The Voctade study is a survey and analysis within the field of distance education.

It has a particular focus: non-university level distance education in the 15 European Union (EU) member states. The term 'training' is, however, interpreted widely and most university-level distance programmes in the European Union are considered to have a training focus, and are also included in the study.

The term 'distance training' is used for this sector of educational provision when it is necessary to distinguish it from other levels of distance education provision.

The study is known as Voctade: development of knowledge in the field of vocational training at a distance in the European Union.

The study is located within the aims of the Leonardo da Vinci programme which was adopted by the European Community on 18th July 1994 and implemented in the period 1st January 1995 to 31st December 1999 in the field of vocational training policy (94/C 244/03) and of the White Paper on education and training, Teaching and learning : towards the learning society adopted by the Commission of the European Community on 29.11.1995.

• improving the quality and innovation capacity of Member States' vocational training systems and arrangements;
• developing the European dimension in vocational training and vocational guidance;
• promoting lifelong training so as to encourage ongoing adaptation of skills to meet the needs of workers and undertakings, contribute to reducing unemployment and facilitate personal development;
• encouraging specific vocational training measures for adults without adequate vocational qualifications, in particular adults without adequate education;
• enhancing the status and attractiveness of vocational education and training and promoting parity of esteem for academic diplomas and vocational qualifications;
• encouraging specific vocational training measures for disadvantaged young people without adequate training and, in particular, young people who leave the education system without adequate training.
• supporting vocational training policies in such a way that all workers in the community have access to continuing vocational training throughout their working lives without any discrimination;
• promoting equality of opportunity as regards access for men and women to vocational training and their effective participation therein, in particular so as to open up new areas of work to them and encourage them to return to work after a career break;
• encouraging the acquisition and transparency of qualifications and an understanding of the key skills relevant to technological development and the functioning of the internal market, the competitiveness of undertakings and the requirements of the labour market;
• promoting the gradual development of an open European vocational training and vocational qualifications area, particularly through the exchange of information and experience on obstacles to application of the free provision of services by training bodies;
• fostering the development of methods of self-training at the work place and of open and distance learning and training, in particular to facilitate access to continuing vocational training.

• the provision of information and guidance on training provision
• broad and open access serving individual aptitudes and needs
• access to training throughout life
• special needs of the disabled and disadvantaged
• equal access to education for men and women alike
• parity of esteem between further and higher education
• information technology will certainly permit substantial growth in all forms of distance teaching. This was a point made by the European Parliament in its July 1993 resolution on open and distance learning, on the basis of the report by Mrs D Pack.
• the achievements of the Open University (presumably the United Kingdom rather than the other EU open universities, but the White Paper does not indicate which one is being referred to) which has for many years developed distance learning on a substantial scale should also be mentioned in this context.
• need for 'second chance' arrangements.

Aspirations to provide 'broad and open access', 'access to training throughout life', 'special needs of disabled', 'use of technology in education', 'second chance arrangements', and provision of training for those in need of re-skilling and retraining but who cannot attend training centres or colleges because of work commitments or social responsibilities, have been standard in the distance education literature (Keegan 1986) for decades, if not for more than a century.

How can one remedy this situation?

In 1993-1994 a Euroform study carried out a survey entitled Distance training in the European Union with the goal of quantifying the number of EU citizens in the, then, 12 EU countries enrolled in distance learning programmes for training or retraining. Among the conclusions of that study are:

• There were over 2,000,000 enrolments in distance training systems, public and private, in the, then, twelve EU countries.
• This enrolment represented over 70% of all EU citizen participation in distance education, with only 21.2% of the total volume of distance students enrolling in university programmes from the European open universities or distance learning departments of conventional European universities
• France, Spain and the Netherlands were the leading countries for distance training enrolments.
• There was also an extensive provision in Belgium, Denmark, Germany and the United Kingdom. Less that 5 000 enrolled annually in Ireland, Italy and Portugal. Greece was developing a new system.
• Distance training in the EU was an important EU resource. It was little known in spite of the 2,249,810 EU citizens annually involved.
• Research undertaken by van der Mark in 1993 had identified the average level of student fee in a number of countries. It appeared to lie between 100 and 1000 Ecu. Only the government programme in Flanders was tuition free.
• For ease of calculation an average fee of Ecu 500 was taken. Thus, if the average fee did in fact lie in the region of Ecu 500, then the global fee income paid by EU citizens to government or private distance training institutions was over Ecu 1,000,000,000, provided that each student paid the full fee and enrolment in the course was not paid for or subsidised by taxpayers in the country.
• Government and proprietary providers shared the EU distance training market on an approximately 50/50 basis.
• 1994 provision was shared between the, then, 12 EU countries thus:

The 100 page report Distance training in the European Union was distributed widely throughout Europe in 1995 to policy makers, educators and researchers by the Zentrales Institut für Fernstudienforschung of the Fernuniversität-Gesamthochschule in Hagen.

