4 stages

Considering distance education history usually four basic stages could be marked out that straightly correspond to four models of DE.

Let's go with the first model first. It was founded long ago in 19-th century and was left like that until the 20-th's century 60-th. The model was presented as a knowledge transfer between teacher and student. The transfer achieved through printed materials, radio and television programs. This model was to bring to minimum interrelation of professor and student making a schedule to be very tough.

The second model proposed in 60-th was creating a passage to new methodological teaching principals. Together with printed marials, radio and television now audio and videocassettes began to spread. But the main deficiency still remained: connection was only one way. Of course as exceptions some mail or telephone consultation were happening but that wasnot really enough.

The third model, founded in 1985, began to apply innovation methodology of education, using the newest technologies like computer that was providing an access to CDs, e-mail, interactive bulletin boards, video and audio communication. In this model the first concern of a teacher was to coordinate the proccess of information delivery to students. A large amount of educational institutions have started using multifunctional web-sites, two-way connection became possible. Though interaction wasnot happening synchronyously it didnot bother anyone.

The fourth education model is similar to the third but it's elaborated with using computer technologies providing fastspeed data exchange, that helped synchronisation between teacher's and student's action. But still there is a limit of information exchange speed and bandwidth access. But distance education does not stand at one place, it developes constantly and in a closest future we will witness the next DE models.