''Continental Classroom'' is a U.S.

educational television Educational television or learning television is the use of television programs in the field of distance education. It may be in the form of individual television programs or dedicated specialty channels that are often associated with cable televi ...

program that was broadcast on the

NBC The National Broadcasting Company (NBC) is an American commercial broadcast television and radio network serving as the flagship property of the NBC Entertainment division of NBCUniversal, a subsidiary of Comcast. It is one of NBCUniversal's ...

network five days a week in the early morning from 1958 to 1963, covering physics, chemistry, mathematics, and American government. It was targeted at teachers and college students and many institutions offered college credit for courses of which the broadcasts were the main component. The physics course was the first course in the subject available for credit nationwide and the government course was the first nationally broadcast TV course in social studies; the mathematics course has been called the first

MOOC A massive open online course (MOOC ) or an open online course is an online course aimed at unlimited participation and open access via the World Wide Web, Web. In addition to traditional course materials, such as filmed lectures, readings, and p ...

(massive open online course) in statistics.

Background, production and format

The idea for the course came from the drive to upgrade science education in the US after the Soviet Union's successful launch of

Sputnik Sputnik 1 (, , ''Satellite 1''), sometimes referred to as simply Sputnik, was the first artificial Earth satellite. It was launched into an elliptical low Earth orbit by the Soviet Union on 4 October 1957 as part of the Soviet space progra ...

in 1957. Learning of a plan by the New York State Commissioner of Education, James Allen, to spend $600,000 on a refresher course for science teachers, Edward Stanley, Director of Public Affairs and Education at NBC, decided the network could do the same nationwide for not much more money. The

American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education AACTE (American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education) is a nonprofit national association of educator preparation programs, including universities and community colleges, dedicated to professional development of Pre-K-12 teachers and sch ...

was also planning a pilot project on using television in teacher training. Major funding for the program came from the

Ford Foundation The Ford Foundation is an American private foundation with the stated goal of advancing human welfare. Created in 1936 by Edsel Ford and his father Henry Ford, it was originally funded by a $25,000 (about $550,000 in 2023) gift from Edsel Ford. ...

and from various corporations. John Crosby
"Television and Radio"
''

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'' (Sarasota, Florida), January 16, 1959, p. 13."TV Course Offers Chemistry, Physics"
''

The Victoria Advocate ''The Victoria Advocate'' is a daily newspaper independently published in Victoria, Texas. It is the second-oldest paper in Texas and the oldest west of the Colorado River, dating back to May 8, 1846, following the Battle of Palo Alto The Ba ...

'' (Victoria, Texas), October 4, 1959, p. 11C. The title came from a phrase Stanley used to explain the idea to James Killian, science advisor to

President Eisenhower Dwight David "Ike" Eisenhower (born David Dwight Eisenhower; October 14, 1890 – March 28, 1969) was the 34th president of the United States, serving from 1953 to 1961. During World War II, he was Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary ...

.Carlisle, p. 48. Physics for the nuclear age was the topic of the first year's course, which was broadcast from 6:30 to 7:00 in the morning Monday through Friday. The second course, in chemistry, was preceded by a rebroadcast of the physics course at 6:00 am. Courses in mathematics and American government followed. The Ford Foundation withdrew its funding for the fourth season, and the network subsequently canceled the program. The fifth season was a rebroadcast of the fourth, the last program airing on May 17, 1963. Lecturers were paid $40,000 for a year of at least 130 half-hour lectures, and could have one or more paid assistants. They were given use of an apartment in Manhattan and their children were placed by NBC in good schools. They worked from outlines, rather than memorizing scripts. Each lecture was recorded in a four-hour studio session some two weeks ahead of the air date,Stanley K. Derby
"Continental Classroom: an Experiment in Educational Television"
''School Science and Mathematics'' 59.8 (November 1959) 651–59 (subscription required). usually in the afternoon by instructor preference. The first two seasons used three cameras; after the loss of the Ford Foundation support, this was reduced to two. The total budget was between $1.2 and $1.5 million a year. The program attracted more viewers and a wider variety of viewers than NBC had expected: 400,000 for the physics course, 600,000 for chemistry, and one and a half million for American government, and including high-school classes (two of them for blind students), more than 800 engineers in the

San Francisco Bay Area The San Francisco Bay Area, commonly known as the Bay Area, is a List of regions of California, region of California surrounding and including San Francisco Bay, and anchored by the cities of Oakland, San Francisco, and San Jose, California, S ...

