Audiovisual Education, History of

The Audiovisual Era

With the introduction of recorded sound and radio broadcasting, sound recording was integrated with film during the 1920s, beginning the transition from the visual instruction movement to what was soon to be known as the audiovisual era.

In 1920, the Radio Division of the U.S. Department of Commerce was established, and it began to license commercial and educational radio stations. Later, during the 1920s and the early 1930s, radio became the focus of a number of educational endeavors throughout the nation as colleges and universities experimented with educational radio and began to integrate audio technology with film and visual instruction methodologies. Among these was the Ohio School of the Air in 1929, launched in a joint effort by the State of Ohio, Ohio State University, and a Cincinnati radio station.

Classroom broadcasting to enhance instruction spread rapidly during the decades preceding World War II. Typical broadcasts included lectures and performances by college bands and orchestras. Likewise, university extension divisions offered on-site and correspondence courses and in-service training, sponsored conferences, and published texts and materials in audiovisual education.

The advent of film with sound in the late 1920s introduced a critical period in instructional film history from another perspective: Just as educators were becoming convinced of the educational merits of the silent film, the advocates of film with sound realized that they would have to fight the old battle all over again to gain acceptance for this new technology, especially since they believed many educators feared that film with sound would make their silent film equipment obsolete. Aside from this battle, the commercial education film enterprise was failing at an alarming rate during the late 1920s and early 1930s due to the Great Depression.

Audiovisual Education during War

World War II gave a big boost to the emerging field of instructional design and to the audiovisual era, and the need to rapidly train tens of thousands of new military personnel created a heightened interest in applying educational research in a systematic way.

Many educational researchers participated in the war training effort, and this helped to propel forward systematic efforts to design instruction. During the war, the benefits of this effort to audiovisual media were seen primarily in increased use of educational media to train military personnel and to satisfy the demand for training millions of industrial workers as rapidly and effectively as possible. This spurred an unprecedented production of educational films for training purposes.

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