The report stated that it sought to refocus attention on the extent and importance of distance training in the EU.

In the 1994-1995 academic year another survey of distance training provision was carried out on behalf of DG XXII of the European Commission. This study clarified and tended to confirm the conclusions of the earlier study. It redefined a number of the programmes that had been included in the previous study as not falling within the strict definition of distance education and training chosen for the study. It added a brief survey of provision in Austria, Finland and Sweden.

In general terms the 1994-1995 study reconfirmed that citizens studying vocational educational and training courses at a distance in the EU probably numbered between 2,000,000 to 3,000,000; that the further education and training component of this figure was over 70% and that if fees paid by citizens were added to fees paid in part by citizens enrolling and tax payers subsidies and to this figure were added fees totally subsidised by tax payers, the annual distance training market would indeed reach Ecu one billion.

The results of these two surveys and the continued absence of distance training from policy documents provide the background to the Voctade study.

• to draw attention to the richness, complexity and extent of the field of European provision of distance training as presented in the 1994 report and the 1995 study
• to collect 1995-96 data and 1996-97 data on the same basis so that trends can be analysed, the accuracy of the 1994 data can be verified and policy can be developed
• to collect data on Austria, Finland and Sweden so that the 15 nation educational provision can be properly presented
• to analyse the transparency of the qualifications awarded to the two million EU citizens annually enrolling in EU training programmes at a distance
• to analyse the transportability of the qualifications awarded to the two million EU citizens studying at a distance in the EU countries
• to provide data for the development of a Clearing House for the certification, transparency and transportability of Vocational Training at a Distance qualifications in Europe.
• to re-focus attention on the crucial role of the distance training sector as a complement to face-to-face Vocational Training in Europe and as a complement to university-level distance education in Europe.

• 1996 and 1997 data on the dimension of distance training in Europe as a complement both to conventional Vocational Education and Training (VET) and as a complement to university-level distance programmes
• detailed evidence from 15 EU countries of the contribution distance training makes in 1995-97 to Vocational Training in the EU and trends for the period 1994 to 1997
• detailed evidence of vocational qualifications from EU government and proprietary distance training providers
• detailed evidence of the transparency and transferability and market value of training qualification for which EU citizens pay annually to EU government or proprietary institutions
• provision of draft plans for a European Virtual Institute for Transportability of Vocational Training Qualifications at a Distance
• publication and provision of developed knowledge for policy makers in the Commission, and National Governments, on a little studied EU training resource.

The four major issues are

1. Is it possible to quantify the number of EU citizens who take a vocational distance education programme in a given year?

If it proves possible to quantify the number of EU citizens who take a vocational distance education course in a given year - will this figure be in the tens or hundreds of thousands, or the two million plus indicated by the 1994 Euroform study and the 1995 DG XXII study?
2. Is it possible to quantify in Ecus the volume of fees paid by EU citizens for themselves, or paid by taxpayers in subsidies for enrolment of their fellow citizens, to EU government institutions or EU private companies for vocational training at a distance in a given year?

If it proves possible to quantify in Ecus the volume of fees paid by citizens (or subsidised by taxpayers) to EU government institutions or EU private companies in a given year for distance Vocational Education and Training programmes, will this figure prove to be an insignificant sum or the 1 billion Ecu annually recurring volume of fees indicated by the 1994 European study and the 1995 DG XXII study.
3. If it proves possible to quantify in Ecus the volume of fees paid by EU citizens to EU governments and to EU private or semi-private vocational distance education colleges and if the volume of annually recurring fees is 1,000,000,000 Ecu or anything like it, what is the value, level and transparency of the qualifications offered for these courses, and what is their value in competitive job interviews or for further studies at public institutions?
4. If it proves possible to analyse the certification that the EU citizens receive for their investment in vocational training at a distance, what is the transferability of their qualification within the EU, what is the acceptance of distance qualifications and certificates won in one country and used at job interviews in another, and what regulations, protocols and agreements are in place to render such acceptance permanent?
5. If, on the other hand, the certificate is offered globally by electronic or virtual provision, and is developed in one EU country and offered either synchronously or asynchronously in another EU country, either by satellite, or by two-way video, two-way audio video conferencing or via the World Wide Web, what is the transparency and transferability of such degrees and diplomas in each of the EU states?

