The State of Distance Learning in France

This article presents a brief overview of the current state of distance education in France. We commence with a brief introduction to the country itself, followed by a descriptive, albeit highly abbreviated, overview of the history of France’s educational system. We then turn our attention to specifically examine certain implementations of online education currently employed with the French higher education context. Selected for particular attention in this manuscript is France’s Conservatoire national des arts et métiers, Cnam (in English, the National Conservatory of Arts and Crafts, or CNAM) and the Centre national d’enseignement à distance, Cned (in English, the National Center for Distance Education, or CNED) as 2 salient examples of the manner in which France has chosen to integrate distance education within higher education. We conclude with key reflections arising from the content presented in this manuscript.

France lays at the westernmost part of the sprawling European Plain, the land-form now politically designated as Europe. Bordered in the south both by the Mediterranean Ocean and the Pyrenees Mountains, and delimited on the west by the Alps Mountains, France was originally grassland during the Pleistocene Ice Age (Anderson, 1999). Since that era, the terrain within the region of France has undergone substantial geologic changes, resulting in a unique topography that now encompasses nearly every type of physical landform found in the world, including deserts, ice-clad mountains, plains, plateaus, forests and prairies. Today one may experience all these varied landscapes without ever leaving the continental borders of the country. When France’s overseas holdings¹ are considered, even extreme tropical and arctic land formations can be counted as parts of the enormous variability contained within the county’s geography.

France enjoys a high percentage of highly arable land, largely attributable to the presence of an expansive river system which includes the Loire, Seine, and Rhone rivers. These major rivers, along with a number of tributaries, make France particularly suitable for agricultural cultivation, as well as for raising livestock.² The land in France is a fertile source of everything from exotic fruits, wheat, vegetables of all types, and even naturally effervescent water; additionally, the land provides a natural home for a wide array of both domesticated and nondomesticated animals and wildlife.

By geographic measure, France consists of some 210,000 contiguous square miles within the European mainland, plus an additional 47,000 square miles in its overseas holdings, totaling nearly a quarter million square miles. The country’s summative territorial holdings make France the 42nd largest country in the world by geographic size, dispersed over 12 time zones, more than any other country in the world. With a population of 67 million people, the country is the fourth most populous country in Europe (The World Bank, 2018). The capital of France is Paris,³ which, including its suburban area, has a population of some 12 million individuals.

With the region’s documented history reaching as far back as prehistoric times, the area now referred to as France was at various historical periods home to the Celts, the Gauls, the Franks, the Romans, the Normans, the Carolingians, the Burgundians, as well as other ethnic and political groups. Archaeological digs conducted across the country, commenced during the 18th century and continuing to the present day, have continued to unearth numerous treasure troves of historical artifacts from each of these historical indigenous peoples.⁴ These unearthed artifacts are currently held in the public trust and are available for viewing in numerous natural history museums located throughout the country, often in small towns well off the beaten tourist trail. These museums make France a place of continuous historical discovery and investigation for anyone traveling through the country.

Many French individuals popularly consider themselves ancestors of the Gauls, a Celtic ethnic group. Nevertheless, the names France, French, française, and François/Françoise are all derivative of the word Frank, not Gaul.⁵ Charlemagne, called “the King of the Franks,” was a 9th century Frankish political leader who, along with his son, Charles the Bald, was arguably the start of the French nation. In spite of this historical association, many French history schoolbooks have famously begun their pages with the opening words “Nos ancêtres les Gaulois” (“Our ancestors, the Gauls”). Frank/Gaul, past/future, religious/secular, left/right, cathedral/court: dichotomy is perhaps the most accurate descriptive word that can be applied to numerous aspects of modern France.⁶

