
Audio-Visual Instruction in Practice.........................................................................................................................9
Educational Television (ETV).............................................................................................................................................9
ETV in Europe.........................................................................................................................................................10
ETV in North America ............................................................................................................................................10
ETV Programming ..................................................................................................................................................10
ETV in Developing Countries.................................................................................................................................11
The Communication Paradigm .........................................................................................................................................11
Information Theory..................................................................................................................................................11
Semantics .................................................................................................................................................................11
A New Paradigm for Audio-Visual Education .......................................................................................................11
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Michael Molenda
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Historical Foundations
5
Michael Molenda
gained access to texts saved in Arabic. During the 15th oil lamps. The so-called magic lantern provided enter-
century, Yi Toegye in Korea was developing a neo- tainment for paying audiences throughout the 19th cen-
Confucian philosophy that focused on moral principles tury (Petroski, 2006). The use of slide projection in
but also treated epistemology. His Steps of Practical education was restricted by the high cost of purchasing
Self-Cultivation, procedures for thinking through and operating these early devices. They ran on gas, oil,
problems, are comparable to the maieutic method of or hydrogen combined with lime (so-called limelight,
Socrates. (Socrates considered his educational practice rst used in the Covent Garden Theatre in London in
to be similar to midwifery in that he helped individuals 1837), all of which had a high cost per hour of use.
deliver ideas; see Kim, 2003.) Edisons invention in the 1890s of incandescent light-
By the Renaissance era, European philosophers of ing powered by electricity made slide projection afford-
education such as Comenius were elaborating peda- able, and by the end of the 19th century lantern slides
gogical principles and practices that are recognizable were in common use in education.
to the modern educatorfor example, arranging the
classroom for efcient management, systematically Silent Films in Education
incorporating visuals into text presentations, organiz-
ing the curriculum according to the developmental The direct ancestors of educational lms were the non-
stages of learners, and engaging children in playful theatrical short lms that began to emerge around 1910.
activities instead of punishing drills. British and French cinematographers exhibited lms
Advances in communications media came to edu- showing amazing sights such as microscopic creatures,
cation slowly in the 18th and 19th centuries. Maps, insects in ight, and underwater seascapes. Films of
globes, and scientic apparatus were standard equip- news events and travel adventures played to rapt audi-
ment in the better schools and colleges in the 18th ences. Silent lms began to be used in schools as early
century, but it was not until early in the 19th century as 1910 (Saettler, 1990). In 1912, the Lyce Hoche de
that a new general-purpose media formatthe black- Versailles in France had gained international notice for
boardcame into widespread use. The Scots claim that its exemplary incorporation of lms into science teach-
the blackboard was invented by James Pillans, head- ing. By the 1920s, many different individuals, compa-
master of the Old High School in Edinburgh in the early nies, nonprot organizations, and government agencies
1800s, who used a blackboard and colored chalks to attempted to supplement the existing supply of theatri-
teach geography (Scots Community, 2007). By 1830, cal lms and newsreels. Educators could nd many
the blackboard, usually locally made by painting planks types of lms to use: theatrical lms edited for special
with black paint, had become an essential part of class- purposes, industrial lms, government lms, and a
room furnishings. Its ability to make teacher or student smaller number of lms produced specically for the
writing or drawings visible to a large group expanded classroom. Schools that wanted to be viewed as pro-
the teachers capabilities exponentially. Bumstead gressive rushed to build collections of lms. Despite
(1841, p. viii) proclaimed that the inventor or intro- the marginal value of many of the available lms, inter-
ducer of the blackboard system deserves to be ranked est and usage continued to grow, and by the end of the
among the best contributors to learning and science, if 1920s many education agencies had units devoted to
not among the greatest benefactors of mankind. lm or visual education, and thick catalogs documented
The hand-held stereoscope became popular in edu- the thousands of lms available to educators.
cation in the mid-1850s, promoted by Sir David Brew-
ster in England, who carried out basic research in
stereoscopy and became a rm advocate of its value VISUAL INSTRUCTION MOVEMENT
in visualizing the curriculum (Anderson, 1962).
