History

Late 1800s-early 1900s: lantern slide projectors, stereopticons & motion picture projectors were among the earliest media instructional for instruction
1910: the first catalog of instructional films was published

"Books will be obsolete in schools.... It will be possible to teach every branch of human knowledge with the motion picture."
Thomas Edison, 1913

Edison's prophecy about video becoming the sole method of instruction did not pan out. Reasons for this include lack of accessible technology, lack of ability to use the technology, lack of quality or relevant films and the high cost of equipment, and teacher reluctance.

Welcome to the AV Club

From the mid 1920s

Advances in audio technology (radio, recording, and "talkies") reached education and "audiovisual instruction" was born.

1929-1939: the Great Depression brought great loss to investments into audio-visual education
In 1932, visual instruction organizations unify

"Tomorrow they (radio, films, television) will be as common as the book and powerful in their effect on learning and teaching."
National Education Association statement, 1932

Like Edison's prediction about visual instruction becoming the sole medium for education, audiovisual instruction did not catch on the way some believed it would, and for the same reasons.

Early Learning Theories

From the mid 1930s

As the tools for teaching developed, so did the concepts for learning and teaching. Among the most influential are

Visualizing the Curriculum (1937), in which the authors (Hoban, Hoban & Zissman) connect the value of audiovisual aids to the degree of realism they carry.
This concept was further entrenched in 1946 with the "Cone of Experience" model presented in a textbook, which he continued refining in two later editions.

Illustration of a learning pyramid based on Dale's, which did not include numbers.

V for Victory: The War & Progress in Instructional Technology

1939-1945

Though the growth of audiovisual instruction in schools slowed during World War II, the advances made in military training reached the rest of education before long.

In 1941, the Division of Visual Aids for War Training was established by the federal government. Over a five-year span, this bureau created over 450 training films
Between 1939 and 1945, the overhead projector was created, and technologies such as slide projectors & audio equipment were used to train soldiers how to recognize different types of ships & aircraft and how to communicate in other languages, and simulators were used for flight training.

"We had everything calcuated perfectly except the speed with which America was able to train its people.
German Chief of General Staff, 1945

Though there was no data collected about the efficacy of soldier training, instructors attest the new methods shorted training time and resulted in less absenteeism. The Germans seem to have agreed on the instructional effectiveness.

Enter Instructional Design

Theories from 1949 through the 1970s

After the war, there was a jump in interest in models & analyses of communication theories. These theories, considering not only the content of a message, its audience & deliverer, but also the message's vehicle, had obvious application in instructional technology.

In the 1950s, for some educational leaders, the entire communication process became an important consideration in designing a curriculum, though others remained focused on the communication medium only.

At this time, an interest in evaluation & testing grew from military trainings and the educators & psychologists who engineering them. This systems approach to education, like the programmed instruction movement, is probably familiar to instructors who are otherwise untrained in education, with its methodology in teaching through small steps that elicit active responses to frequently-posed questions with immediate feedback and self-paced learning.

Equally familiar to instructors today is another aspect of programmed instruction: objectives that describe learner behaviors, the conditions under which those behaviors should be performed, and clear criteria for judging them.

In the early 1960s, criterion-referenced testing appeared, with its focus not on comparing student performance, but on individual performance.

The mid-1960s brought influential theories on learning with foundational works on learning types and organizational schema analyzing the hierarchical relationships of skills.

Beyond theory, these changes were evident in two primary technologies: the further use of instructional television and the new use of computers.

Instructional Television

Example of an instructional video from the 1950s.

In 1952, the Federal Communications Commission caused a leap in the development of instructional television programming by reserving over 200 channels for educational use.

In that decade & the next, the Ford Foundation poured resources into the creation of educational programs for schools, public television, and even an experimental series for a college campus.

The push toward accessible educational television swung wider into public television's community & cultural information, never really catching on in the public education, for reasons much like those for the initial visual and audio-visual educational methods not taking off: teacher resistance to change, expense of supplying schools with the necessary technology, difficulty of learning to operate it, and lack of quality programming.

Computer-Assisted Instruction (CAI) Programming

The earliest work in using computers to aid instruction was in the 1950s, primarily by IBM where researchers developed an author language and programs for schools.

Advances in the 1960s included adaptive teaching machines, applications of CAI for use in public schools & universities.

Computer assisted instruction advances continued into the 1970s, but without significant impact on education.

Rise of Personal Computing & the Internet

1980s to today

In the early 1980s, once personal computers were available, they occupied a place in many schools for instructional purposes. People, as with other visual and audio-visual instruction technologies, expected the computer to take over education. They seem to have been right this time, but it took a while: even in the mid-1990s, when computers were plentiful in schools, many instructors were not implementing their use in the classroom, and what use they were put to was not especially innovative.

Modern Mobile Technology

With modern advances in technology allowing smaller devices and astounding connectivity, learners today from public schools to universities and in trainings for business, industry, military, and even in skills instruction like motorcycle safety rely on computer-based instruction on sophisticated learning platforms that are accessible to students on devices they already own, in many cases.

Interactivity, self-pacing, individualized instruction, timely feedback on performance, and accessibility are some of the benefits of modern instruction using technology.

While some instructors still struggle with the same issues that instructors always have regarding implementing new technology, there are more resources in place for helping overcome those obstacles.

Student learning sketching skills on a phone-sized mobile device, with instructor using a tablet

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