The Herald-Times
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Robert "Bob" Heinich died January 12, 2020 at a retirement community in Colorado Springs following a brief illness. He is survived by his wife, Christine, and their son, Paul. A resident of Bloomington from 1969 to 1994, Bob was born in 1923 in Queens and attended Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan, a magnet school for math and science. He developed an early interest in art films and making recordings of dramatic poems-interests that eventually led him to the field of audiovisual education and eventually to the Indiana University faculty.
After serving in the Army Air Corps in World War II, he enrolled at Colorado State College, where he met his future wife, Christine Rebecca Finegan. From 1949 to 1962 Bob served as audio-visual director of Colorado Springs public schools. While his program was gaining national repute, he also served as president of the Friends of the Library and of the credit union, wrote record reviews for the city's newspaper, and acted in an amateur theatrical group.
In 1962 he left to pursue a Ph.D. at University of Southern California, which he accomplished with distinction when his dissertation was recognized as the outstanding dissertation of 1967 at USC and was published by the Association for Educational Communications and Technology (AECT) as one of the foundational works in the new field of instructional technology.
In 1967 he became director of the new Educational Systems Division of Doubleday & Co. In 1969 he left to join the Instructional Systems Technology faculty at Indiana University, where he was to remain until his retirement in 1990, serving as department chair 1979-84. In 1971-72 he served as president of AECT, and during his presidency the association established the ECT Foundation, of which Heinich became the first president. He was also editor of the leading research journal for 13 years, but is probably best known as co-author of Instructional Media and the New Technologies of Instruction, first published in 1982, and still going in its 12th edition-the most widely adopted textbook in its field. Bob's career achievements earned Distinguished Achievement awards from two major professional associations and the Distinguished Alumni award from University of Northern Colorado (formerly Colorado State College) in 1995.
After retirement, Bob and Chris participated in square-dancing and ballroom-dancing clubs, in Colorado in the summers and in Monroe and Brown counties the rest of the year, until moving to Colorado Springs in 1994. There Bob continued to do photography, to expand his formidable collection of recorded classical music, poetry, and drama, and to work with the local historical society.
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