, nuns, 500 inmates of

San Quentin State Prison San Quentin Rehabilitation Center (SQ), formerly known as San Quentin State Prison, is a California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation state prison for men, located north of San Francisco in the unincorporated area, unincorporated place ...

in California, parents of students studying science, and other members of the public, including many 6–14-year-olds.Carlisle, pp. 49–51.Marcel C. LaFollette, ''Science on American Television: A History'', Chicago/London: University of Chicago, 2013,
p. 32
, one eighth of the viewers were teachers, four fifths of those science teachers. At its peak the program was shown on 172 stations, including some

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and

CBS CBS Broadcasting Inc., commonly shortened to CBS (an abbreviation of its original name, Columbia Broadcasting System), is an American commercial broadcast television and radio network serving as the flagship property of the CBS Entertainme ...

affiliates and

public television Public broadcasting (or public service broadcasting) is radio, television, and other electronic media outlets whose primary mission is public service with a commitment to avoiding political and commercial influence. Public broadcasters receive f ...

stations."Continental Classroom", Wesley Hyatt, ''The Encyclopedia of Daytime Television'', New York: Billboard, 1997, , p. 105. Each course had an accompanying textbook, and about an hour of homework was assigned for each lecture; local colleges and universities were free to impose their own requirements such as discussion sessions, and to determine fees, for students to receive credit for the course. More than 400 institutions offered courses built around the program, for credit ranging from zero to seven hours; the maximum number of students watching the program for credit in any season was under 5,000. (The physics course was announced only about a month in advance of its start, causing logistical problems for colleges.) In some markets, such as New York, the program was ultimately re-run in the afternoon, and tapes were produced that some colleges used. David S. Moore
Interview with Frederick Mosteller
(conducted on December 18, 1992), ''Journal of Statistics Education'' 1.1 (1993).

Season 1: Physics

The first course began on October 6, 1958, and consisted of 165 lectures under the title ''Atomic Age Physics'' by Harvey White, head of the physics department at the

University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California), is a Public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Berkeley, California, United States. Founded in 1868 and named after t ...

. It was the first nationwide course offered for credit in physics. White, described by ''

Time Time is the continuous progression of existence that occurs in an apparently irreversible process, irreversible succession from the past, through the present, and into the future. It is a component quantity of various measurements used to sequ ...

'' as looking "like an insomniac alchemist" on the program, had seven

Nobel Prize The Nobel Prizes ( ; ; ) are awards administered by the Nobel Foundation and granted in accordance with the principle of "for the greatest benefit to humankind". The prizes were first awarded in 1901, marking the fifth anniversary of Alfred N ...

winners appear as guest lecturers, one of them being Carl D. Anderson.

Season 2: Chemistry

For the second season, on chemistry, the lecturer was John F. Baxter of the

University of Florida The University of Florida (Florida or UF) is a public university, public land-grant university, land-grant research university in Gainesville, Florida, United States. It is a senior member of the State University System of Florida and a preem ...

, and NBC broadcast the program in color. Nobel Prize winner

Glenn Seaborg Glenn Theodore Seaborg ( ; April 19, 1912February 25, 1999) was an American chemist whose involvement in the synthesis, discovery and investigation of ten transuranium elements earned him a share of the 1951 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. His work i ...

, then Chancellor at Berkeley, appeared on the first broadcast of the season. The physics course was repeated during the preceding half hour, and chemists and physicists began watching each other's programs in addition.

Season 3: Mathematics

The ''Contemporary Mathematics'' course that began in fall 1960 was divided in two ways: each week, the Monday, Wednesday, and Friday classes were for college students and the Tuesday and Thursday classes for teachers; and in addition, the first half of the course was ''Modern Algebra'', taught by John Kelley of Berkeley and Julius H. Hlavaty of

DeWitt Clinton High School DeWitt Clinton High School is a public high school located since 1929 in the Bronx borough of New York City. Opened in 1897 in Lower Manhattan as an all-boys school, it maintained that status for 86 years before becoming co-ed in 1983. From i ...

