Remote learning isn’t new: Radio instruction in the 1937 polio epidemic | Hacker News Reader

Remote learning isn’t new: Radio instruction in the 1937 polio epidemic

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168 pointsrustoo42 comments

Remote instruction was viewed as an important early application of telecommunications technology. For example, the first FM radio station in this state (KANW, which perhaps due to its experimental nature at the time apparently did not claim a vanity call sign with meaning as most early stations did) was operated by the city school district with the purpose of broadcasting centrally produced lessons to classrooms. Broadcast to the public was only an incidental goal at the time as FM receivers were not yet common. Similarly, in many cities there is a public access television station which was, at least historically, operated by the K-12 district for similar purposes (KNME here, originally for New Mexico Education, has a similar history). In some larger areas there is also a television station operated by the community college or university extension, originally for the purpose of delivering continuing education courses.

Today the majority of these stations have quietly transformed into public stations (many having become NPR or PBS affiliates) and that historical purpose is largely lost. All evidence indicates that this concept of remote instruction was never particularly successful, although some school districts retained a city-wide closed circuit television system for quite some time with the primary use of announcements and occasionally low-interest courses such as less common foreign languages.

Remote insturction is certainly not new, and while the technology has indeed advanced I'm not convinced that it's really advanced since the 1960s to a degree that really revolutionizes the field. The technology in use today is still fundamentally video and audio delivery. Of course it's usually bidirectional today, but anyone who's tried to teach online has probably discovered that bidirectional video doesn't help nearly as much as you would hope.

Fascinating. Thank you for sharing.

And before this there was correspondence learning (i.e. learning via snail mail). Many technologies have been pitched as being transformational for education. Often they have some impact but don't live up to the hype.

100 years ago correspondence courses enabled people who could not afford college get college degrees. My grandfather earned a college degree this way, and liked the setup so much he made his career distributing correspondence college courses. He met my grandmother having sold her courses on mechanical engineering.

(Bet ya didn't know women worked as mechanics in the 1920's!)

30 years ago it enabled my siblings and I to continue to follow our home curriculum while we spent three years posted to a developing country for dad's foreign service job, and my mother to complete a college degree while we were there.

Remote learning over potentially-connectionless protocols (e.g. email) also makes sense as a way of supporting those who cannot afford always-on internet connections (or streaming-level bandwidth). This is not a small number even in the developed world, and could grow larger under a collapse.

Public access (any citizen being able to get on the Cable network) is different than educational access (only educational content) and Government access (city and county council meetings, community bulletin boards, etc.). These collectively made up "PEG access", and may have been a single organization or multiple depending on the municipality. Cable companies tended to view these as pure cost centers, and have tried to get rid of them through legislation.

Source: I used to work at a public access station. These were hit hard by the internet, when YouTube made it easy to put whatever video you wanted online, which was much more difficult to do with any sort of quality before the early 2000's. The public access channels that have survived/thrived embraced teaching the public videography, lighting, sound, editing, etc.

This is the modern landscape, but the television example I mentioned (and actually most of the examples I know of offhand that remain successful today) actually predates the creation of the cable access programs, it originated as an OTA channel pre-cable (in this area). Without actually having researched it too much, I suspect the educational access program is too restrictive for a pivot to PBS affiliate due to service area limitations.

You could view the educational access program as a failed attempt to bolster these types of services. There are definitely active educational access stations but I'm not aware of any case where they're still used to deliver teleinstruction - would love to hear about any that do.

Seattle Public Schools has maintained their TV station. I'm not familiar with it pre-covid but they were announcing broadcast material when schools closed https://twitter.com/SeaPubSchools/status/1245841000171479046...

Broadcast is relatively easy. And one of the problems with e.g. MOOCs (for the most part) is they "solved" the problem of video lectures--which was not actually much of a problem. And everything else, with a few partial exceptions, didn't really work very well. And it's the same problem with online learning generally beyond low (maybe 10 people or so?) scale. Many of us are in larger meetings of course, but that mostly works because most people are just watching (or, more likely, half-watching).

It's mostly the same thing with events. Effectively or actually pre-recorded video is fine but that's just YouTube videos. Even chat doesn't work very well once scale goes up and I haven't seen anything that does a great job of the hallway track.

> It's mostly the same thing with events. Effectively or actually pre-recorded video is fine but that's just YouTube videos. Even chat doesn't work very well once scale goes up and I haven't seen anything that does a great job of the hallway track.

Can some form of "Second Life"-style VR improve the situation somehow? VR is much overhyped but perhaps it could be a potential solution.

I doubt it. The problem isn't so much the bandwidth but the serendipity. I got at least peripherally sucked into the Second Life hype and I'm very unconvinced VR was the missing ingredient.

> The problem isn't so much the bandwidth but the serendipity.

It is what I meant. Can the "hallway track" experience somehow be simulated in VR or MMORPG to improve the interactivity between participants? It doesn't sound like a practical idea, sure, but I don't think it's stupid enough to be excluded from investigation.

On second thought, a simulation in video games isn't a particularly new idea, there must be a good collection of researches and conclusions already. I should look it up on Google Scholar someday to answer my own question...

I often wish there was some kind of "video game" type conferencing software that would emulate an empty room with avatars that can walk around.

The important thing being that audio physics works as close as possible to real life. So you could hear people better that are closer to you or facing you. Then you could have small localized conversations in the room and easily switch between groups by just walking around.

I think vr chat would work for this (despite the name it doesn't require age headset).

It would be hilariously unprofessional though as a medium (like using discord instead of slack, but worse).