The official name of France is la République française. France is designated as a semipresidential unitary state because the country possesses both a president and a prime minister, and because power is devolved from the central government to each lower division of the state⁷ (Nolen, 2010). This form of governmental structure contrasts to some extent with so-called federal systems such as that employed in the United States, where power (e.g., in the U.S. case) is shared between and among 50 states, and with each state possessing integral authority as defined by the U.S. Founding Fathers.⁸ France’s governmental structure also differs also from the United States in the extent of power accorded to each president: French presidents have vast authority to enact political and governmental policies exceeding that appropriated to U.S. presidents. This may be seen in the substantial and lasting effects from the rules of past, recent French Presidents such as Charles de Gaulle, François Mitterrand, and Georges Pompidou, to name but a few.⁹

Both unitary and federal states are democratic in nature, and in the specific cases of France and the United States, both countries have written constitutions¹⁰ which are based on previously written statements of individual rights.¹¹ In France, this foundational document is named la Déclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen de 1789 (The Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen of 1789), and in the equivalent document in the United States, The U.S. Bill of Rights.¹²

Both France and the United States are politically designated as Republics, where ultimate power resides in the citizenry, and elections are conducted to select representatives of the people, including the President, who indirectly exercise the people’s will.¹³

France has the seventh largest gross domestic product in the world, currently estimated at 2.6 trillion dollars, and is a member of the G7 Major Advanced Economies Group (The World Bank, 2018). France is the world’s leading tourist destination, with some 87 million tourist arrivals per year generating some 250 billion Euros (280 billion U.S. dollars) per year in income and supporting an estimated 3.3 million jobs (statista, 2018; World Tourism Organization, 2018). Although France’s tourism status is widely known, what is not (at least, outside of the European area) is that France is also the fifth largest agricultural exporter in the world, generating some $74 billion U.S. dollars of food exports each year (World Atlas, 2015). As described earlier, more than half of the country is arable and under permanent tillage (Economics Trading, 2019), and any eastward overflight of the country will reveal a seemingly endless vista of planted crops stretching from Brittany (on France’s westernmost coast) to Alsace (on France’s eastern border with Germany).

France additionally exports a wide variety of goods of other types to all parts of the world, with Germany, Spain, Italy, and the United States, in that order, being the country’s top four trading partners (Workman, 2018); overall, France is the second largest exporter of goods to Europe (World Trade Organization, 2008). France is home to a major pharmaceutical industry which develops and markets a wide range of advanced medicines and continues to be home to many groundbreaking medical innovations¹⁴ that later reach worldwide adoption. Perhaps even less well known is that France is home to some of the world’s most advanced aircraft companies, including Dassault Engineering, a designer and manufacturer of state-of-the-art military aircraft as well as sophisticated software products, and Airbus Corporation, which is either the largest or second-largest civilian aircraft company in the world (juxtaposing seemingly yearly with the U.S.-based Boeing Corporation). France is also the source of a significant cadre of advanced computer programmers which position the country as a leader in data analytics, predictive data analysis, aircraft stealth and wing design, and computer software (including best-selling gaming programs). Principal French exports to the United States include electrical equipment, chemicals, aircraft and engines, beverages, cosmetics, luxury products and perfume. France is also the well-known home to many top luxury products brands, including LVMH Moёt Hennessy Louis Vuitton SE (the world’s most valuable luxury brand), Chanel, Dior, Cartier, Hermès, Lancôme, Christian Louboutin, Lafite, and Yves Saint Laurent, which cumulatively generate some $22 billion in sales per year. France’s economic prowess is not simply a recent phenomenon; as far back as the 1800s, French theoreticians were the first to attempt to apply scientific principles to what is now called the field of economics in an effort to model, predict, and improve economic outcomes.¹⁵

France is often colloquially called “the Hexagon” due the country’s symmetric hexagonal shape (refer to Figure 1). The official language, French, la langue française, is a Romance Language¹⁶ spoken at various levels of expertise by over 220 million individuals around the world. These individuals are collectively referred to as the Francophone World (French Ministry for Europe and Foreign Affairs, 2019).

