The Voctade project has collected a very great amount of data on distance training in the European Union .

A major contribution to the development of knowledge and to the analysis of the European Union training industry, is the provision of a classification or typology of forms of provision.

In what follows criteria for the delineation of a valid typology are established, four major models are elaborated, each of the models is analysed and placed in its global context.

Central to this analysis is the study of the models of provision that are found in the EU in 1997, and it is part of the contribution of the Voctade project to the understanding of vocational education and training in Europe to provide a typology of distance training models of provision.

These rules for the construction of a valid typology are accepted here:

• It should be helpful to the readers, enabling them to focus on a range of institutions within the field 'distance teaching institutions' about which statements can be made that identify what this grouping of institutions has in common, and what it is that distinguishes it from the other groupings.
• To be helpful it should not be artificial - each grouping should contain a number of institutions.
• It should not be artificial with regard to students - each grouping should enrol thousands, preferably millions, of students.
• It should not be artificial with regard to time - each grouping should have been identifiable for at least a decade, preferably longer.
• It should try to encompass all distance teaching institutions, public and private - and not just concentrate on distance education at university level.
• It should only include those distance teaching institutions or departments of existing institutions which exhibit both the major characteristic subsystems of distance institutions (course development and student support services).

• The government distance training institution
• The proprietary distance training institution
• The distance teaching university
• Distance education courses from a university.

Each of the four institutional models identified in this report has been established for decades and has enrolled many millions of students.

The invasion of France led to the creation of the Centre National d'Enseignement par Correspondence (CNED) by a government decree of 2 December 1939 to meet the needs of school children dislocated by war. In the mid-1980s the name was changed to its present form, CNED, which might be translated as National Centre for Distance Teaching.

The New Zealand Open Polytechnic today operates from a former girls school in a quiet corner of Lower Hutt with support from a number of regional resource centres in Auckland, Wellington and shortly, Christchurch.

Unlike other polytechnics and universities, it 'belongs' to no particular city or region but rather to the country as a whole, and hardly any of the hundreds of thousands of students who have studied with the Open Polytechnic over the years have ever set foot on its premises.

Last year as it marked its 50th year in the distance education business, the Open Polytechnic of New Zealand could look back on a record of success unequalled by any of the country's other tertiary institutions purely in the numbers of students it had educated and the range of skills and trades it had taught.

The Open Polytechnic had its origins in the Second World War and the Army Education and Welfare Service (AEWS) which was established to train and educate soldiers for their eventual return to civilian life.

After their discharge from the armed forces many ex-servicemen wished to continue their AEWS studies. Correspondence tuition had been organised by the Wellington Technical College but this work required more than the part-time services of a few college staff.

The characteristics of this model, the government distance training college, together with the listing of the government institutions world-wide which comprise it are:

• many of the foundations made in or after World War 2
• full time specialist staff for course development at all levels in their discipline.
• full time specialist staff for student support services
• heavy investment in plant, printing machinery, audio studios, video studios or access to government plant
• capable of enrolling tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of students
• great economies of scale
• great economies of scope
• same production staff for courses at all levels

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Figure 12 Government distance training institute

The model is well established in many parts of the world and a listing of these government institutions with their dates of foundation and original titles (as many have changed their names in the 1990s) would include:

1. New South Wales Open Training and Education Network (OTEN) formerly the New South Wales College of External Studies, Sydney, Australia, claimed to go back to the New South Wales Correspondence Teaching Division in 1909.
2. Centre National d'Enseignement à Distance, (CNED) Poitiers, France, formerly the Centre National de Téléenseignement, (CNTE), originally the Centre National d'Enseignement par Correspondance, (CNEC) 1939.
3. The Open Polytechnic of New Zealand at Lower Hutt, formerly the New Zealand Technical Correspondence Institute/School, 1946.
4. Queensland Open Learning Network, Brisbane, Australia, formerly the Queensland College of External Studies, 1946.
5. South Australian College of External Studies (1947) Adelaide, Australia, later the South Australian Open College of Further Education, today remodelled.
6. Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology External Studies Department (1948), Australia, later the Victorian TAFE Off-campus Network, today remodelled.
7. Western Australian Technical Extension Service (1949), Perth, Australia, today remodelled.
8. Enseignement à distance de la Communauté Française de Belgique (1959), Brussels, Belgium, formerly Le Service des cours par correspondance de l'Etat (Belgique)
9. Bestuur Afstandsonderwijs (1959), Brussels, Belgium formerly as above.
10. National Extension College (1963) Cambridge, United Kingdom, included here as a forerunner of UK government initiatives like the Open University, the Open Tech, the Open College of the Air, the Open Polytechnic. It is a limited company charity.
11. Centro para la Inovación y Desarrollo de la Educación a Distancia (1992) Madrid, Spain, incorporating some of the roles of INEM (1968).
12. In 1997 in Austria a new example of this model is being developed jointly by the Austrian Federal Ministry of Education and by the government of the city of Vienna. It has been named the Österreichisches Zentrum für Selbststudium und Fernunterricht.

The model may be characterised as an institutional structure whose didactics are frequently patterned thus: the colleges develop or purchase learning materials and send them by post to the student. The student studies the materials and posts assignments back to the institution which marks and comments on them and posts them back to the student. The student studies the comments, completes the next assignment and the process is repeated.

