European seminar on the potential for open and distance learning in the European context, Oslo, 26 April, 1991
There was a time when nobody in Europe, neither in the West nor in the East, would deny that the bold Norwegian people was internationally orientated. We became an early annoyance to our neighbours from the time our ancestors put their first Viking ships on to the waves and went pillaging in all directions.
Although we never became a part of the Roman Empire, our international activities brought us in acquaintance with what is now looked upon as our common European cultural heritage. Since then, steadily improving communications has made it difficult to look at Norwegian history and culture isolated from the rest of Europe. This is also the case when we look at open and distance learning, which is the theme of this seminar.
Therefore, I will start by giving a brief survey of the development of distance education in Europe, and then try to point out some characteristics of open and distance education in this country. Finally I will mention some of the challenges that distance education is met with in Europe today, and reflect on the potential role of Norwegian distance teaching institutions in the broader European context.
I think it is important to notice that distance education has been part of the European educational scene for about 150 years. It started in 1840 in Great Britain, and it has existed in many of the European nations since the beginning of this century. Between 1890 and 1920 private distance education was introduced on a regular basis in Germany, France, Italy, The Netherlands, Sweden, Belgium, Spain, Switzerland, Denmark, Norway, and Finland (Karow 1980).
Many of the pioneer institutions are still in existence. Some of them have grown into big institutions and have expanded their range of methods and media. Among them you will find advanced institutions of considerable reputation in European distance education even today. Their main activities are usually on the secondary level and within vocational and continuing education.
The pioneer institutions of Western Europe were established and owned by private individuals, and correspondence education was developed mainly in commercial enterprises. But also voluntary organisations with social and political purposes found that distance education was an effective means of bringing education to the general population. In some countries, for instance Norway, private institutions have been reorganised as nonprofit, independent foundations. Although the situation varies between the countries, there is no doubt that nongovernment distance education institutions in Europe provide vital contributions both to general secondary education and to vocational and inservice training in industry and in the public sector.
In Eastern Europe the course of history meant that distance education had to be introduced through state initiatives. Distance education has been used quite extensively in many of the republics of the Soviet Union from about 1920, in general and vocational education both on secondary and postsecondary levels. Particularly, the Soviet Union is known for its extensive use of distance education for postsecondary studies in conventional universities, teacher training and polytechnic colleges and in a number of specialised distance teaching universities. A characteristic feature of the Soviet experience is that correspondence tuition has been combined with facetoface sessions in a "consultation model". After the Second World War, similar systems were introduced in several countries in Eastern and Central Europe.
Only a few countries in Western Europe established staterun distance education institutions. The best known of these is probably the French CNED, started in 1939. Sweden and Belgium are countries with similar institutions. Worth mentioning is also that many countries have established approving or accrediting bodies and regulations for private distance education, for instance Norway, The Netherlands, Germany, and the United Kingdom.
The first type of distance education to be introduced was correspondence education. This was an innovation, not so much in technology as in the organisation of teaching and learning. Otto Peters has pointed out that this is the first "industrialised" form of education, characterised by mass production and division of labour (Peters 1973). What could then be more natural, when the new broadcasting media appeared, than to use them for distance education purposes? An early example is reported from Glasgowin 1924 (Cain 1975), and in the following years educational radio and later television became a regular service both for pupils and teachers in schools and for the adult population. Broadcast programmes were often supplemented by printed material and correspondence tuition, thus introducing multimedia distance education.
Examples of such combinations could be mentioned from several countries in all parts of Europe. National broadcasting corporations like the BBC and the Swedish Educational Broadcasting have been very active. In Germany we have the "Telekolleg"s with yearly about 10 000 students. The Spanish Radio ECCA in the Canary Islands has been in existence for 25 years and serves almost 100000 students a year with formal and nonformal educational programmes (ECCA 1990).
Although distance education has long traditions in Europe, its use at the university level is, in general, much more recent. Notable exceptions are Great Britain, where correspondence tuition in preparation for external examinations at the University of London followed the establishment of the university's external examination system in 1858, and the already mentioned use of distance education in higher level education in the Soviet bloc. In most European countries, however, the interest in higher level distance education was aroused in the 1960's and 1970s (Daniel 1987).
