If Anant Agarwal can walk around the Harvard/MIT Summit of Higher Education with a cognitive science paper written in 1972, I can herald the work of Soren Nipper and his generational view of distance education.  The difference being, Nipper’s work is seminal in the history of distance education, and the piece is both critical of lackadaisical pedagogy as well as cautious of, as he calls it, computer conferencing without accounting for the numerous variables inherent in learning.

There’s lots of good academic reading in this field — Terry Anderson, John Daniel, Tony Bates — but Nipper comes up in all of it.