Description:
On October 4, 1914, The Norwegian Correspondence School (NKS) accepted its first student, a woman, who, for a fee of NOK 10, registered for two courses (Amdam and Bjarnar, 1989). Seventy-five years later, distance education has become an important part of Norwegian higher education. However, there are several reasons why distance teaching did not gain acceptance in Norwegian higher education earlier. One of is the well-known skepticism of distance teaching as a strategy, the other was the adoption of other modes of making higher education accessible to more people, such as offering part-time studies and de-centralized study programmes in locations without higher education institutions. In Norway, because geography has been more of an obstacle than social class, might help explain the greater focus on building traditional education institutions during this period (Støkken 1999).Early in the 1990s, we can talk to a certain degree of a change of climate or attitudes towards distance education within higher education circles. This change in attitude was initially found in the Ministry of Education and with a few visionary university and college leaders. However, by the late 1990s, favourable attitudes towards distance education had spread to an increasingly larger number of faculty members, as indicated by a substantial number of distance teaching programmes that were being developed. Hence, it can now be claimed that distance teaching has moved out of the shadows and into the spotlight.