An old-fashioned form of distance learning, a correspondence course is a course in which you study at home, receiving your work by post and sending it back by post.

Correspondence courses were introduced for adults who wanted to continue training while working full-time and for people who lived far away from institutions of learning.

Once hailed as a key element in the newly developed concept of lifelong learning, correspondence courses lost their appeal to interactive media, in particular the Internet.

The first subject thaught by correspondence was the Pitman Shorthand a technic of stenography.