Enthusiasm for the use of still pictures and motion
pictures as educational resources grew to become the
EARLY VISUAL MEDIA Visual Instruction movement, an increasingly orga-
nized effort by enthusiasts to promote wider use of
Slide Projection these new technologies. This movement is regarded as
the rst paradigm in which the eld found its identity.
The origins of the modern eld of educational technol- Under this paradigm, advocates sought to make visual
ogy can be traced to the efforts of practitioners in the materials widely available throughout school districts,
late 19th and early 20th century to use projected visual postsecondary institutions, and adult education institu-
images to supplement lectures. Slide projection evolved tions. At rst these resources were included in the col-
from 17th-century handpainted slides illuminated by lections of educational museums; the rst in the United
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Historical Foundations
States was established in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1905, the 21st century. As soon as the phonograph was
based on exhibits saved from the Worlds Fair held in invented, lm producers tried various methods of using
that city in 1904 (Saettler, 1990). Later, collections of this new technology to add sound to motion pictures,
visual media were gathered into visual resources cen- but in the late 1920s the technique of adding an optical
ters of their own, and the leaders of the emerging eld sound track to the lm itself became the preferred
of visual instruction were the directors of these centers. format for sound lms. Interestingly, there was con-
The earliest formal research on educational appli- siderable resistance to sound lms in the education
cations of media was Lashley and Watsons program community. Some methodologists felt that the practice
of studies on the use of World War I military training of having the classroom teacher add narration to silent
lms on the prevention of venereal disease with civil- lms added a level of customization and personaliza-
ian audiences (Lashley and Watson, 1921). An early tion to lm showings. Administrators worried about
large-scale effort to design and produce a set of lms their installed base, the large investment they had made
specically for schools was the Chronicles of America in silent lm projectors. As late as 1936, a survey
Photoplays, produced by Yale University in the late showed that schools owned ten times more silent lm
1920s. Knowlton and Tilton (1929) studied the use of projectors than sound lm projectors (Saettler, 1990).
these history lms in seventh-grade classrooms. One The slide format had become standardized at the 2 2-
of their major conclusions was that the educational inch frame size, using 35-mm lm, which was also
value of such lms lay not only in the quality of the used for the lmstrip, which later became the most
materials but also in how well teachers used them. This popular format for commercially produced audio-
nding, that the instructional value of any media prod- visual materials. Audio resources were added to the
uct is determined largely by how it is used, would be growing base of visual resources. By the 1930s,
rediscovered by each succeeding generation with its schools maintained equipment pools that contained (in
new media: radio, then television, then programmed order of frequency): lantern slide projectors, radio
instruction, then computer-based instruction, and now receivers, 16-mm silent lm projectors, 35-mm silent
Internet-based learning environments. lm projectors, lmstrip projectors, opaque projectors,
The making of lms for educational use in the micro-slide projectors, 16-mm sound lm projectors,
early years was not explicitly guided by pedagogical and 35-mm sound lm projectors (Saettler, 1990).
theories. Producers generally chose subjects that were
visual in nature then applied the methodology of one
of the existing lm genres: drama, travelogue, docu- EDUCATIONAL RADIO
mentary, ethnography, historical reenactment, nature
study, scientic experiment or demonstration, lecture, Initiation of Radio Services
procedural guide, and the like.
During the 1920s, visual instruction enthusiasts In the 1920s and 1930s, broadcast radio became the
formed a number of organizations. In 1923, one of prime mass communication medium around the world.
them, the National Education Associations Depart- In most countries, broadcasting facilities were directly
ment of Visual Instruction (DVI), emerged to become managed by the government, although after the found-
the preeminent organization of professionals con- ing of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) in
cerned with the use of visual media to improve instruc- 1927, many countries (such as Japans NHK and Can-
tion. The name changed to Department of Audio- adas CBC) followed its model of a quasi-autonomous
Visual Instruction (DAVI) in 1947 as its boundaries public corporation. Providing cultural and educational
expanded to include auditory media: sound lms and programming was assumed to be a primary responsi-
various forms of recorded sound, beginning with pho- bility of these organizations; such programs were often
nographs and later including radio broadcasting, sound among the rst to be broadcast. The rst school pro-
lmstrips, and audiocassettes. grams in Canada began in 1925, in England in 1926.
