According to a study currently being conducted by VOCTADE for the European Commission it would appear that there are about 2.5 million people studying at a distance for vocational purposes in the European Union. And this figure excludes in-house training and hobby-type courses.
If it is assumed that students in a number of countries were not paid for by their governments it is likely that an average fee would be 400 ECU. Therefore an annual recurring market could be one billion ECU. Although these are only preliminary findings which still need further verification, they do give some idea of the size of the distance learning market in Europe particularly in the non-university sector.
VOCTADE (Development of knowledge in the field of training at a distance in the European Union) is an EC Leonardo sponsored research project led by the Dublin consultancy company - Distance Education International Ltd., who also edit the Routledge Studies in Distance Education Series. VOCTADE partners include ZIFF, the research centre of the Fernuniversität (German Open University) and the major Italian distance education provider, the University of Rome III.
Distance training, the non-university part of the distance education sector is considered by the researchers to be the least studied area of European education and this study seeks to establish statistics for the market volume and its financial dimension as well as study the certification, transparency and transferability of qualifications at a distance in the EU.
For the purposes of this study the field has been divided into four categories: distance teaching universities; distance programmes from conventional universities; government distance training; and proprietary distance training. Each student studying at a distance is put into one of these categories. As there are 16 national systems this means that 64 types of provision have to be studied. However, the work is made more complex by the merging of distance systems with open learning provision or flexible teaching structures in certain countries, especially the United Kingdom and Denmark.
The study has identified four major models, one for each category:
the open university model like UNED in Spain;
provision from a conventional university model like Sheffield Hallam University in the UK;
the distance training college like CNED in France, Enseignement á Distance in Wallonia, the CIDEAD in Spain or Bestuur Anderweijsinstellingen in Flanders;
the proprietary distance college model like LOI in The Netherlands.
Preliminary results show very extensive enrolments in France, Germany, The Netherlands, Spain and the United Kingdom. The open universities enrol over 450,000 students with two open universities in Spain and one each in Germany, The Netherlands, Portugal and the United Kingdom. To this must be added at least 150,000 who enrolled with conventional universities mainly in
Finland, France, Sweden and the United Kingdom. The non-university sector totals between 1.2 and 2 million, evenly divided between government and proprietary providers.
As a state-of-the art study of distance training provision in the late 1990s it is raising some vital questions for European training in the 21st century:
should governments fund conventional schools, colleges and universities or should they fund distance education or even virtual systems?
can the distance training providers hold onto their massive market?
if electronic or virtual systems are to be developed will they take their market from conventional universities, distance providers or create a new market?
if distance systems are so popular with the citizens of Europe why are they so neglected by planners?
what technologies do the 2.5 million home based learners use and why?
if distance training is such an important EU training resource, why is it absent from planning documents and so poorly researched?
It is hoped to put all the VOCTADE statistics up on a WWW site early in 1997 so that all can contribute to the accuracy and fairness of the data.
For further information about the VOCTADE Study contact:
Dr Desmond Keegan,
Distance Education International Ltd., PO Box 59,
Blackrock,
Co Dublin,
Ireland
Tel: +353 1 285 3196
Fax: +353 1 288 8208