Just seeing this on-page image reminds me of some very early distance learning from many years ago. It involved typewriting, not just typing a few letters here and there. No, this was very serious stuff that helped the student to pick up fantastic speeds and accuracy over several weeks of tutoring via headphones from taped lessons, or even live broadcasts on a particular radio channel. The drawback to the latter was the speed was set and you had no way of slowing the tutor down – if you missed a bit, you had to skip ahead to catch up on the lesson, with no form of catching up on the lost section. At least with a tape recorded lesson, you could wind it back to the lost spots – I used to prefer this method, although it seemed very old and clunky compared to audio typing which became my absolute favourite of these dark arts! Audio involved the supply of headphone attached to foot pedals. These pedals were operated by taping buttons with one’s toes. I believe left was ‘stop go back’ middle was ‘stop’ and right was go ahead and keep going until the end. You could go back and listen as many times as you needed but this did defeat the object of learning to type as accuraely as physically possible.