Many of the representations of France are so well known that they have achieved currency in countries around the world that do not speak French. The national anthem of France, for example, la Marseillaise, written in 1792 by Claude Joseph Rouget de Lisle (Bouzard, 2016), is arguably the world’s most instantly recognizable national anthem. The flag of France, the famous tricolor, representing the historic colors of Paris (blue and red) and the traditional color of the French monarchy (white) in a triple striped, rectangular format has been adopted, with color variations, by numerous countries throughout the world.¹⁷ The name “Joan of Arc” (Jeanne d’arc), a secondary patron of France, is easily recognized by numerous individuals around the world. France’s iconic and eponymous steel structure built in Paris for the 1887 World Fair by Gustave Eiffel is so famous as to negate the need to state its name and is perhaps the world’s single most immediately recognizable cultural icon. Numerous other examples of widely recognized cultural representations of France could be easily cited.

As an indicator of France’s ongoing efforts in the field of technology innovation, in 2017, Paris was named the “European Capital of Innovation” by winning the European Union’s iCaptial Award (Boorman, 2017). Under the Macron presidency (2017–current), France has now established Station F in Paris, the world’s largest startup campus for innovation and start-up businesses (Station F, 2019). In 2017, French venture capitalists raised 2.8 billion Euros in capital funds, and some predict that at some point the country may surpass Britain as Europe’s leading technology innovator (Dealroom.co, 2018; Scott, Dickson, & Contigugla, 2018). This accomplishment is built upon a long history of French technological innovation, including photography, cinema, and the Minitel, a French videotex network system (Mailland & Driscoll, 2017) that was an early precursor to Internet network technology, in addition to numerous other inventions. France’s technology-leader status is also the result of an intensive effort to further increase technological innovation, including a national outreach program for technology startups (La French Tech, 2018). Taken together, France’s past and present technological achievements make the country one of the world’s foremost leaders in the technical and technology worlds.

France’s higher educational system is an organizationally complex and highly varie-gated system that must respond to the needs of a large number of students within numerous fields of study. Examination of the specific details of French higher education organizational structures could never be covered in an article of this length. To summarize, there are three achievement degrees of French higher education: the Licence et Licence Professionnelle; the Masters; and the Doctorat. These degree levels are designed for interoperability with other European institutions, and approximately mirror the system at use within the U.S. higher education system (i.e., bachelors, masters, and doctorate degrees). There are some 3,500 higher education institutions in France, more than 80 of which are universities, serving some 2 million students each year (IFP Ltd., 2018a, 2018b). French business schools regularly appear in the top places of world school rankings (Financial Times, 2018a, 2018b), and often, some may be surprised to find, implement an English-language curriculum as these schools are training the next generation of financial and business leaders not only for France, but for many countries around the world. French political and economic leaders are often the product of France’s highly competitive Grands Écoles system, which consists of some 250 premier higher educational institutions (IFP Ltd., 2017). The country is also home to numerous medical universities, including the Université Sorbonne Paris Cité-USPC, the Université de Lyon, the Université of Aix-Marseille, amongst many others, and leading universities, such as the Paris-based Science Po, attract students worldwide to specialize in the social sciences. Research-intensive engineering institutions, such as the CentraleSupélec in Paris, are also a part of the higher education system in France.

Over the centuries France has been home to numerous national educational reforms and innovations in instructional methodologies, but the nation maintains an ongoing realization for the need of ongoing educational revision combined with a future-looking mindset if France is to remain a world leader in education. France’s centuries-long history makes it such that the past remains an irreplaceable component of all French education (both within its curricular content and in the administrative organization of educational institutions), but the ongoing recognition of the importance of high educational standards also motivates French educational reformers to continue to look ahead in meeting the demands of a 21st century workforce. In French higher education, therefore, both the past and the future simultaneously reside in a coexistent reality, which informs all aspects of the overall education system.

