ABSTRACT
Two design cases examine historically significant projects in technology-assisted instruction developed at Stanford in the 1960s and 1970s: Computer Assisted Instruction (CAI) and the Nicaraguan Radio Mathematics Project (NRMP) reveal the intellectual heritage of technology-enhanced instruction. Like MOOCs, the goals of both CAI and NRMP were to improve educational quality, provide effective, low-cost access to education, and to deploy available technologies to enhance teaching and learning at scale. These cases examine the practical and theoretical forces which influenced the evolution of CAI to NRMP, to the widely deployed Interactive Radio Instruction (IRI), to MOOCs. Through exploration of the commonalities in instructional design and use of technology, they illustrate how our current educational technology designs rest on the foundations of these early experiments.