• should governments fund conventional schools, colleges and universities or should they fund distance education or should they fund virtual systems?
• can the distance training providers hold their massive market?
• if electronic or virtual systems are to be developed will they take their market from conventional universities or distance providers or create a new market?
• if the distance systems are so popular with citizens why are they so neglected by planners?
• what technologies do the 2.5 million home-based learners use and why?
• what proportion of distance education enrolment in the EU is at university level and what proportion is at vocational and training level?
• if the further education component of distance education in the EU proves to be larger than the university component, why is it little studied and represented?
• if distance training is such an important EU training resource, why is it absent from planning documents and poorly researched?

Should governments fund conventional schools, colleges, universities and training centres?

1. For the first time in history, about 150 years ago, it became possible to teach at a distance. Prior to the wondrous development of technology associated with the Industrial Revolution in northern Europe it was not possible to separate teacher and learner and maintain the essential interpersonal two-way communication which is the core of the educational process.
2. Fifty years later, the first public programmes of distance education were on offer, especially in the United States and Australia. Every New Zealand, and Australian State government and each Canadian provincial government set up its government distance education college for children's education at a distance in the 1910s and the 1920s.
3. From 1940 in France, but also in Australia and New Zealand the Second World War and its aftermath saw substantial government investment in distance education colleges for citizens displaced by war or recently demobilised.
4. The communist governments of the socialist democracies of Central and Eastern Europe from the 1950s established distance systems as a central component of training provision at all levels. Only 10 years ago, one third of all students in the world studying at a distance were in the USSR or China (Dieuzeide 1986).
5. Since the 1970s most EU governments have invested in distance education institutions and by 1997 nearly every government in the world is either offering distance education programmes to their citizens or considering doing so.

The case might be argued thus:

Society has for some hundreds, if not thousands of years, provided itself with locations called 'schools', and higher level locations called 'universities' at which the teaching-learning interaction takes place.

The question for the distance education analyst is whether institutional learning is per se linked to the privileged places for institutional learning created by society. In doing this the analyst abstracts from questions of quality: the analyst regards the quality of learning in schools and universities as a given: it has always been of a given quality and will always be so.

The analyst will also be aware of the sacrifices that normal students make to go to school or college. Students made these sacrifices to obtain an education a hundred years ago just as they do today: children are sent to boarding schools, huge prices are paid for digs in university cities.

Distance education students choose to remain in employment, at home, with their families. They expect to be given institutional learning at home and, more and more frequently in the 1990s, university degrees at home.

The ideals of von Humboldt or Arnold or Newman that the university is a place where scholars come together for the purposes of learning do not convince these students to make the sacrifices required.

Can the distance education providers hold their market?

Quantified at between 2,000,000 and 3,000,000 enrolments a year in the mid 1990s by earlier studies, the distance education providers have a large market.

Can they hold it into the 21st century?

Those who aspire to taking over their market or to creating a new and parallel market to it, are wide ranging:

• multimedia package producers
• technology-rich conventional universities
• open universities
• government departments of labour or training.

Where will the multi-media training package producers get their market from? Will they create a new market? Will they take students from conventional systems? Will they reduce the enrolment in distance systems or is there no market at all?

Technology-rich conventional universities. In the mid 1990s there appear to be major efforts by technology-rich conventional universities to enter the distance learning market.

Rejected by the distance learner as unsatisfactory and inconvenient only a few years ago, conventional universities are returning with technology-based products to woo the students who refuse to travel to their campuses.

Open universities : the open universities and distance education departments of conventional universities are already moving into the training market. All of them, except perhaps the German Fernuniversität, offer certificates and diplomas at levels well below university degrees.

Government training agencies the distance training providers can also be threatened by their own national or state ministries, who want their enrolments to go elsewhere, or who want their plant or staff for other purposes, and who provide training centres for students to travel to for vocational education and training.

• What technologies do the 2.5 million home-based learners use and why?

• What proportion of distance education enrolment in the EU is at university level and what proportion is at vocational and training level?

The White Paper does well to call for parity of esteem for further and higher education; the Voctade project seeks to extend this parity of esteem to distance provision as well.

• If distance training is such an important EU training resource, why is it absent from planning documents and so poorly researched?

Voctade deals with the development of vocational education and training in the EU at a distance - the vocational training of EU citizens that takes place at a distance, and not in schools, colleges, training centres, company programmes and universities.

Of the four sectors into which the Vocational Education and Training (VET) of adults in Europe is usually surveyed and analysed:

• conventional university and higher education institutions
• open/distance university and higher education provision
• conventional further and vocational training
• training at a distance

Of particular importance for the study are the goals set by the EU authorities for the surveys and analysis part of the Leonardo da Vinci projects.