Compounding the dichotomous “past/ future” nature of French education is France’s membership within the European Union (EU). The EU is a supranational European political structure currently (i.e., late 2019) composed of 28 European countries who have politically joined to form the world’s single largest trading block.¹⁸ Beyond political unification, many EU nations have also monetarily joined together through the mechanism of a common currency called the Euro.¹⁹ Membership in the EU necessitates that France has two sets of educational policy bodies to which the country must attend. The first is the national (i.e., French) educational system, which according to EU policy, is “responsible for … [its] own education and training systems” (europa.eu, 2018). The second are the supranational, EU political bodies overseeing EU educational standards designed to improve education within all European member countries.²⁰ The political reach of the EU’s educational policies and standards are such that they could arguably play as great a role as any EU member state’s own indigenous educational policy. The EU’s influence upon member states’ educational systems, including France, is likely only to increase if further harmonization of EU member states is achieved over time.²¹

Two major events from the history of France have significantly impacted the entire subsequent bulk of western education. It is virtually impossible to overestimate the effect each has had on higher education of the entire last millennium.

The establishment of the Palatine School by Charlemagne in the 9th century in Aixla-Chapelle (now Aachen, Germany²²),

established a foundational cornerstone in how education would both be envisioned and implemented across Charlemagne’s Kingdom, which eventually subsumed the bulk of what is today called Europe. Charlemagne had an intense interest in education²³ and believed that education was an essential component for the ongoing health of both the kingdom and the church (Amirault & Branson, 2006). After conquering much of the European continent, the Emperor then turned his attention to education, proceeding to actively attract to Aix-la-Chapelle leading scholars of the day from as far away as Britain and Ireland, as well as all parts of the continent, for purposes of establishing his new Palatine School. Charlemagne’s goal in doing so was to improve the level of education among students who would then be returned to all parts of Europe to further spread his educational vision throughout the continent. His emphasis on the importance of learning how to read and write established the concept of the textbook as central to education as an educational tool, a view subsequently propagated into nearly all educational systems across the world.²⁴

This historic event has led some to name Charlemagne the “Father of French Education.” Others argue—perhaps with an equally defensible approbation—for the Marquis de Condorcet (1743–1794 A.D.),

due to Condorcet’s extensive work within education near the time of the French Revolution. Others posit Jules Ferry (1832– 1893 A.D.), who served as minister of public education and fine arts, pioneering numerous educational reforms in France, including compulsory and free primary school education for all, and establishing the view that education is a right of all citizens that should be utilized for the betterment of country and society.²⁵ All three of these individuals (Charlemagne, Condorcet, and Ferry) played an integral role in the field of education, each with a unique concern to be addressed. The question of who was “the Father of French Education” therefore perhaps has no fixed answer to which all will agree.

Arguably of even greater significance to France’s educational history than Charlemagne’s emphasis on textbooks and reading/writing was another historical event that, at the time, could not have even begun to be fully appreciated in terms of its eventual impact and endurance upon the field of education: the creation of the first European university. This honorific is often accorded to the 13th century University of Paris (more specifically, The Sorbonne), when many of Europe’s most acclaimed instructors were drawn together to Paris to establish the university, and its students housed in colleges within the city, particularly on the Left Bank of the Seine River.

The educational paradigm of The University has become so universal that today it is difficult to remember that The University was both an innovation and an invention. More specifically, The University was an innovation and invention developed in reaction to other educational structures existing at the time. Prior to the 13th century, students studied in ad hoc schools led by various masters of repute (and often by a single master, not a faculty of masters), in individual cathedral schools or in remote, rural monasteries across Europe. The University, by contrast, involved the incorporation of an assembly (faculty) of esteemed masters, an organized body of students, a standardized course of study, and was uniquely a city-based phenomenon (Daileader, 2001a).

Although some 800 years have now since passed, the University of Paris remains located in Paris, now segmented into 13 campuses (I through XIII). The European University’s significance to education, and its first instantiation²⁶ at The

University of Paris, was that it was the first fully systematized European educational higher education system. The University of Paris and its Italian and British counterparts set in motion the worldwide university movement that now, 8 centuries later, is implemented in virtually every nation in the world, in both public and private variants.

The University movement was also the provenance of a new educational method today referred to as Scholasticism (de Wulf & Coffey, 1907; Kenny & Pinborg, 1982). The Scholastic Method, which can be envisioned as an adversarial approach to learning in opposition to the meditative/ associative approaches used in monastic education, helped propel the university in establishing itself as the world’s premier educational organization, quickly bypassing all other methods of instruction in what we now refer to as “higher education” (Daileader, 2001c).