It's why I said "It doesn't sound like a practical idea, sure, but I don't think it's stupid enough to be excluded from investigation" in another sub-thread.

Note-to-self: check the literature on this subject...

> The important thing being that audio physics works as close as possible to real life.

+1. I imagined this feature when I asked this question.

You might be interested in Calla, which provides exactly that kind of spatialized audio for meeting participants (via avatars) on top of Jitsi conferencing:

https://github.com/capnmidnight/Calla

Thanks for recommending this! It's really cool. I submitted it as top level submission here and seems to be getting some traction: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24710948

No probs! If I remember correctly, I heard about it on HN around the start of COVID-19 restriction time in this great side-projects thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23170881 . Glad to see it gaining more attention.

I think the VCR replaced all that. :)

Of course it is not new when I was in primary school teachers use to tell us that in remote places in Australia there is school over the radio. But I always wondered why over the radio when already at the time you could do it over the internet using email instructions. But I guess not all people had a computer and internet connection in Australia, and building internet infrastructure all over the place is challenging. To this day half of the world still doesn't have internet connection.

I guess not all people had a computer and internet connection in Australia

It's still the case in much of the world. On HN, we don't realize how lucky we are to have internet connections.

In the mid-sized American city where I lived recently, the most recent numbers show almost 200,000 people with NO internet access at all. Not at home. Not at work. Not even on their phones. That number expands to over 400,000 when the rest of the county is included.

I live in Albany, NY. My neighbor is a teacher in a rural district about 35 miles to the southwest. 65% of students don’t have internet, and many don’t have phones at home as the landline network rots away and is expensive. ($60/mo unless you qualify for food stamps)

So they are parking school busses in areas with cell signal with hotspots for kids to do work and mailing or distributing paper for kids to work on.

In the city, I think ~30% lack internet, which is gross considering that 90% of the population is within a few hundred yards of extensive fiber optic infrastructure laid to support the state government and universities.

Mid sized American city with 200K without internet?? Let’s be generous and say that that represents 1/4 of the population (for context, this suggests 10% of broader US population goes without: https://www.allconnect.com/blog/33-million-americans-dont-us...). That makes your city’s population 800,000. That’s in the top 20 of cities by size (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities...).

If you raise the percentage of the city that represents up, it starts to get unbelievable. If you vary it down, your city wouldn’t qualify well as midsized. Do you have a source for your claim?

Also, it wasn't "broadcast radio" but more like ham radio, offering a level of interactivity most internet connections at the time couldn't offer.

When I heard of it, in the 1990s, most internet connections were still dial-up, not broadband, probably even more so in the Australian Outback.

Aside from that, it seems farms in the Outback were often already equipped with ham radios, while computers weren't as widespread, and still quite expensive.

You are of course referring to the School of the Air:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_of_the_Air

That remote learning system actually started back in the early 50s, a time well before the age of the internet.

The internet connection probably didn’t exist or it was too slow in the outback. I’m from a relatively densely-populated part of the country and we only recently got satellite, before that the only other option was dial-up or a USB device that plugged into your computer and allowed it to use 3G.

Haven't correspondence courses also been a thing forever?

This, I remember my grandfather learned to repair watches this way

This is what the Philippines is doing for distance learning for mountain provinces.

I find it interesting, while most South East Asian countries/ASEAN/the world does Internet distance, there's significant infrastructure issue that make radio best.

Same as why most emerging economies embraced cell phones much more readily vs ever having copper lines strung across.

Broadcast classes never went away. There are thousands of radio and television stations in the United States today that are still owned by local school districts and other quangos, and still broadcast classes and class material.

The COVID pandemic has expanded the use of broadcast classes in a number of cities, including San Diego and Las Vegas.

Australia has done remote instruction for decades. It boggles my mind that we are not borrowing existing and proven educational technology.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_of_the_Air

Hum... Brazil is borrowing the tried and tested ideas of education over radio and TV for remote instruction in rural areas.

At the same time, everybody is trying as hard as they can to stop needing them. That's because those techs suck. It is much easier to learn when you have any bit of interactivity, the more interactivity, the easier it is. Broadcast and postage are just not suitable.

School of the air is not broadcast radio, it is ham radio which is interactive.

We who? Anyone who has the Internet can use YouTube and Khan Academy and Zoom for a far better experience than SoA. Anyone else can use SoA.

Mexico has remove TV instruction right now I think:

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-53917882

The radio in the picture is more classy (Philco 90 lowboy?).. OT, but the current HBO show Lovecraft Country is awesome because of the old radios!

https://www.worthpoint.com/worthopedia/vintage-1931-philco-m...

http://www.tuberadioland.com/philco90_lowboy_main.html

FWIW, Television-based mass education has been mainstream in India since late 1980s. NCERT (1) TV slots in the government-run free-to-air TV channel (Doordarshan) is how many thousands learn, and graduate (in combination with IGNOU, which is an open university).

(1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Institute_of_Education...

Clearly remote learning has been around the entire time there has been remote speaking.

The boy on the left was dilligently studying.

The girl was waiting to see if she was being watched, so she could do something else.

The boy on the far right, with the dragon hairdoo, was about to jump on the family cat and terrorize it.

And the last boy was reading what interested him, which was a different subject from what was on the radio!

"This pandemic could reshape education once school safely shifts back to the classroom..." ...just like, after the 1937 polio epidemic, radio remained a key tool for the deliver of education to children. Oh, wait...

Sounds like radio learning would make you a really good.... listener?

I wonder if there is research on which subjects work best this way. I believe I have heard about a literacy program that was done over radio that was shockingly successful.

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