Within the 'Surveys and analyses' part of Leonardo da Vinci programme the Voctade project seeks to contribute to:

• breaking down the barriers segregating different forms of education and training;
• describing the training phenomenon under study in terms of its links with working life, educational traditions and social values of each country;
• revealing the development that has led to the training phenomenon as it currently stands and the environmental factors that the next developmental stage of the training phenomenon is about to meet;
• contribute to the development of a common frame of reference and conceptual framework for investigating vocational education all over Europe;
• respond to the view that previous surveys and descriptions of the vocational education system of the countries were hard to exploit because different concepts had been used and because differences in the societies had escaped attention.

The Voctade project seeks to provide a development of knowledge in the field of vocational education and education and training (VET) at a distance, leading to the enhancement of parity of the sector, in two ways:

• parity of esteem between face-to-face, conventional, group-based training and training at a distance.
• parity of esteem between distance education programmes at higher education level and distance education at further education level.

Parity of esteem between higher education at a distance and further education at a distance is as important as that between conventional programmes at higher and further education levels.

Studies preliminary to this one suggested that at least 70% of distance education in the EU and world-wide (measured by the volume of citizens enrolled) is in the VET further education sector, and less than 30% in the university sector and it is one of the tasks of the Voctade project to verify this. In this context it is well to give some illustration of the non-university distance provision from Europe and overseas.

There is also an important provision of university level courses ranging from Capes to agrégation and the Deug, but the vast bulk of the Cned's courses falls in the area of distance training. One of the EU's largest educational institutions, it is little cited in the distance education literature or in European educational policy documentation.

Extent of provision in the United States of America is also extensive. Three recent analyses by leading experts, Moore, Steele and Paul are cited here briefly.

The scene in the United States is studied in an article by Moore (1995), director of the American Centre for the Study of Distance Education. He cites 5,000,000 enrolments in 1994 in technical and vocational courses from military, proprietary, religious and other non-university providers. Each branch of the US armed forces has its own distance college, as do many government departments.

At a conference in Dublin in mid-1996 Steele, the outgoing president of the United States Distance Learning Association (USDLA) in an upbeat presentation reported:

The news from America is that distance learning works. Not only that but the technologies work: printed materials work, audio or radio works; video or television works; floppy disks and the Internet work; one-way-video two-way-audio works; two-way-video two-way-audio works. (Steele 1996:2)

Steele went on to explain the work of his association towards the Snowe-Rockefeller-Exxon-Kerry Amendment to the 1996 United States Communications Act. This is an amendment which grants cheaper telecommunications rates to distance education systems and distance students in each state of the US.

In a contribution to a recent book on distance education and training, Opening education: policies and practices from open and distance education, Paul gives this context from North America:

Distance education has come of age. Traditional educators and governments leaders the world over are its latest advocates as they struggle with the challenges of democratising higher education in increasingly difficult fiscal conditions. There is scarcely a modern university that is not significantly involved in distance education and many political leaders envision a virtual university of the future, one which is much more cost efficient and technologically based.

In such a context, one would expect such recent converts to look to experienced practitioners to understand better the lessons they have learned and to seek their advice in implementing new systems and programmes. To a certain extent, this has been the case, but too many of the newcomers are looking at distance learning through rose-coloured glasses as the new panacea for all the ills facing their educational systems today.

As one often asked to speak about distance education and the application of new technologies to learning, I frequently disappoint my audiences -many of whom are technological zealots - by adopting a critical stance and using my experience in distance learning to demonstrate its shortcomings and the importance of student support and effective design. I emphasise that distance learning is simply another means to encourage students to become independent lifelong learners and that one must start with the learning needs of students, not, as is so often the case, the fancy new technology itself.

One should not be too surprised to encounter such zealotry, however, for distance education itself has not been particularly characterised by a critical perspective. Open universities were so successful from the outset that there was little tendency to worry about completion rates or the quality of interactive learning they represented. The success of the British Open University and its many offshoots around the world was attributed by many to its innovative 'industrial' approach to learning, with its emphasis on team-based course design incorporating the principles of behaviourism and competency-based learning.

This success, however, may have been as much a product of providing access and opportunities to already self-directed learners who were simply waiting for the chance to prove themselves than to any breakthrough in learning theory (Paul, 1996: xi).

In the last few years the contribution of distance learning to higher education has become a focus of discussion in many countries. There are two reasons for this.

