The people who acquired this vision

The people who acquired this vision and led others to it in this century were often initially intrigued by the potentialities of hardware devices such as the stereopticon, the slide projector, the motion-picture camera and projector. Since learning always involves stimulation of the learner, it was apparent that these devices made possible stimulation for learning that was both deliberately designed and replicable. Consideration of these features raised questions for the intellectually curious. Could the stimulation required for particular learning objectives be designed and recorded on film, so as to be presented many times to many different learners? Could such recorded presentations be employed to circumvent the unfortunate but often unavoidable variability in instruction quality that marked poor teaching? Could certain identifiable portions of presentations for learning, well established in their content and objectives, be made available for teacher use as standard segments of instruction, replicable from class to class? Could some kinds of stimulation for learning be presented by film-related devices that would be difficult or impossible to present in other ways? And as a possibility, could presentations be devised that in some respects captured the most ingenious techniques of superior teaching?