Arkansas State Normal School (now the University of Central Arkansas-UCA) was created to rid the state of haphazard teachers. The vast majority of Arkansas teachers in the late 19th century and early 20th century, had no college experience. In fact, as late as 1927 Arkansas had 80,000 students whose teachers had a high school diploma or less. And, of those 80,000 students, 40,000 were taught by teachers who had an eighth grade education or less. Arkansas State Normal School was created in 1907 to educate men and women in the art of teaching and rid the state of uneducated classroom instructors.
In order to utilize every opportunity to educate Arkansans, The University of Central Arkansas (UCA) under the leadership of President B.W. Torreyson, decided to offer correspondence courses. Torreyson was heavily influenced to offer extension courses by Dr. Frank Harrin. Dr. Harrin had taught extension courses for the University of Arkansas while teaching at Little Rock High School. Torreyson agreed with Harrin that extension courses needed to be offered by UCA, but wanted to wait until World War I was over to offer the courses.
The December 28, 1918 edition of the Log Cabin Democrat carried the following:
A feature of much interest which will be inaugurated by the
Normal with the opening of the winter term will be a system
of correspondence instruction for those unable to attend the
school in person. Twenty different courses embracing as much
of the entire curriculum as possible to be given by mail and
including work in every department is offered in this work.
In the fall of 1920, four plans of study had been created. Extension work (correspondence courses) was being done by mail, home study groups were held and overseen by UCA instructors, in “mixed groups” that were taught by several faculty members-each lecturing on a particular topic, and “vitalizing courses” which called for organized groups to read specific books and discuss the books within the group. The titles of the first books used in vitalizing courses are as follows: Evolution of Dodd, Penrod, Phelps and His Teachers, Jean Mitchell’s School and Emmy Lou. In a September 2003, check of UCA’s Torreyson Library, only Evolution of Dodd and Penrod are still on the shelf. The other three books have been removed from the library’s holdings.
The number of students engaged in extension work was at first a trickle. However, in just a short time there were more students enrolled in extension courses than there were in the resident classes. In May 1919, only ninety-one students were enrolled in extension courses, but by October 1921 that number had increased dramatically. In 1928 there were 935 students enrolled in the regular session, 1,945 in the summer session, 2,245 were taking correspondence courses and 4,138 were in classes or study clubs in various Arkansas cities. So, in 1928 a total of 9,263 students were being educated either on or off campus by the University of Central Arkansas.
The first extension class was held in Plumerville, Arkansas, in the fall of 1921, and was taught by Dr. Frank Harrin. Other classes were held at Clarksville and Paragould with Professor Denney instructing. Dora B. Smith instructed a class at Wooster and also at Greenbrier, and Daisy Dickerman taught the Mayflower extension class. All of these classes had at least twenty-five students. The largest class was taught by Professor Denney at Paragould and had seventy-five students. These classes met for two hours every other week for a period of sixteen weeks, and were worth one hour of credit.