Two streams of development spring from this new interest. The first is the establishment of dedicated distance teaching universities, often named open universities. First came the British Open University in 1969 and the Spanish Distance Education University (UNED) in1970. Soon after the German Fernuniversität was established, and during the 1980's the Dutch and the Portuguese Open Universities joined the group. It is fair to say that no single event has contributed as much to the general acceptance of distance teaching methods, particularly on the higher level, as the establishment of the British Open University. The five dedicated Open Universities play a very prominent role in European distance education.
The second stream was the introduction of distance education programmes within conventional universities. Two countries may be mentioned as examples: France, where this development began in 1964, and Sweden, where distance education programmes from conventional universities were launched about ten years later. The number of such programmes is increasing very fast in many countries, and I am convinced that we will see a remarkable development of distance education from conventional universities in the future.
It also seems that it is not a question of an either or between the two types of provisions. For instance, Germany has developed a comprehensive system of further education at a distance for teachers and other professions, parallel to the establishment of its distance teaching university. In Britain, the Open Tech programme during the 1980's has involved about 300 producers and150 colleges in the delivery of open learning packages and programmes, many of them including distance teaching and support systems (Daniel1987).
Outside the educational institutions distance education is used in inservice training programmes in several big companies and in local and central public administration. Sometimes they use programmes and courses from universities, colleges or private institutions, but they also organise their own inhouse distance education programmes. Organisation, methods and technologies vary, and I suppose nobody knows the actual range and scope of such programmes. There is reason to believe that this too is a growing field of distance education. Other forms of technologybased training and open learning are also used increasingly.
Let us now have a closer look at distance education in Norway.
It is worth noticing that Norway is known to be a country where distance education has a strong position. In a German study of private distance education in a number of countries in the late1970's, Norway came out with a much higher number of students in proportion to the population than any other country in the survey. Part of the reason for this favourable position was a generous system of state grants to correspondence students introduced in 1975. Unfortunately, the state grants have been dramatically reduced since that time, and a certain decline in the number of students has followed, particularly during the second half of the 1980s. Still Norway compares favourably with most other countries in this respect.
The degree of public awareness of and responsibility towards distance education in the nongovernment sector which is demonstrated for instance in the Norwegian grant system, is not usual in Europe. A Belgian researcher, Nathan Weinstock, has made a distinction between a more liberalistic view on private distance education found in most Western countries, and what he calls "le systèmedes établissements privés à vocation publique" the combination of private enterprise and public responsibility that is a characteristic feature of the Nordic countries and The Netherlands (Karow 1980).
Another aspect of this close relationship between independent institutions and public authorities is the accreditation system introduced by the Law on correspondence schools, effective since 1949. In many respects this law is now outdated and needs revision. But it has had two important effects: First, it has made visible and put focus on the public interest in distance education for more than forty years. So, distance education could not be ignored, like in many other countries. Secondly, it has forced the institutions to be constantly aware of quality issues in general, and particularly those concerning the development and revision of course material. Thus, not only is the volume but also the standard of distance education in Norway relatively high, I believe, compared to both private sector institutions in other countries and to what is usually offered from staterun institutions irrespective of the level of education.
It is also a fact that research in distance education has been performed regularly in Norway since about 1970, the main part of it as institutional research in some of the independent institutions. Consequently, there exists a Norwegian research tradition in distance education, and some parts of this research is well known and frequently quoted all over the world. I may add that the establishment of SEFU (The Norwegian Centre for Distance Education) in 1988 was possible only because of the existing tradition of development and research.
In her Broady lecture, delivered at the 14th World conference of the International Council for Distance Education in Oslo in1988, our prime minister, Gro Harlem Brundtland (1988), underlined the fact that Norway is a population of only four million people scattered over a relatively wide area, intersected by fjords and mountains. It has therefore been a common challenge to develop a modern welfare society through joint efforts. We have managed to establish a highquality, decentralised system of primary and secondary education, and we also have a very decentralised pattern of institutions of higher education run by the state. Actually, I believe that the establishment of a system of regional colleges for higher education twenty years ago was one of the reasons why Norwegian authorities and institutions did not take up the idea of higher level distance education at that time.
