Historical Review of Distance and Online Education from 1700s to 2021 in the United States
Education : Perspectives on a New Environment , which she edited .
World Wide Web and Internet
In 1989 , Sir Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web , an Internet-based hypermedia initiative designed for global information sharing , while working at CERN , the European Organization for Nuclear Research ( PEW Research Center , 2014 ; World Wide Web Foundation , n . d .). In 1990 , Berners-Lee wrote the first web browser and server . “ By the end of 1990 , the first web page was served on the open internet , and in 1991 , people outside of CERN were invited to join this new web community ” ( World Wide Web Foundation , n . d ., para . 9 ). In 1993 , the graphical browser Mosaic accelerated the widespread use of the World Wide Web and by January 1998 , “ almost 30 million host computers were connected to the Internet ( Zakon , 1998 ), and more than 58 million users in the United States and Canada were estimated to be online ( Neilsen Media Research , 1997 )” ( as cited in National Research Council 1999b , p . 181 ). The 1990s to 2000 represented an era of expansive growth within higher education and online education as the World Wide Web and the Internet became publicly accessible .
Institutions such as The George Washington University , which had been offering distance education degree programs since the mid-1980s , expanded offerings to include fully online formats ( Gibbs , 1998 ; Kearsley et al ., 1995 ). Drexel University ( Fry , 2020 ), New York University ( James , 2005 ), and other traditional universities began developing and offering degree programs fully online . The flurry of interest in online education spawned extensive development efforts among several universities that subsequently failed .
Learning Management Systems
During the latter part of the 1990s , learning management system ( LMS ) platforms became increasingly present
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