, New York, respectively, and the second ''Probability and Statistics'', taught by

Frederick Mosteller Charles Frederick Mosteller (December 24, 1916 – July 23, 2006) was an American mathematician, considered one of the most eminent statisticians of the 20th century. He was the founding chairman of Harvard's statistics department from 1957 to 1 ...

, chairman of the department of statistics at

Harvard University Harvard University is a Private university, private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Founded in 1636 and named for its first benefactor, the History of the Puritans in North America, Puritan clergyma ...

, and Paul Clifford of

Montclair State College Montclair State University (MSU) is a public research university in Montclair, New Jersey, with parts of the campus extending into Clifton and into Little Falls. As of fall 2018, Montclair State was, by enrollment, the second largest public un ...

.Carlisle, pp. 50–51. G. Baley Price, "The Mathematical Scene, 1940–1965", in ''A Century of Mathematics in America, Part 1'', ed. Peter Duren with Richard A. Askey and Uta C. Merzbach, History of Mathematics 1, Providence, Rhode Island:

American Mathematical Society The American Mathematical Society (AMS) is an association of professional mathematicians dedicated to the interests of mathematical research and scholarship, and serves the national and international community through its publications, meetings, ...

, 1988, corrected repr. 1989, , pp. 379–404
p. 398
The number of institutions offering credit for the course rose that year; probability was not commonly offered at the time. Exams were mailed out to participating institutions. According to Mosteller, more than 75,000 students took the probability and statistics course for credit at 320 colleges.Rick Wicklin

blog,

SAS Institute SAS Institute (or SAS, pronounced "sass") is an American multinational developer of analytics and artificial intelligence software based in Cary, North Carolina. SAS develops and markets a suite of analytics software ( also called SAS), which ...

, October 2, 2013. Some high schools also gave credit for it. Gottfried Noether, then at

Boston University Boston University (BU) is a Private university, private research university in Boston, Massachusetts, United States. BU was founded in 1839 by a group of Boston Methodism, Methodists with its original campus in Newbury (town), Vermont, Newbur ...

, helped develop the course and administer it at the institutional level.

Seasons 4 and 5: Government

The course in government was titled ''American Government: Structure and Function'' and taught by Peter H. Odegard, chairman of the political science department at Berkeley.Carlisle, pp. 51–52. It was the first college-credit course in social studies to be available on national television; the audience included over half the high-school social science teachers in the US. For the fifth season, in 1962–63, there were plans for a course in economics, but NBC decided the cost of the program was too high, and instead the government course was repeated.

''Education Exchange''

In the 1963–64 season ''Continental Classroom'' became ''Education Exchange'', which aired for the last time on December 18, 1964. This took the form of short courses on specific topics developed by outside agencies, such as a 20-day series on safety, and series titled ''Wall Street for Everyone'' and ''Sex in American Culture''.

Reception

In its first season the program won the 1958

Peabody Award The George Foster Peabody Awards (or simply Peabody Awards or the Peabodys) program, named for the American businessman and philanthropist George Foster Peabody, George Peabody, honor what are described as the most powerful, enlightening, and in ...

for Television Education and the 1958 Sylvania Television Award for Outstanding Public Service Series. Stanley of NBC said that Alexander Stoddard, the former superintendent of schools in Los Angeles, had told him ''Continental Classroom'' was "the most significant thing that happened in American education in the last 100 years" and that the

League of Women Voters The League of Women Voters (LWV) is a nonpartisan American nonprofit political organization. Founded in 1920, its ongoing major activities include Voter registration, registering voters, providing voter information, boosting voter turnout and adv ...

had been convinced NBC had produced the government course "just for them". Teachers taking the courses for in-service credit reported that they were useful for keeping up to date, even for recent graduates.Donald H. Dooley
"Chemistry at the Crack of Dawn"
''

The Milwaukee Journal The ''Milwaukee Journal Sentinel'' is a daily morning broadsheet printed in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where it is the primary newspaper and also the largest newspaper in the state of Wisconsin, where it is widely read. It was purchased by the ...

'', February 21, 1960, p. 26. In 1992, David S. Moore looked back on it as "quite remarkable", a precursor of programs for highly motivated learners like the

National Technological University The National Technological University (, UTN) is a country-wide national university in Argentina, and considered to be among the top engineering schools in the country. Hosting over 85,000 students, its student body is comparable to Argentina's ...

. The statistics and probability course has been called the first

in statistics.