Editorial: Reflactions on learning online

Abstract

A long time ago and in a galaxy far away, my first degree was in electrical engineering. This was over fifty years ago, at a time when many people believe that technology-based learning had not been invented. This of course, is not true and is a consequence of amnesia in the education technology community (Rushby, 1983; Romiszowski & Rushby, 2015). However, it was not until the 1970s that viable systems to manage the learning process became available. By the late 1970s, Plato (developed by the University of Illinois) was supporting several thousand graphics terminals distributed worldwide, running on nearly a dozen different networked mainframe computers (Smith & Sherwood, 1976). So, my undergraduate course was wholly class-room (and laboratory) based.