By the mid-1930s, there were school broadcasting ser-
vices in virtually every European country as well as in
AUDIO-VISUAL INSTRUCTION Australia, Japan, South Africa, and India.
The phonograph record, introduced in 1910, was the Educational Radio in Japan
rst widely available format for recorded sound and
was used almost exclusively for music. Although mag- Japans NHK initiated nationwide school broadcasts
netic tape displaced the phonograph for recording pur- in 1935 and soon developed a policy of programs to
poses in the 1950s, vinyl records remain in use into complement the school curriculum, to ll in areas
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Michael Molenda
unreached by the conventional teaching (De Vera, directly instructional. Radio services had difculty
1967, p. 23). Following reorganization after World playing core instructional roles. For one thing, the
War II, NHK went on to become an international advantage of broadcasting is its coverage of a broad
exemplar for its ambitious and high-quality pro- area, but that meant crossing school district and even
gramming in radio and later (beginning in 1953) in state and provincial boundaries. It was difcult to
television. create any lesson that would meet the content, scope,
sequence, and timing demands of multiple schools
Educational Radio in North America across multiple jurisdictions. For another thing, teach-
ers, the gatekeepers of the classroom, were reluctant
In Canada, the rst large-scale school broadcasts were to turn over responsibility for core subject matter,
actually offered by the Canadian National Railways sensing that it would threaten their authority. This
(CNR) system. This radio service was established to pattern of consigning technology-based programming
entertain rail travelers, but it also reached the towns to a supplementary role was to be repeated with tele-
and cities along its route, and the CNR broadcasters vision, programmed instruction, and computer-
were quick to provide programming that would appeal assisted instruction.
to school audiences. The CNR school service built a
loyal audience by deliberately building participative
activities into the programs. The service was sub- EDUCATIONAL MEDIA
sumed into the CBC in 1933. In the early 1920s, many IN WORLD WAR II
American universities obtained licenses to operate
radio stations, often as technical experiments in elec- During World War II both the Allies and Axis powers
trical engineering. A large proportion of these died used motion pictures extensively for home-front pro-
out in competition with commercial stations, but some paganda purposes, with the German director Leni Rief-
put down roots. The operations that prospered were enstahl setting new aesthetic standards with psycho-
the ones in which radio played an integral part in the logically powerful documentaries, such as Triumph of
universitys missionbringing educational opportu- the Will. Such lms provided rich material for a gen-
nities to audiences beyond the campus (Wood and eration of researchers in psychology and media studies
Wylie, 1977). in the United States and Europe. The need for rapid
mass training of literally millions of combatants and
Educational Radio Programming industrial workers brought lms to the forefront of
military training. The British and American armed
By the mid-1930s, many Ameican school districts forces made extensive use of 16-mm lms for training
operated radio stations, which developed sophisti- and motivational purposes, but the U.S. effort was the
cated educational programming, often incorporating most pervasive of any of the combatant nations.
innovative pedagogical techniques. At the Cleveland, Between 1941 and 1945, the Division of Visual Aids
Ohio, Board of Educations radio station, WBOE, in for Military Trainingwith major participation by
the 1930s they pretested programs by creating rough Hollywood directors and actorsproduced over 400
drafts and trying them out with student audiences. sound lms and over 400 silent lmstrips, enabling a
This practice foreshadowed the later notion of improv- military mobilization far broader and faster than the
ing lessons and validating their worth through forma- Axis strategists had expected (Saettler, 1990).
