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Sage the Night Owl

As of May 2022, the WGU has become the largest online college in the US

SJS / GreenPolicy360 siterunner: I was asked by the Governor of New Mexico in 1996 to represent our state in the creation of the "Virtual University". In the 1990s, as a member of New Mexico's State Board of Education, I could see future opportunities more clearly in my roles on the state's technology council and with educational technology. At the time I was responsible for oversight of bringing the Internet into some 900 schools and I welcomed the role to create a new educational vision -- an online, accredited university. In my travels in 1969/70 I had become impressed by the new UK "Open University" and realized in the 1990s that online networks could provide new media access to top-level professors and educators and be made available to every student geographically. The idea of bringing 'remote learning/distance learning' to all students in our state and states around the country and world was immensely appealing. My goal, also, was to make higher education affordable and in New Mexico I worked to propose a full-tuition college scholarship, which was funded with a state lottery scholarship program. The combination of access and funding came to be. Each of the original Virtual University founding states appointed a member to serve on the work group and we set in motion what was formally announced in 1997 -- the new Western Governor's University.

The WGU and NM lottery scholarship are well into their second decade of success now in 2019. Education is the key to opening doors for every student and lifelong learning is an opportunity all of us deserve. It is a torch we are all passing forward, eye opening education and all that education brings with it.

Salud to the WGU and OU !

• https://www.wgu.edu/about/our-story.html

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Governors_University

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distance_education

• https://thejournal.com/Articles/1997/06/01/Technology-in-Education-and-the-Next-TwentyFive-Years.aspx

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learning_management_system

• http://www.open.ac.uk/

SJS: A tip of our network learning hat also to Ivan Illich who GreenPOlicy360's founder-siterunner assisted at CIDOC in Cuernavaca in 1972. Illich was attempting to theorize and describe new models of education that were expansive and not constrained by 'factory-like' systems of rote learning, standardized, regimented curriculum, and top-down methodologies. Illich saw student success and growth in creativeness, inquiry, thinking skills, and individual learning. His networking ideas were out in front of pedagogy in the era and were stimulating wide discussion in educational circles. I was soon in New York City, with an educational publishing company and printer, Faculty Press and Book-Lab, and in the evening studying with the Graduate Faculty of the New School. New media, digital systems, ed tech and networks were just beginning to change printing/publishing and learning. These were exciting times ripe with potential and possibilities.

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Networked_learning

Recently, networked learning has its roots in the 1970s, with the likes of Ivan Illich's book, Deschooling Society, through to more recent commentary in the early 2000s, largely inspired by the Internet and social media.

1970

In 1971, Ivan Illich envisioned 'learning webs' as a model for people to network the learning they needed:

I will use the words "opportunity web" for "network" to designate specific ways to provide access to each of four sets of resources. "Network" is often used, unfortunately, to designate the channels reserved to material selected by others for indoctrination, instruction, and entertainment. But it can also be used for the telephone or the postal service, which are primarily accessible to individuals who want to send messages to one another. I wish we had another word to designate such reticular structures for mutual access, a word less evocative of entrapment, less degraded by current usage and more suggestive of the fact that any such arrangement includes legal, organizational, and technical aspects. Not having found such a term, I will try to redeem the one which is available, using it as a synonym of "educational web." -- Ivan Illich, 1971

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