Whereas Norway has 4 million people, we have 12 million members of voluntary organisations. These organisations are a vital force in the development of our society, and some of them are very active in the sector of adult education. It has therefore been naturalfor many of our distance teaching institutions to develop models of collaboration with voluntary educational organisations as well as with local school authorities. In Norway, you will not find "study centres" which take care of local support for distance students. However, you will find a very extensive network of collaboration between central institutions, be they public or private, and a range of organisations and educational bodies in local communities serving local students. In Norway, this isa virtue of necessity. I tend to believe that it is also a strong feature of Norwegian distance education in a time when "networking" seems to become one of the fashionable new key words, not onlyin education, but in our societies in general. A particular feature in Norway seems to be that it is quite easy to establish network relations across the usual distinctions between secondary and postsecondary levels and between public and private bodies and institutions.
Because networking is a natural way of thinking and working in this country, the state institution for distance education, NFU, was established in 1979 based on what has been called a "switchboard" model of cooperation. In all NFU projects, external resources from several institutions are linked together. And when the government last year established a new Executive Board for Distance Education at University and College Level, called SOFF, the mandate of this body is also to coordinate resources from existing institutions in a network for higher level distance education. There is reason to believe that distance education at the university and college level will have a high priority in the next years, and SOFF will be the main agent in developing the networks that are needed.
Norwegian competence in distance education has not yet been widely spread in many institutions. With no professional education in the field, competence had to be developed through experience, and we have had only a few institutions where sufficiently broad experience could be gained. At the moment, distance education in Norway is in a phase of development and experimentation in several respects, and competence is now being developed over abroad range of methods and technologies. The Norwegian Telecom has for many years been interested in distance education and the new communication technologies, and has made important contributions to the development in this field through collaborative projects with educational institutions.
I think it is only fair to mention just one area where I believe Norway in a very short time has arrived at a position in the frontline of European development. I am thinking of the use of computer conferencing within distance education. Since NKI in 1986 introduced its own computer conferencing system for distance education (Paulsen & Rekkedal 1989), several Norwegian institutions have started offering programmes either based on or with the optional use of computermediated communication and conferencing. The most comprehensive programme in this area is the "electronic college" offered by NKS in collaboration with the computer centre of the University of Oslo. Here more than 500 distance students are actively using the computer conference facilities as part of their management studies (Søby 1990). NKS and the University of Oslo is also using their experience to develop specifications for second generation conferencing systems that will be more userfriendly and better designed for distance education purposes than the systems available today.
Norway's distance teaching institutions have for a long time had good relations with the rest of Europe. They were founding members of the European Council for Education by Correspondence in 1963,and a Norwegian became the Executive Director of the European Home Study Council when it was established in 1968. The Norwegian Association for Distance Education is a founding member of the European Association of Distance Teaching Universities and of SATURN, both established in 1987. The Permanent Secretariat of the International Council for Distance Education was established in Oslo in 1988, with a Norwegian as the Secretary General.
The most important networking experience in recent years has without doubt been the establishment of the ICDE secretariat, and we are grateful that the Norwegian government made this possible. Not only have Norwegian institutions got access to a rich flow of information. We have also been in the position to follow closely the shaping and the beginning implementation of both global and regional strategies of collaboration between distance education institutions all over the world.
Indeed, it was ICDE who took the initiative to organise a conference in Budapest in May last year, in order to develop a platform for wider European collaboration in the field of distance education. This brings me to the concluding part of my speech, dealing with current issues and opportunities concerning European collaboration in distance education, as seen from a Norwegian perspective.
Until recently, distance education institutions have in general been operating on a national level. There are a few exceptions, where a common language has made it possible to extend the borders of enrollment outside the domain of the nation. Still, on the European scene this has been quite insignificant exceptions. The adaptation and use of course material from other institutions and countries has occurred more frequently, but on the whole also this opportunity has been used to a surprisingly small extent. For some obvious reasons this situation is changing.