tive and summative evaluation (Cambre, 1978). Edu- During the war, as lms were being produced and
cational broadcasters offered programs in every used in training, the U.S. Army commissioned a series
conceivable subject, including foreign languages, of psychological studies, later published as Experi-
health, social studies, home economics, science, ments on Mass Communication (Hovland et al., 1949),
music, art, and many other subjects. BBC program- which tested hypotheses about various lmic tech-
mers worked closely with advisory boards of teachers niques and their instructional effectiveness. Because
in every subject area to nd niches into which audio of the concentration of time, money, effort, and
material might add value (Bailey, 1957). They reached research expended on these productions, a genre of
thousands of schools in each country; for example, in instructional lm came into its own. New lmic con-
1936 in England and Wales some 4600 schools were ventions were established, for example, showing pro-
registered users (Parker, 1939). However, in the Amer- cedural tasks from the performers viewpoint rather
icas and many European countries, programming than the viewers and using a rst-person stream of
tended to be what Levenson and Stasheff (1952) consciousness narration to model the thought process
referred to as informally educative rather than of the performer.
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Historical Foundations
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Michael Molenda
1953. In most European countries, the radio formula for additional teachers by replacing the presentation
was carried over to television, with the state broadcast- function with broadcast lessons.
ing agencies expanding into this new medium, funded In the late 1950s and through the 1960s in the
by license fees, and continuing their tradition of bring- United States, programs were distributed on a regional
ing cultural and educational programming to the pop- basis, such as by the Eastern Educational Network and
ulace. the Midwest Program of Airborne Television Instruc-
tion (MPATI, a precursor of satellite broadcasting), and
ETV in Europe a few on a national basis, such as Continental Class-
room. During this period, the Ford Foundation and the
The BBC began school broadcasts in 1957; by 1974, federal government were subsidizing the expansion of
over 80% of all schools were making regular use of television in higher education through grants for
BBC programs (British Information Services, 1974), closed-circuit TV construction and program produc-
a pattern that carried on into the 21st century. Guided tion. By the end of the decade of the 1960s, tens of
since the early days of radio by a School Broadcasting millions of school and college students were receiving
Council that includes strong representation of teachers, televised instruction on a daily basis. After the popu-
programs are carefully designed to be integrated into larization of videotape recording (later, videocassette
the national curriculum. In other European countries, recording), ETV programming was increasingly cre-
the general pattern is for the state television corpora- ated and used as off-the-shelf packaged units rather
tion to devote a small percentage of its broadcast hours than being received through broadcasting.
to programming aimed at in-school audiences and
adult education. ETV Programming
10
Historical Foundations
ETV in Developing Countries ical and social sciences. Flowing from Shannon and
Weavers (Shannon, 1949) information theory, through
As television was later in coming to the less industri- Wieners (1950) cybernetics and Berlos (1960) Pro-
alized countries, so were educational applications. In cess of Communication model, thinkers in educational
many countries educational television came with the technology were viewing teaching/learning problems
nancial and technical support of industrialized coun- as communication problems. Improvement of commu-
tries, intending to help expand educational opportuni- nication depended on detecting where the weak points
ties as part of nation building; for example, in 1961 in the process were and ameliorating them: choosing
UNESCO and the Ford Foundation established a pilot a more visual medium, building more redundancy into
project in Delhi, India, to offer televised physics, the message, matching the receivers language capa-
chemistry, and English lessons to secondary students bility better, providing the sender with better feedback
in that city (Mohanty, 1984). In 1966, a project was about the receivers response, and the like.
initiated for communicating agricultural information
to farmers in some 80 villages outside of Delhi; the
programs were viewed communally and were followed Semantics
by group discussion.
This pattern of urban in-school programs and rural During the 1940s and 1950s, theories of communica-
agricultural development support was followed in tion not only sparked the emergence of information
many other developing countries. During the 1960s science but also attracted attention in the social sci-
and 1970s, educational television projects were under- ences. General Semantics, conceived by Korzybski
taken in more than a dozen countries in Latin America (1933) and interpreted and popularized by Hayakawa
(e.g., El Salvador and Colombia) and like numbers in (1941), offered a new way of studying the meanings
Africa (e.g., Ivory Coast and Niger) and Asia (e.g., evoked when humans communicated through various
South Korea and India). In Oceania, the entire educa- media. It added the human dimension to the technical
tional system of American Samoa was restructured process of communication addressed in other commu-
around television in the 1960s. nication theories.