Prior to the introduction of Scholasticism within European universities, students in cathedral schools, collegiate schools, and monasteries were taught in widely dissimilar, nonstandardized approaches. The emergence of the university as a systematized educational structure brought with it an array of features that significantly altered the nature of higher education: a fixed set of subjects to be learned in a specific order (based on the ancient form of the Seven Liberal Arts and divided into two parts, the Trivium and the Quadrivium²⁷); a concentration of premier teachers to a school’s location to comprise a faculty; a formalized system of assessment, including the quodlibetal (a verbal debate held in public and assessed by a master or magister as he was then called); and the introduction of transferable, portable degrees which objectified a student’s educational accomplishments and made possible his application to other universities to teach as a recognized scholar (Amirault, 2012). This means that, today, all university students and instructors anywhere in the world are participating in a system that can be directly traced to 13th century Paris and the Île-de-France region. Even with subsequent and significant structural modifications throughout the centuries (reflecting changes in national goals and the accommodation of the greatly increasing breadth and diversity of available knowledge), the linkage to medieval France remains intact to this day.²⁸

Although it is accurate to view French education as reaching back at least a millennium of time, perhaps the best starting point to examine France’s modern educational system is the period of the French Revolution (1789–1792 A.D.). The focus of the Revolution was one of liberté, égalité, fraternité (“liberty, equality, fraternity”), and this would apply to education as well as to other political and economic goals. Previously, the Kingdom of France,²⁹ as in most western European realms, reserved advanced education for the wealthy and for those who would enter the service of the church; in the specific case of France, educational content was even delivered primarily by the church. With the French Revolution, however, education was henceforth to be looked upon as a necessary aspect of life open to all individuals regardless of background, wealth, gender, status, or religious affiliation.

The French National Assembly decreed in 1808 the structure of The French Imperial University; this decree apportioned existing universities into academies with oversight by rectors (Caporali, 2014). This change clearly marks an early demarcation point for understanding how France’s educational system would evolve over time to meet the standards espoused by the Revolution to equally serve all citizens. Although the French Imperial University, as originally conceived, would have a short lifespan (the institution was ended in 1896, but was reconstituted³⁰ during the Bourbon Restoration), this can be arguably viewed as the start of the modern French university system.

It would be the state, too, not the church, which would eventually become the official educational licensing body for all levels of education, as well as the oversight body for the national educational curriculum. In 1889, René Goblet, a successor of Jules Ferry (who himself had served multiple terms as Education Minister), fully differentiated public and private educational institutions and was able to induce the French Legislature to move all instructor positions into state civil servant positions.³¹ This built upon Ferry’s emphasis on educational laïcité (secularism) that originally arose as part of the French Revolution (Decherf, 2001; IFP Ltd., 2018b). The 1905 Law of Separation completely disconnected religion from government institutions with the words (translated into English³²) “the Republic does not recognize, pay, or subsidize any religion” (la République française, 2019b; Pew Research Center, 2005). The 1905 Law of Separation places the responsibility of education on the State as well as on students, stating (English translation) it is “the duty of the state to provide free, compulsory, secular education at all levels” (la République française, 2019b).

Upon the end of the Fourth Republic in 1958 and the installation of Charles de Gaulle as the president of the republic under the Fifth Republic, a number of events arising from this change impacted France’s educational system. State spending on education, for example, markedly increased, making France one of the highest per-capita spenders on education in the world (Hoffmann & Andrews, 1981). An increase in the number and variety of topics was introduced into the educational curriculum, and the overall effect was to generally shift the French curriculum closer toward the social sciences, the natural sciences, and technology (as opposed to the previous focus on the humanist subjects such as Greek, Latin, literature, philosophy, history, etc.).

