Faculty of Education executive dean Barney Dalgarno said old databases didn't link up to the modern record-keeping systems.

"We know that at least 20,000 students have graduated from the combination of CCAE and University of Canberra. We think it's quite a few thousand more than that," he said.

The university is celebrating hitting the 50-year milestone with events welcoming past students and tutors back to campus.

Coralie Amos was in the second cohort to study at the then School of Teacher Education in 1972 when ACT split from the NSW school authority. Teachers were required to do four years of training instead of two.

"You could park just outside building 5 on a dirt paddock and just two minutes and you're in your lecture room," she said.

"Most people knew everybody else and it was just good fun. And the times were changing in 1972 because we were becoming our own boss and new ideas were coming in. So it made for exciting, innovative times."

Primary schools were booming as public servants from Melbourne, Sydney and Adelaide moved their families to the capital.

Mrs Amos remembers learning about how to use the television in the classroom and eventually the Apple Mac computers came into schools.

She has maintained her connection to the university as a volunteer at the Australian National Museum of Education for the past 10 years, collecting and cataloguing everything from slates, ink powders, magazines and school year books.

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While many things have changed in teacher education, Professor Dalgarno said the core elements have stayed the same.

"It's really interesting reading the history of the faculty, that some of our early innovations were having students out in schools every week, which in fact, is one of the things we do now ... I think we've always stood for that real combination of theory and practice."

For Mrs Amos, education trends are a like a big circle, especially in the fields of grammar and literacy.

"Often things go around and then they come back to where they start."