Chapter 2: Case studies introduction

CASE STUDIES OF DISTANCE TRAINING IN THE EUROPEAN UNION Desmond Keegan Hugh O Neill Distance Education International Ltd. Chapter 2 Case studies introduction

The presentation of case studies in the Voctade report is necessary for a number of reasons.

There is little knowledge of how the sector of distance education and training works among educational researchers and educational administrators; few understand the daily workings of an open university or a national distance training institution; the four institutional models identified in this study have not been presented before in the literature; the day-to-day constraints of teaching at a distance are little understood:

the shelf-life of courses
the turn-around time of assignments
certification at a distance
student alienation
choice of technologies for the home-based student
cost-effective course production
Tutor marked assignments and Computer marked assignments (TMAs and CMAs)
choice of technologies that will remain with the same protocol for the shelf life of courses
the industrialisation of the educational process.

These 16 case studies show the richness and diversity of EU distance training provision. They demonstrate that in this study no harmonisation is intended or implied. Even within the institutional groupings there is a striking divergence: from the large well-established open universities to the new open university foundations in the last few years, a plethora of strategies for the teaching of courses at a distance from ordinary universities; the national characteristics of the government distance training polytechnics; the range of proprietary institutions, from institutions with six figure enrolments, to colleges with a few hundred.

The institutions represent twelve of the member states of the European Union and teach in Spanish, English, Greek, Danish, Catalan, Finnish, Italian, Swedish, French, Dutch, and German.

For purposes of analysis each of the 16 case studies follows the same pattern:

Title, name, address, telephone
Official status as a training provider and history
Training provision: courses
Training provision: certification
Training provision: statistics
Training provision: finances
Course development policies
Student support services policies
Employment: numbers and categories
Plans

These categories are built up from Keegan's analysis of the two characteristic subsystems of distance institutions:

Course development subsystem
Student support subsystem

in his book Foundations of distance education.

Miller and Rice (1967) in their Systems of organisation. The Control of Task and Sentient Boundaries, show how organizations can be characterized by their essential operating activities and show the importance of analysing task boundaries and sentient (personal) boundaries in administration. In Miller and Rice's terms it is important to identify the 'operation activities' that characterize the enterprise. The operating activities are those that directly contribute to the import/conversion/export processes which define the nature of the enterprise and differentiate it from other enterprises.

Millar and Rice's theory of system organization was applied to the organization of distance education systems by Kaye and Rumble (1981). They had little difficulty in identifying two characteristic operating subsystems, 'course development' and 'student support services', and the task boundaries that separate these activities within the organization from other activities.

Keegan developed this analysis and showed that the course development subsystem comprises the planning, designing, crystallizing, and recording of the teaching (together with the proposed methodologies and structures for presenting the teaching at a future date) in mechanical or electronic form. The student support subsystem comprises the activities designed by the institution to focus on the student's home (or institutional centre near the students' home) that will provide a private and individualized presentation of the pre-recorded course content, together with the simulation of teacher and peer-group clarification, that normally accompany the presentation of courses in oral, group-based educational provision.

Distance education enterprises have clusters of task and sentient boundaries which focus on the process of 'course development' and others which focus on the process of 'support services for students studying at home' in a way which cannot be found in other educational institutions. These two characteristic operating subsystems define the nature of a distance system and differentiate it from other forms of educational administration.

These case studies present an excellent cross-section of the European Union's institutions which are at the cutting edge of the current industrialisation of vocational education and training and the privatisation of institutional learning in Europe.

The case studies show the richness and complexity of distance training provision in the European Union today, the contrasting solutions to the challenge of developing systems for students studying at a distance shown in the four models into which the study is divided, and striking national difference within the four models.