In many cases, these projects were not intended to
be permanent; in any event, most were not sustained. A New Paradigm for
Tifns (1978) system analysis of ETV projects in Audio-Visual Education
Latin America indicated that although the lessons
themselves were educationally effective the overall The communication perspective became a new para-
projects suffered from systemic problems. Claytons digm for dening the audio-visual instruction eld. It
(1979) analysis echoed these ndings, noting that sys- was embraced wholeheartedly by a segment of the
tems in which major components are absent or dys- eld; for example, the name of the academic program
functional tended to perish. at Syracuse University changed from Audio-Visual
In the post-colonial era, ETV was viewed as a Education to Educational Media to Instructional Com-
means of expanding the reach of disadvantaged edu- munications in the mid-1960s. The rst formal deni-
cation systems while improving the quality of the edu- tion of the eld in 1963 used the term audiovisual
cation that was offered. The evidence indicated that communications as the central concept. When the time
from a strictly economic standpoint these early came to change the name of DAVI in 1971, there was
projects were difcult to justify. Reform based on tele- nearly equal support for communications and technol-
vision may be a faster means of changing the curric- ogy as the key terms, so both were incorporated into
ulum and improving teaching methods but it is also the new name: Association for Educational Commu-
more expensive in these settings and often not locally nications and Technology (AECT).
sustainable (Carnoy, 1975).
RADICAL BEHAVIORISM
THE COMMUNICATION PARADIGM
Application to Instruction
Information Theory
The term behaviorism refers collectively to several
During the later days of educational radio and the related but different theories in psychology. One of
earlier days of educational television, communication them, radical behaviorism, has had the greatest practical
theory became a dominant paradigm both in the phys- impact on educational technology due to the application
11
Michael Molenda
of its primary technique, operant conditioning, to teach- an early example is Educational Technology: Readings
ing-learning problems (Burton et al., 2004). As dis- in Programmed Instruction (DeCecco, 1964).
cussed in the chapter by Lockee and colleagues in the Between 1960 and 1970, the research focus of
Technologies part of this handbook, B.F. Skinners anal- what had been the audio-visual education eld shifted
ysis of the problems of group-based traditional instruc- sharply toward work on teaching machines and pro-
tion led him to the invention of a mechanical device for grammed instruction, prompting the change of the
applying operant conditioning to academic instruction name of the eld from audio-visual education to edu-
(Skinner, 1954). Referred to as a teaching machine, the cational technology. Torkelson (1977) examined the
device gained national attention. The arrangement of contents of articles published in AV Communication
stimuli, responses, and reinforcers in teaching machines Review between 1953 and 1977 and found that the
became known as programmed instruction, and pro- topics of teaching machines and programmed instruc-
grammed instruction lessons in book format were pub- tion dominated the journal in the 1960s. In fact,
lished in great profusion in the 1960s. between 1963 and 1967, these topics represented a
plurality of all articles published in that journal.
Impact of Teaching Machines This reorientation of the eld can be seen as a
major paradigm shift, from the creation and use of
The Department of Audiovisual Instruction (the audio-visual media or the communication of messages
hyphen between audio and visual was dropped in to the design of learning environments according a
1960) joined the new programmed instruction move- specic set of psychological specications. The dom-
ment by publishing Teaching Machines and Pro- inant psychological theories would change over time,
grammed Learning: A Source Book (Lumsdaine and but the role of applied psychologist would remain at
Glaser, 1960). The 1959 DAVI convention program the core.