From a Norwegian perspective, the participation of the EFTA countries in Community programmes in the fields of research and education is of the utmost importance. We already have some examples of Norwegian institutions joining projects supported by European Community programmes like DELTA and COMETT, and some institutions have joined applications for the TEMPUS programme.
Another political driving force is the completely new situation in Central and Eastern Europe. Here, we suddenly have a group of countries who are rapidly changing from one political and economic dimension to another, becoming part of a political and economic climate which, up until now, used to be referred to as Western European. The Budapest Conference, organised by the International Council for Distance Education last year, managed to establish a platform for future collaboration within the wider European area.
I believe that distance education has the potential of becoming a major instrument in meeting the tremendous challenges involved in the building of a new future in these countries. This is the subject of another speech this afternoon. I will only stress that this task ought to be a longterm obligation and a broadly based engagement from both the governments and the academic communities of Western Europe. A comprehensive programme of collaboration in distance education at all levels is necessary, based not so much on the export of western products or courses, as on collaborative schemes which will make existing or new institutions in the Central and Eastern European countries able to meet the needs of education and training in their countries.
There is a third driving force towards integration, and that is the technological development in our part of the world. Postal communication is a technology that already transcends national borders. However, we have now reached a stage where a couple of new communication technologies present themselves as realistic alternatives or as supplements. I am thinking of satellite transmission and computer mediated communication. Satellite transmission can be used either as a twoway or to a certain degree multiway communication medium between teleconferencing sites, or as a oneway medium with the potential of reaching individual students in their homes. Computermediated communication is a very flexible medium of multiway communication between individuals. Both technologies appear as particularly appropriate in programmes at the transnational level, and several projects and programmes are already exploring such opportunities. Their potential for European distance learning will be growing, and funds ought to be available for further exploration of technological and organisational aspects as well as the market potential.
As I see it, we need a range of various kinds of projects, networks and mechanisms of collaboration. Some of them are:
1 Programmes of research, development and evaluation in distance education
There are in some countries centres of research, development and evaluation of open and distance learning programmes and institutions. Most of them are based in distance teaching institutions, but there are also some technologyoriented research centres with an interest in open and distance learning. However, it is not easy to see anywhere a really integrated approach to the complex issues involved in the development of open and distance learning, either at the national level or in transnational programmes. I believe it is a challenge with a European dimension to identify what we could call "centres of excellence" in distance education and link them together in research, development and evaluation of distance learning systems and methods for the future.
2 Transnational education programmes
The last two or three years we have seen the establishment of a few transnational distance education programmes and institutions in Europe. The European Programme of Advanced Continuing Education(EuroPACE) was founded in 1988 and offers advanced continuing education in particular technological subject areas in cooperation between companies and universities. The programmes are usually based on satellite transmission, support material and the possibility of feedback through telephone, fax or electronic mail. TheEuropean Association of Users of Satellites in Training and Educational Programmes (Eurostep) was founded in 1989 to co-ordinate, organise and promote satellite delivered education and training programmes across Europe. Another educational satellite service is Channel E, established under the DELTA programme of the European Community (Moles 1990).
There are also several examples of transnational networks and projects offering education and training services based on computermediated communication. Nordic institutions have been particularly active in such projects, and this has led to the initiative last year to establish what is called NEK The Nordic Electronic Knowledge Network.
Other transnational programmes are schemes where an institution in one country serves as a local resource and support centre, serving students who are studying with distance teaching institutionsin other countries. The function of such a study centre may cover a range of activities like information, counselling, exam arrangement, tuition and adaptation to local needs.
These are only a few examples of new types of programmes growing up in Europe these days. Some of them are marketdriven, but they are all exploring new markets and are therefore in a vulnerable stage of development, depending on support from various sources, particularly in the initial phases of development.
3 Joint course development
Even national distance teaching programmes could benefit from increased collaboration with European partners in the development and production of courses, particularly in the field of continuing education. In this field it is extremely important to react quickly on identified needs and to have flexible models of development and production.
