The first distance education program in the United States dates back to 1728, although most people think of online programs when they contemplate distance learning today. That first distance education program was a short hand course advertised in the Boston Gazette, in which lessons were sent to students through the mail on a weekly basis. Nowadays, however, people can attend an accredited online university and get a broad spectrum of coursework delivered via the Internet. Students can complete anything from technical degrees to bachelor's degrees to online graduate degrees.

What we consider the true modern model of the distance education program has been around since the 1840s, when Isaac Pitman taught shorthand in Great Britain through correspondence. After the postal service developed in the 1800s, commercial correspondence colleges started to pop up all across the United States. While the idea of an accredited online university is based on the same idea, the colleges today offer a much more comprehensive educational system thanks to the technologies available. Online graduate degrees require a great deal of dedication on behalf of the student that man may have once thought impossible through remote schooling, but modern schools have proved that wrong.

The first university to offer a distance education program was the University of London, which established the External Programme in 1858. The University of Queensland also started a distance education program in Australia in 1911, which was administered by the school's Department of Correspondence Studies. Other schools in South Africa, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and Germany continued to start similar programs throughout the early and mid 20th century.

Charles Wedemeyer of the University of Wisconsin at Madison is considered the father of modern distance education in America. Many agree that the United States has been most innovative when it comes to the accredited online university, where all coursework is completed online and the student receives a qualified higher education degree at the end. Numerous people are now able to complete their distance education degree this way.