Online learning's future must balance innovation, values

Online learning seems new, but it’s older than you think.

The field’s predecessor, distance education, can be traced back centuries. From Sir Isaac Pitman, who taught shorthand by correspondence in 1840, to lectures broadcast on the radio in the early 1920s, all the way through to the early 1990s when colleges and universities took advantage of the newly minted World Wide Web and began to offer online education programs, it has evolved alongside technological advances.

In those early days of the internet, online learning was an adjustment for students, too. When Bellevue University launched it...