The European Association of Distance Teaching Universities (EADTU)has put much effort into the establishment of joint course production teams in various subject areas. Norwegian members have been involved in many of these teams. Unfortunately, none of the EADTU projects have yet been successful. Although some of them may be in the future, I have come to believe that the EADTU model of collaboration is not what Norwegian institutions need. It is not flexible enough, it takes too much resources and far too much time to develop anew course. It may be better suited for the big, dedicated Open Universities, but I suspect that even the Open Universities should be far more flexible and marketoriented in their approach to joint course production. We have something to learn from for instance publishers in creating more open marketplaces for ideas and projects.
4 Programmes for institutional development
The organisation of distance education is a quite complicated affair, involving highly specialised competence in various areas, including curriculum and course development, production, education and educational technology, support systems, administrative computing systems and administration of knowledgebased organisations.These various elements must be put together in a way well adapted to the local situation, education system and communication infrastructure.
Open and distance learning is not equally well developed in all parts of Europe. Therefore, there is a need to link together expertise and institutions in programmes for institutional development. This might also include bilateral agreements and even joint ventures between institutions in different regions of Europe, where one country could draw upon expertise in a particular subject area or in a particular aspect of distance education. One example is the current situation in Eastern and Central Europe, where such institution development programmes would be the appropriate way to develop open and distance learning systems and institutions in this part of Europe.
5 Regional collaboration
Finally, I believe that in many cases regional collaboration networks and programmes are needed. For instance, the Nordic countries have similar traditions and experience in distance education, and I am sure that in some areas it would be wise of us to join forces and cooperate more regularly than we have done until now. We have a tradition of collaboration in multimedia projects involving broadcasting, but in other areas we have done less than we ought to. Several initiatives to increase Nordic collaboration have been taken recently; the NEK network which I mentioned earlier is just one example. I believe that the Nordic countries as a region should work more together in order to contribute to the development of open and distance learning in Europe. To do that, we need the active support from our governments for joint Nordic initiatives, for instance within computermediated communication or in co-operation with institutions in Central and Eastern Europe.
Having these needs in mind, we must ask ourselves whether we have the resources and instruments we need in order to develop European collaboration in open and distance learning in the direction we want.
At the moment, I do not think we have networks which are broad enough or strong enough to bring together the whole range of institutions in Europe in the widest sense of the term. We ought to mobilise all available resources and institutions: Open Universities, conventional universities, teacher training and further education colleges, private institutions and publishers, media specialists, broadcasting and satellite services, training agencies, enterprises and associations of various kinds. And we must do this irrespective of level of education or of traditional political and geographical divisions. One such network is under preparation, based on the Budapest Platform, and I hope it will reach the stage of formal establishment in a couple of months. It is badly needed.
Some of the patterns of collaboration which I have mentioned, will develop just because they are needed, both between educational institutions and between companies. But some of them will not occur, or they will not survive, without political and financial support at the national and transnational level. Some countries have established programmes which may be used to support collaboration and development in the field of distance education. Outside the European Community, however, such programmes are few and without any co-ordination. Therefore, it is very important that open and distance learning now is on the political agenda in all European countries. We may hope that the programmes and other instruments which are established at the national level will relate to transnational mechanisms to stimulate an integrated European development.
Obviously, there are a lot of inhibiting factors to collaboration, like language, costs, incompatible technology and cultural and educational traditions. But since medieval time Europe has constitute one cultural area, and with the technological and political developments of our time the challenges and opportunities of integration present themselves with growing appeal. As Europe now grows at the same time tighter and wider, time has come to join forces across national and political borders to exploit fully the resources of competence and experience we have together in open and distance learning. I hope this seminar will inspire us to "trace the roads to distance education in a wider Europe", to quote the title of a recent report to the Council of Europe. And I hope that the Norwegian spirit of collaboration between the public and the private sectors will allow various types of institutions, with necessary support from their governments, both to explore market opportunities and to finance research and pilot projects that may lead us forward along the many fascinating routes that will be open to us in open and distance learning in the emerging new Europe.
(An adapted version of this conference paper has been published in Open Learning, 6, 3,1991.)
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