Forty years of pushing the boundaries of education

This year marks the 40th anniversary of the Distance Education journal. This anniversary, like any other such milestone, gives us an opportunity to reflect on when and how it began, where it has been, and what may lie ahead for the journal, and the field more broadly. As pointed out in the article “The position of Distance Education in a journal network” in this issue by Zawacki-Richter and Buntins, the development of this journal was closely tied to the growth and emergence of the Australian and the South Pacific External Studies Association (ASPESA), the forerunner of the present-day Open and Distance Learning Association of Australia (ODLAA), which owns it (see also Bewley, 2008; Inglis, 1999). The idea of a journal on distance education was first mooted at one of the earliest forums of ASPESA and ratified at the 1979 ASPESA Forum held in Perth, Western Australia (see Mitchell, 2009)