The program began in 1964 as the Food Industry Home Study Program, one of the largest distance learning programs in the U.S. It had up to 18,000 students at its peak, with students mailing in their assignments and completed exams; some of them later used fax machines until the added convenience of email in 1998.
It was renamed the Food Industry Management Distance Education Program in 1996, when video, CD-ROM and the World Wide Web contributed to enhanced course design, interactive training, and learning opportunities in more than 40 courses in supermarket, food distribution and convenience store operations.
“These examples brought teaching in a nontraditional sense, but providing the high-quality content that one could receive from on-campus learning, based on research at the university,” Evan Earle said.
“I think the work we are doing now will shape the way we teach going forward in unexpected ways.” -Julia Thom-Levy
Cornellians have pioneered technologies crucial to today’s virtual learning environments – including online video chat for personal computer users (with CU-SeeMe in the 1980s) and desktop videoconferencing with SightSpeed. The latter began as a research project by Toby Berger, professor emeritus of electrical and computer engineering, and co-founders Aron Rosenberg ’02 and Brad Treat, MBA ’02, now a visiting lecturer at the Samuel Curtis Johnson Graduate School of Management. And the co-founders of Blackboard Inc., Daniel Cane ’98 and Stephano Kim ’98, first developed the learning management platform while they were Cornell students.
Today, Cornell extension brings education to communities across the state and around the world; and the university’s external education initiatives, including executive education at Cornell Tech, ILR in New York City and AAP NYC, incorporate distance learning and the online learning platform eCornell.
As the university begins online classes this week, faculty members are diving into a range of modern educational technology.
“Faculty are thinking about the most important elements of their in-person teaching and how to translate and even enhance them in an online format,” said Julia Thom-Levy, vice provost for academic innovation and professor of physics in the College of Arts and Sciences. “One such area is active learning, where all students are engaged and work through the most difficult concepts, with frequent feedback from their instructors.”
Cornell instructors are exploring innovative and creative ways to engage with students online, she said.
“I think the work we are doing now,” Thom-Levy said, “will shape the way we teach going forward in unexpected ways.”
Header Image: The Cornell Demonstration Train brought education and live demonstrations to upstate communities, in cooperation with the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the New York Central and Lehigh Valley railroads. Photo by Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections/Provided
This article also appeared in the Cornell Chronicle.