Examines educational history to discover the process by which curriculum became a universal idea and how the concept of the classroom was invented. Argues that universal ideas and inventions such as the classroom result in the creation of dominant institutional categories that exert a powerful influence over what can or cannot be done by…

This case study of historical research on the topic of higher education focuses on the history of postsecondary distance education in an industrialized nation. The social history of the Open Learning Institute (OLI) of British Columbia is used to analyze how a new higher education institution establishes itself in its community, the consequences…