Coping With Success: Distance Learning in Indiana Higher Education

A sage once cautioned, “Be careful what you wish for lest you get it.” Accomplishing significant enrollments in distance learning now confronts Indiana’s higher education institutions with new challenges in handling that success. Though popular media still speak of distance learning as new or experimental, Indiana’s higher education community has been practicing it for nearly a century. Indiana University’s independent study program dates to the early 1900’s, and Purdue began broadcasting college classes by radio in the thirties. Purdue and IU began inter-campus course delivery in 1961 that led to creation of the Indiana Higher Education Telecommunication System (IHETS) in 1967. Thus, Indiana’s institutions and their faculties have a history of creativity in using technology to support, improve, and deliver postsecondary education, even though we also have a deep-seated tradition of doing rather than bragging. We take for granted what others, several years later, loudly proclaim as “innovative” or “unprecedented.