Distance education has going on at NYU since the 1950s.
The first course offered was “Comparative Literature 10: From Stendhal to Hemingway,” taught by Dr. Floyd Zulli, Jr., an assistant professor of romance languages at the College of Arts and Science. The 3-point course studied the development of the novel from Stendhal’s The Red and the Black to Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises. View a preview of the course below:
Some other fun facts:
• NYU hosted the first university course for academic credit ever offered on a New York metropolitan-area television station.
• Produced by CBS-TV in association with NYU, the Sunrise Semester series began in 1957 as an experiment and ran for almost 25 years.
• To receive 3 college credits, 177 students paid $25 per point. More than 700 students applied and some 120,000 others followed the course—without credit—on television
Thank-you for posting this segment of Sunrise Semester! Dr. Floyd Zulli was an excellent, as well as, an eloquent educator, who greatly enhanced the reading of great literature with his own personal style, which was both captivating and engaging. I am dismayed that his entire series of lectures from the Sunrise Semester Course is not available in this digital age. His readings are timeless, and deserve a place of distinction on literary sites, etc., in our present day, on the Internet. As one of his early morning students, it is my wish, that someday, somehow, his fascinating lectures and insights will be made available again to audiences both here and abroad.