Mary Ward was a risk taker. As a teacher at the San Francisco State Normal school she was responsible for assisted future teachers with self-instructed learning. The required materials, documentation, assessments, and other materials can be found with books which she authored. Pupil's Self-Instruction Arithmetic, book two, Application of Percentage(call number QA103W26 v.2) and Pupil's Self-Instruction Arithmetic Formal and Problem Percentage(call number QA103W26 v.1) are two such books which she created while working at the San Francisco State Normal School. There are texts can be found in the San Francisco State Library main collection.
If her texts were created today they could easily be adapted and used in conjuntion with a web based distance education course. Today with the growth of technology, distance education is just in its infancy. Using the model of self-instruction which Burk and Ward fostered in the early 1900's distance education is on the rise. Every semester more and more Colleges and Universities offer this style of learning. This model was truly before its time.