In 1728, a gentleman called Caleb Phillips advertised in the Boston Gazette, offering private correspondence courses in shorthand. Subscribers would receive their lessons by post, complete the assignments and send them back to Mr Phillips to mark. A little over 100 years later, Sir Isaac Pitman did the same thing in Britain, promoting thousands of enthusiastic would-be secretaries and clerks to sign up. Pitman shorthand is still widely used today. A little while later, the University of London became the first university to offer degrees by what they called “distance learning”.

The Victorian middle classes, vastly wealthier than their parents and with time on their hands, fell in love with the idea of self-help. A book of the same name was published by Scottish social reformer Samuel Smiles. It outsold every other publication that year with the exception of the Bible but including the first edition of Darwin’s Origin of Species. Viewers of Downton Abbey may recall Lady Sybil conspiring with housemaid Gwen in her pursuit of a typing qualification, which would allow her to escape the drudgery of domestic service to become a secretary.

News: Ofsted publishes findings of online learning review

More: Ney Review on college financial oversight published

Remote learning: Collaboration is the key to success

Now, as then, the thirst for knowledge both for its own sake and as an aid to career improvement is everywhere. Anyone working in education will remember the names and faces of those most driven individuals for whom learning was a path to wealth or success or even enlightenment. Today, we have the opportunity to serve those people by reawakening that Victorian dream, but without the need for stamps or pre-addressed envelopes.

Distance learning’s time has come

Distance learning is an idea whose time has come. Schools, colleges and universities are frantically getting up to speed with the technology that is enabling them to keep supporting their students during this difficult time. Parents and students are having to become more tech savvy themselves to keep up. The coronavirus and our enforced confinement are driving these developments at a speed that would never have been seen in normal times. As ever, crisis drives disruption, which in turn dramatically accelerates technological development and adoption.

This will have transformative implications for all of education but in particular for the new South Central Institute of Technology, of which I have the honour to be the first principal. To take over at such a time is not what I expected. As the Queen said, this crisis is causing untold damage to people, communities and the economy. However, as with all such tumultuous events, there will be consequential opportunities and we owe it to ourselves those in education who are struggling to grasp them with both hands. The potential for individually tailored learning is immense.

At the IoT, the emphasis is on collaboration with employers to create a curriculum that perfectly incorporates the teaching of skills relevant to the needs of business today. These connective technologies will allow that collaboration over real-world problems to take place in real time as well. They are also an important factor in driving the desire for inclusion, which is at the IoT’s heart. Race, gender, orientation, age, disability and geographic location all become far less significant factors when everyone involved is at the end of a keyboard. It’s the ultimate leveller.

Those of us in education should use this time to dream. We should be discussing and planning ways to take advantage of this new explosion in the use of technologies with the goal of widening access, not just to our regular cohort of students but to the world. We have an opportunity to make education a truly global enterprise in which anyone can benefit. It is estimated that around 60 per cent of the human race are now active internet users with the numbers climbing most steeply in the developing world, the kind of potential audience of which Messrs Phillips, Pitman and Smiles could only dream. They want to learn and we have the tools with which to teach them. 

Let’s build digital correspondence courses for the world. 

Alex Warner is the principal of the South Central Institute of Technology