Since the establishment of Departments of Continuing Education at Oxford and Cambridge Universities in the 1870’s, the free dissemination of select courses by the Lowell Institute through Harvard in the 1910’s, and the establishment of extension centers through the 1914 Smith-Lever Act, units named continuing education, professional education, and extension, have served the perceived “non-traditional” demographic, often enabling transfer of knowledge to a larger population than served through the academic core of degree based units of the same institutions.