The model might be represented diagrammatically thus:

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Figure 13. Proprietary distance training colleges model

The students' main contact with the representatives of the college is by post, telephone or email so that isolation can be a problem. There are, nevertheless, institutions which have turned these disadvantages into factors to benefit student learning. There is evidence (Bååth 1979) to claim that the correspondence tutor can forge with the distant student a form of privileged one-to-one study that is difficult to create in lecture or tutorial.

In the EU in recent years some of these colleges, especially in the Netherlands, have moved to university level courses and introduced state-of-the-art technologies.

Examples in 1997 include:

Austria	Maturaschule Dr Roland, Vienna
Belgium	Culture et Formation, Brussels
Denmark	Danmarks Kursuscenter, Copenhagen
Greece	Humboldt Institut, Athens
Ireland	Kilroy's College, Dublin
Italy	Istituto Italo-Svizzero, Luino
The Netherlands	Leidse Onderwijsinstellingen, Leiden
Portugal	CIT, Lisbon
Spain	Centro de Estudios Académicos, Madrid
Sweden	Liber-Hermods, Malmö
United Kingdom	Rapid Results College, Wimbledon

This is a group of providers which has received little attention in the distance education literature because of its proprietary character.

There are many hundreds of institutions of this model in the EU today, ranging from Leidse Onderwijsinstellingen in the Netherlands with over 100,000 students enrolled in 1997 to small colleges with a few hundred enrolments or less.

Peters (1968) gives 1929 as the date of foundation of the first distance teaching university in the, then, Soviet Union and lists the 18 Soviet distance teaching universities with their faculties and enrolments in the early 1960's (1968: 549-555). Other foundations followed in the, then, Union of South Africa in 1947 and in China in 1960. A new series of universities teaching at a distance commenced with the Open University of the United Kingdom in 1969.

The importance of the institutions in this model is that they provide specialist distance education courses and support systems for students at university level and provide governments with structures for coping competently with very large student bodies. The representatives of the model from Europe and abroad that enrol more than 100,000 students per year are given:

Country	Name of Institution	Enrolment	Foundation
China	CCTVU network	852,000	1979
Turkey	Anadolu University	600,000	1982
France	CNED	400,000	1939
Thailand	Sukothai Thamatirat OU	350,000	1978
Indonesia	Universitas Terbuka	353,000	1984
India	Indira Gandhi N Open University	242,000	1985
Korea	National Open University	200,000	1972
UK	Open University	165,000	1969
Spain	UNED	186,000	1972
S. Africa	UNISA	130,000	1949
		3,377,000

All of these are national institutions of great prestige and excellent quality. None is new or experimental. Most have decades of experience and tens of thousands of graduates already integrated into the national workforce. Such institutions form an important focus for the study of distance education and underline the contribution of this form of education to developed and emerging economies alike.

Recent foundations include the Open University of Tanzania (1994), the Virtual University of Catalonia (1995), the Open University of Bangladesh (1996) and an open university in Greece in 1997.

The model might be represented diagramatically thus:

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Figure 14. Distance teaching universities

In the European Union in 1997 there are two distance teaching universities in Spain, and one each in Germany, Greece, the Netherlands, Portugal and the United Kingdom.

Today the model is the usual form of university provision at a distance in many European Union countries, especially Finland, Sweden, France, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Belgium FR - in fact most of the countries that have chosen not to found an open university.

The characteristics of this model are that course development is usually by university faculty paid overload to produce the courses or by consultants, and tuition is also provided by the university faculty or tutors hired by the department, and the students study for degrees or certificates awarded by the university. Although there are a range of sub-models the model might be represented diagramatically thus:

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Figure 15 Distance education courses from conventional universities

There are various submodels of the ways in which a distance education programme is organised within a university. Distance education may be handled either by:

• a small department (as in a number of French universities)
• a special department of distance education (University of Florida at Gainesville)
• an integrated mode in which the full time faculty teach equally both face-to-face and at a distance (University of New England, Australia)
• where distance students are taught directly by the normal faculty (Sheffield Hallam University, United Kingdom).

The normal distinction between further and higher education is used but with the insistence that parity of esteem between further education at a distance and higher education at a distance be preserved (Cresson 1994)

Institutions designed specifically for conventional face-to-face provision which also teach at a distance is indicated but it is a basic tenet of the Voctade study that parity of esteem between vocational training at a distance and vocational training in colleges and training centres be achieved. This parity of esteem is largely missing from European documentation.

Institutions developed by government and by the proprietary distance training sector are indicated. Parity of esteem between the two sectors is a further tenet of the Voctade study.

Very little synergy between the four models has been found in the data. The fact that it is possible, in the same member state, for an MBA programme in business Management to be offered by a representative of each of the four categories is competitive. It is also quite possible for a course in accountancy at a distance to be offered by a representative of each of the four categories within a member state.

The data listed in the first volume indicates the representation of the four categories, their contribution to and share of the European Union distance training industry market and their competence in training at a distance built up over the decades.

The challenge for the four models today is how to maintain their market and their contribution to VET in the European Union in the 21^st century.