had a single paper devoted to programmed instruction,
but there was a major session in 1960 entitled Pro-
Behavioral Technologies
grammed Instructional Materials for Use in Teaching
Machines. This title gives a clue to the link between Research and development in behaviorism led to other
audio-visual administrators and programmed instruc- innovations such as programmed tutoring, Direct
tion: the machines that were initially used to deliver Instruction, and Personalized System of Instruction,
the programmed lessons. When schools and colleges which are discussed at greater length in the chapter by
acquired teaching machines someone had to take care Lockee and colleagues in Part III. These technologies
of them: the audio-visual coordinator! The primacy of established an enviable record when compared with
the machine was indicated by the name that marked so-called conventional instruction in experiments in
this special-interest group at the next several DAVI which paper-and-pencil tests were used as the measure
conventions: the Teaching Machine Group. of learner achievement (Lockee et al., 2004). As com-
munication technology advanced, these frameworks
Emergence of Educational were incorporated in mechanical, electromechanical,
Technology Paradigm and ultimately digital formats, such as computer-
assisted instruction and online distance education.
Gradually the emphasis shifted to the process of
designing self-instructional systems. This design pro-
cess dovetailed with the notion promoted earlier by SYSTEMS APPROACH TO
James D. Finn that instructional technology could be INSTRUCTIONAL DESIGN
viewed as a way of thinking about instruction, not just
a conglomeration of devices. Thereafter, technology Evolution of Systems Approach
began to take on the dual meanings of application of
scientic thinking and the various communications The essence of the systems approach is to subdivide
media and devices (parallel to the distinction between the instructional planning process into steps, to arrange
hard and soft technologies found in the second edition those steps in logical order, then to use the output of
of this handbook). Further, by the mid-1960s, Skinner each step as the input of the next. The systems
also came to view programmed instruction as a prac- approach traces its origins to concepts that emerged
tical application of scientic knowledge to education, from military research during World War II. An ana-
and he referred to his instructional strategies as a tech- lytical technique that grew out of submarine hunting
nology of teaching (Skinner, 1965, 1968). Other was called operations research, in which computers
authors converted this term to educational technology; were used to make the calculations required. After the
12
Historical Foundations
war, this approach to analyzing, creating, and manag- joined by Indiana University) culminated in a joint
ing man/machine operations, now referred to as the project, known as the Instructional Development Insti-
systems approach, was applied to the development of tute (IDI). The IDI was a packaged training program
training materials and programs. on instructional development for teachers, and
During the post-war period, each of the U.S. mili- between 1971 and 1977 it was offered to hundreds of
tary services developed its own model for training groups of educators. Because it was usually conducted
development, and all of them were based on the systems by faculty and graduate students from nearby univer-
approach, a soft science version of systems analysis, sities, the IDI became an extremely inuential vehicle
itself an offshoot of operations research. The systems for disseminating ideas about the ISD process among
approach was viewed in the military as a paradigm for educational technology faculty and students across the
combining the human element with the machine ele- United States.
ments in manmachine systems, an antidote to purely
mechanistic thinking. From the entry of the systems
approach into the eld of educational technology, it was A Model for the Military Services
recognized by its advocates as a loose set of guidelines The Center for Performance Technology at Florida
that were applicable to the complex problems of human State University was selected in 1973 by the U.S.
learning only by analogy and not the sort of completely Department of Defense to develop procedures to sub-
deterministic and tightly controlled methodology stantially improve Army training. As recounted by
described by some of its detractors. Branson (1978), the ISD procedures developed for
The concept of systems approach probably was the Army evolved into a model, the Interservice Pro-
introduced to educational technology leaders in the cedures for Instructional Systems Development
United States by Charles F. Hoban in his keynote (IPISD), that was adopted by the Army, Navy, Air
address, A Systems Approach to Audio-Visual Com- Force, and Marines. The detailed procedures clus-
munication, presented at the second Lake Okoboji tered around ve major functions: analyze, design,
leadership conference in 1956 (Noel and Noel, 1965). develop, implement, and control. The IPISD model
The conference spotlight coincided with a series of eventually had enormous inuence in military and
articles by James D. Finn published around the same industrial training because its use was mandated not
time. Together, they helped create momentum behind only in all of the U.S. armed services but also among
the idea of the systems approach, which eventually all defense contractors.
became a hallmark of the eld.