First, the world now has nearly thirty years of experience of the success of a new type of university, usually called an open university. These new institutions have used various communication media to reach students at home. Because they have used new technologies to reach a new student body, these universities have redefined the mission of universities.

In 1969, at the inauguration ceremony of the UK Open University its founding Chancellor, Lord Crowther, charged it to be open as to people, open as to places, open as to methods and open as to ideas.

To be open as to ideas is the raison d'etre of all universities, although they have not always been open to ideas about how to run their own affairs. However, the three other qualities of openness have distinguished the open universities from campus universities for almost two decades. The main aim of open universities is to open up higher education to more people. This is especially true of large open universities. Last year I studied these universities, which I call the mega-universities, for my book Mega-universities and Knowledge Media: Technology Strategies for Higher Education. I am delighted that my book has now been translated into Malaysian and Chinese, because the mega-universities are the most important advance in higher education of the 20th century.

Their aim is to be open as to people, which often means adults already in employment. To take education to such people, wherever they live, the mega-universities have to be open to places. This is turn requires them to be open as to methods because they cannot achieve their aims through traditional classroom teaching.

The second reason that distance learning has become a topic of live interest in many countries is related to the explosive growth of the interactive computer and communications technology of the Internet and the World Wide Web. The term virtual university has become associated with proposals for new universities grounded in this technology. But the phenomenon is more widespread than that. Many universities that have previously taught only on campus now say they are 'making courses available on the Web'.

We can think of open universities and virtual universities as mirror images of each other. The open universities began with the goal of being open to people. To achieve that goal they had to adopt the secondary aims of being open to places and open to methods. The virtual universities begin with the goal of being open to certain new methods - the knowledge media - which they hope will allow them to achieve the secondary aims of openness to people and places.

The real and proven success of open universities and the apparent promise of virtual university projects have created an unprecedented interest in distance learning. This is causing many universities, implicitly or explicitly, to include in their missions the notions of openness to people, to places and to methods. Some people think that this challenges the accepted notions of quality in higher education (http://www.open.ac.uk/OU/News/VC/aaoukl.html).

Accurately to evaluate the importance of distance training provision today one needs to underline that prior to 1970 most distance education institutions were proprietary. The main exceptions were the government distance training colleges in Europe, New Zealand and Australia. Since 1970 there has been a marked shift from private to public provision. A major focus of this has been the high profile open universities developed in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s in Europe and overseas. To this must be added the distance courses from conventional universities and from other higher education institutions.

These university successes have tended to overshadow the continuing importance of courses at the distance training level, even though many of the programmes run by open universities and university departments world-wide are for certificates and diplomas rather than degrees, and might be considered to be part of training provision.

In the same way two of the major United States studies in the late 1960s and early 1970s had a major further education at a distance, rather than higher education at a distance, focus:

• Mac Kenzie O and Christensen E L Correspondence instruction in the United States (1969)
• Mac Kenzie O and Christensen E L The changing world of correspondence study (1971) Penn State University.

In the 1990s there have been a few publications in which distance training is an important focus or in which distance training is treated alongside university-level provision. Among these studies are: Oravep's Formations ouvertes et à distance: la situation en France (1994), Danish Ministry of Education's Technology supported learning (Distance learning), (no date), Zimmer's Vom Fernunterrich zum Open Distance Learning (1994) and van den Brande's (1993) Flexible and distance learning.

This report seeks to re-focus attention on the extent and importance of distance training provision in the European Union as a sector of Vocational education and training with parity of esteem both to distance education at university level and to face-to-face training in colleges and centres.

• universities
• distance education courses at university level
• vocational and technical colleges and centres
• vocational and technical training at a distance.

It is argued that in the field of vocational education and training for adults considerable research and policy formulation has been devoted to universities and to the development of training centres and colleges.

It is argued that the open universities and distance education from conventional universities at university level is well known and well studied.

It is claimed that of the four sectors of provision of vocational education and training (VET), distance training, the focus of this study, is by far the least analysed and researched and by far the least present in EU documents.

This analysis might be presented diagramatically thus:

D
Figure 1 Vocational education and training of adults in the European Union.
A typology of European Union distance systems

• distance teaching universities
• distance education provision from conventional universities
• public distance training
• proprietary distance training.

Two classifications are also given for further education: provision wholly or partly provided by the EU national governments from taxpayers' moneys, and provision from proprietary institutions.

Other classifications or categories are possible but are not considered here.

It follows that every citizen studying at a distance in the EU in the period of analysis: the academic year 1995-1996 and the academic year 1996-1997 is posited to be enrolled in one of those four institutional categories.

This might be represented diagramatically thus:

D
Figure 2 A typology of European Union distance systems