Chapter 6
Enseignement à Distance

Category: Government Distance Training Institution

Country: Belgium: The French speaking Community in Belgium

Location: Brussels

Language of Instruction: French

The distance training institute of the government of the French speaking community of Belgium was located on the 17th floor of one of a cluster of sky-scrapers at Blvd Emile Jacqmain in the heart of Brussels but moved in late 1997 to:
rue Royale 204, Brussels
Belgium.
Telephone 00 322 2077521.

Its official title is Enseignment à Distance de la Communauté Française de Belgique

Official Status

The Service de l'Enseignment à distance de la Communauté Française de Belgique was founded in 1959. Today it offers 150 courses to about 50,000 students of whom 13,574 were newly enrolled in 1997.

Its origins are described in detail in the 1975 book by Weinstock Enseignment à distance du secteur Privé en Belgique.

The documentation of the Enseignment à distance states that it is a public service. It falls clearly within the model of the Government Distance Training Institution, with parallels in France (CNED), New Zealand, Australia and Spain (CIDEAD), as described in Volume 2 of the Voctade report under Institutional Modelling.

The documentation points out that the teaching staff (Le personnel enseignmant), the Government authorisation (L'inspecteur) and the administrative proceedings (L'administration) are exactly the same as for Government provision face-to-face.

In particular it is understood that the Ministry:

Training provision: courses

Six types of provision are available: There are 150 courses in these groupings:

Training provision: certification

Courses prepare for examinations of:

Training provision: statistics

The introduction of an administration fee in 1993 has caused an increase in the number of courses that each student takes from two in 1991 to four in 1995 and a drop in the number of those enrolled, so that the volume of courses studied has increased slightly to 55,886 in 1997 in spite of the reduction in the number of individual enrolments:
New enrolments 1991: 23,097
New enrolments 1992: 22,210
New enrolments 1993: 15,823
New enrolments 1994: 14,440
New enrolments 1995: 13,574
New enrolments 1996: 13,560
New enrolments 1997: 13,500
Enrolments for Enseignment à distance from 1991-'97
The image shows the enrolment figures stated above in a bar graphic.

Nearly all students are adult; less than 4% in 1997 were under the age of 18.

New enrolments in 1997 were in:

Training provision: finances

The college is subject to Ministry of Education regulations which stipulate that the distance education provision was free up to 1993 when an administrative charge of 40 ecu/euro was introduced, following on a cabinet decision of 28th September 1992 to impose a non-tuition fee. Various classes of citizens are exempt from the fees: The annual budget is Ecu/Euro 5.200.000 which includes Ecu 1.300.000 for part time tutors, Ecu/Euro 5.200.000 for printing and salaries for 50 full time staff, rental of premises, postage, computing, materials and production of cassettes.

Course development policies

Courses are written by the tutors at home, edited by the staff of the Enseignement à Distance and prepared for publication.

Student support services

It is a very 'open' system. You enrol when you want, you do as many courses as you want, you pay no fees, you do as much work as you want, you follow your own rhythm, you finish when you want. It is a very student-centred system, with the statistics changing all the time as one student enrols and another finishes - there are always about 50,000 student enrolments in the system. The Enseignement à Distance administration and records are heavily computerised.

Employment

The 50 full-time staff are administrative; they do not teach. They manage, control assignments, edit courses, deal with postage, records, warehousing, and the pre-production of course materials.

The college employs 400 part-time tutors who, by regulation, must be teachers in government schools and who can work for the Enseignement à Distance for a maximum of 14 hours per week, 56 hours per month, and who on average work 7 hours per week in distance training.

The price per assignment corrected is Ecu 6.5 and as the part-time staff are paid by assignment corrected or materials developed, their numbers are not important in budgetary terms. To combat unemployment, the Ministry has in recent years increased their numbers (and reduced the number of assignments per tutor).

Future Plans

It was a strange experience for the Voctade researchers to meet the distance training professionals of the Enseignement à Distance in the centre of Brussels, and their counterparts at the Bestur Afstandsonderwijs a few hundred metres away, also in the centre of Brussels.

They clearly had decades of experience of distance training, knew with authority what can succeed in training adults at a distance and what will not work. They knew the shelf life of their courses and the logistics of handling 55,000 student enrolments all at different stages, of different courses, because of the `openness' of their system.

The chasm between further education and higher education at a distance in the EU is heavily in evidence in the lack of information in Brussels about the French community government distance training institution and its 40 year history. The absence of parity of esteem between vocational education at a distance in the EU and vocational training at a distance in the European Union is also clear. Like the European Union's largest provider of training, the CNED in France, the extremely low profile of the professionals in the field is a pity It is clear that in the 1990s, the Cned in France has made determined efforts to shake this image.

The Enseignement à Distance informed the Voctade enquiry that its present targets include putting courses on the Internet, accomplishing the move to new premises, and developing new courses in English and Dutch.