A Generic ISD Model
Instructional Systems The 1980s brought a proliferation of ISD models for
Development Models education and training. They differed in details but
During the 1960s, the systems approach began to appear typically adhered to the common conceptual frame-
in procedural models of Instructional Systems Develop- work of analyze, design, develop, implement, and eval-
ment (ISD) in American higher education. Barsons uate. This conceptual framework came to be called by
(1967) Instructional Systems Development project, con- its acronym, ADDIE. During the 1970s and 1980s,
ducted at Michigan State University and three other advocates for the systems approach attempted to pro-
universities between 1961 and 1965, produced an inu- mote its use in K12 and higher education. These
ential model and a set of heuristic guidelines for devel- efforts were largely unsuccessful, possibly for reasons
opers. During this same period, Leonard Silvern at the related to the social and economic dynamics of these
University of Southern California began offering the institutions; however, ISD was welcomed in corporate
rst course in applying the systems approach to instruc- and military training, where it became the reigning
tion (Designing Instructional Systems), which was paradigm for the next 20 years as a way to standardize
based on his military and aerospace experience. He also design practices and make training more efcient and
produced a detailed procedural model that inuenced effective.
later model builders (Silvern, 1965).
ISD as a Paradigm Shift
A Model for Schools The ISD movement can be viewed as another para-
These early activities in the consortium that included digm shift in the history of educational technology.
Syracuse, Michigan State, U.S. International Univer- By the end of the 1980s, skill in instructional design
sity, and the University of Southern California (later was viewed as the core competency of the educational
13
Michael Molenda
technology professional. By contrast, the develop- The PLATO project at the University of Illinois
ment and production of audio-visual materials became began in 1961 and was aimed at producing cost-ef-
a niche specialization, one that was often outsourced. cient instruction using networked inexpensive termi-
nals and a simplied programming language for
Critical Questioning of ISD instruction, TUTOR (Saettler, 1990). Most of the early
programs were basically drill-and-practice with some
By the late 1990s, however, an accumulation of pres- degree of branching, but a wide variety of subject
suresnew digital capabilities, intense cost competi- matter was developed at the college level. Over time,
tion and the need to reduce human resources costs, and terminals at outlying universities were connected to
the increasing pace of changeled to increasingly crit- the central mainframe in a timesharing system, grow-
ical questioning of the ISD orthodoxy (discussed from ing to hundreds of sites and thousands of hours of
an international perspective in Tennyson et al., 1997). material available across the college curriculum. As
In particular, the design of more complex computer- software development continued, many innovative dis-
based learning environments in which learners are play systems evolved, including a graphical Web
expected to take the initiative in pursuing knowledge browser. With experience and with more capable hard-
and to collaborate with others in doing so challenges ware, more varied sorts of instructional strategies
conventional ISD procedures (Hkkinen, 2002). Low- became possible, including laboratory and discovery
yck and Pys (2001), among others, have called for oriented methods.
new models that emphasize co-construction of knowl- The PLATO system pioneered online forums and
edge and indeed co-design of the learning environment. message boards, e-mail, chat rooms, instant messag-
ing, remote screen sharing, and multiplayer games,
leading to the emergence of what was perhaps the
ADVENT OF COMPUTERS worlds rst online community (Woolley, 1994). It
IN EDUCATION continued to grow and evolve right through the early
2000s, sparking the expansion of local CAI develop-
Mainframe Era ment and nding a niche in military and vocational
education.
The rst attempts to use computers to present and con-
trol instruction began in the early 1960s before the
microprocessor, when mainframe computers used COGNITIVIST AND
punched cards for input. The early experiments in com- CONSTRUCTIVIST THEORIES
puter-assisted instruction (CAI) began just at the time
that programmed instruction was at its peak, so many Cognitivism
of the early CAI programs followed a drill-and-practice
or tutorial format. A correct response was conrmed, Like behaviorism, cognitivism is a label for a variety
while an incorrect response might branch the learner of diverse theories in psychology that endeavor to
to a remedial sequence or an easier question. Beginning explain internal mental functions through scientic
in the mid-1960s, the CAI research and development methods. From this perspective, learners use their
program at Stanford University, later the Computer memory and thought processes to generate strategies
Curriculum Corporation, created successful drill-and- as well as store and manipulate mental representations
practice materials in mathematics and reading, later and ideas. The Scottish psychologist Kenneth Craik
adding foreign languages (Saettler, 1990). (1943) theorized that thinking and reasoning take place
through the internal manipulation of mental models.
Minicomputer Era A generation later, Johnson-Laird (1983) built on
Craiks foundation, elaborating a theory that when
More innovative and more learner-centered programs people participate in discourse they construct a mental
were developed in the TICCIT project at Brigham model of the situation being discussed. Other theories
Young University in the 1970s after the introduction of that would later become very inuential were being
the microprocessor and the proliferation of minicom- developed in the 1920s and 1930s by Jean Piaget in
puters. These sophisticated programs yielded successful Switzerland and Lev Vygotsky in Russia, but these did
programs in mathematics and English composition; not have signicant impact on American educational
however, both the Stanford and TICCIT programs failed psychology until translations were widely circulated
to gain major adoption in their intended sectors: K12 in the 1960s. Cognitive theories gained momentum in
and community college education (Saettler, 1990). the United States with the publication of Jerome
14
Historical Foundations
15
Michael Molenda
constructivist movement, this could be viewed as computers in the classroom and at home as well as
another paradigm shift in the identity of the eld. From productivity tools such as word-processing programs
that time to the present, the conversation has centered for writing, spreadsheets for organizing quantitative
on using the tools of educational technology to create data, and presentation software to create graphs and
learning environments suited to experiential learning: slide shows.
WebQuests, problem-based learning, microworlds,
simulations and games, blogs, and wikis. School Adoption of Computers
16
Historical Foundations
17
Michael Molenda
ter schools, and private alternatives, started virtual ogies captured the eld, enabling designers to create
schools to try to retain students who were drifting learning environments in which verbal and visual
outside the public school system. A major national media could be combined under the inspiration of var-
survey in 2003 found that students in more than one ious pedagogical theories into expository lessons,
third of public school districts enrolled in distance problem-solving laboratories, collaborative work
education courses: 76% at the high-school level and spaces, or hybrids thereofall made available to
another 15% in combined or ungraded schools (Setzer almost anyone, anywhere.
and Lewis, 2005). The eld has also been and continues to be thor-
oughly interdisciplinary. Certain individuals and insti-
Computer-Based Residential Courses tutions have provided a measure of continuity over the
The use of the Web grew not only for off-campus years, but discontinuity has been a recurrent problem.
distance courses but also for on-campus residential Each media revolution and each paradigm change
courses. By 2004, most American universities had bring new people with different backgrounds into the
adopted a standard course management system eld. From visual instruction to radio, from audio-
(CMS), a suite of applications, tying together Web visual media to programmed instruction, from instruc-
presentations, e-mail, discussion forums, and other tional design to distance educationeach transition
applications. Blackboard.com, introduced its rst has tended to mean reinventing the wheel in terms of
CMS, CourseInfo, in 1999. By 2006, Blackboard had the questions asked in research and in terms of grand
merged with its largest rival, WebCT, and dominated dreams about revolutionizing education.
the eld of college and university CMSs, although Likewise, the eld has been and continues to be
rival open-source software CMSs were also being international in scope. Although the geographically
developed, such as Moodle and Sakai. The wide- diffuse components of the eld are only loosely artic-
spread adoption of CMSs blurred the line between ulated, ideas have been able to ow sufciently to
distance and residential courses, as it allowed resi- allow rich cross-fertilization of both theories and prac-
dential students to carry out more of their course tices. As the Internet has made communication and
activities on a computer, making distance a matter of collaboration an order of magnitude easier, it appears
degree rather than of kind. that the coming years will knit participants even more
Growth in distance education created a demand for tightly together.
distance course designers and developers, making this
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