These were positive developments, but few could predict what would lay ahead for education in the tumultuous period of the 1960s. In a series of protests that swept much of the western world, students at the University of Paris in May 1968 joined in protest, taking over the institution and subsequently spilling out into the greater Paris area. This was not a new phenomenon: since medieval times university students had protested, and even carried out multi-year strikes over a variety of issues; closer in time, immediately before World War I, for example, university students in Paris’s Left Bank conducted a variety of significant protests (Weisz, 1983). The 1968 protests, however, continued to grow, and soon all of France was engulfed in a series of protests, strikes, and riots that brought much of the country to a standstill. Much like what was experienced in Chicago, Illinois and other major cities around the Western world that very same year, local police and state armed forces were deployed in force to contain the situation. President de Gaulle eventually was able to bring the event to a stop through a series of negotiations and by conceding on certain issues. As succinctly stated by Alissa Rubin in The New York Times on the 50th anniversary of this event:

Although the situation was eventually quelled, the nature of higher education in France, as in much of the world, was irrevocably changed. In 2003, the French Education Code (le Code de l’éducation) ratified all existing education legislation, orders, laws, decrees, etc. into its single codification, divided into a Legislative Section and a Regulatory Section (Population Europe Resource Finder and Archive, 2003). In 2005, a framework law was passed identifying education as a national priority and decreed that a common set of skills and knowledge should be provided to all learners in order to provide them equal professional opportunity in life. Another enactment (law no. 2013-595³³) about a decade later in 2013 reemphasized these principles (Caporali, 2014).

But even with the revolution of the 1960s, another revolution was on the horizon: the technological revolution. By the 1980s, computerized and networked technology set the stage not only for the use of computerized technology within traditional classrooms but the explosion of computerized, networked online distance education at a distance. Starting at this time, education systems around the world were faced with questions as to whether and/or how such inventions would be integrated into the curricula of schools everywhere. We now turn our attention to some of the approaches by which France would address the question of the place of e-learning in education.

Although France is one of the world’s technologically leading countries, the country does not possess an open university for online distance education as do some other technologically advanced countries. France has rather chosen to address the need for online education through approaches more familiar to the traditional French model of education, while continuing to draw upon a modern understanding of the role networked, digital technology may play in education (another example of the past/future dichotomy within French society mentioned earlier in this article).

This should not lead the reader, however, to think of France as lagging in technology-based communication and its attendant instructional capabilities. Quite the contrary, such thoughts can be quickly dismissed with a review, to cite but one example, of the French Minitel system, the Médium interactif par numérisation d’information téléphonique (Interactive Medium through Digitizing of Telephone Information). Minitel was a videotex³⁴ system natively developed and deployed in France in 1978 and more fully in 1982. (Note that this date is actually earlier than the adoption of the World Wide Web and its Internet-based hardware backbone.) The French Minitel system is now widely considered to be one the earliest successful precursors to Internet technology (Mailland & Driscoll, 2017). Minitel made use of terminals which were loaned/leased by the French telecom industry to individual homes, and a variety of electronic-based services, including the sharing of text and video, electronics purchases, and so on, were available to French users before the rest of the world had even discovered a World Wide Web. Approaching some nine million terminals by the end of the 20th century and serving an estimated 25 million French users, about a third of the entire population of the country (Sayare, 2012), the system was finally formally shut down in 2009 after 25 years of use due to the worldwide adoption of the World Wide Web running upon the backbone of the Internet’s hardware network. Minitel, however, remains an important representative illustration of the forward-thinking nature of the telecommunications industry within France,³⁵ and is today still widely acknowledged by many telecommunication engineers who have a working knowledge of their domain’s history.

There are other aspects of French efforts in the area of distance learning that dispel any notion that the country has been resistant to distance learning. The Conservatoire national des arts et métiers (“Cnam;” the National Conservatory of Arts and Crafts, or CNAM³⁶), originally a collection of science-and technology-based inventions but now comprising a technology-based continuing education institution which grants doctoral degrees and provides lifelong courses in business, engineering, and multidisciplinary science, was founded some 230 years ago.³⁷ CNAM now provides online courses as well as distance learning support for instruction throughout France’s higher education institutions.

Another large and significant online education organization overseen by the French government is the Centre national d’enseignement à distance (Cned; in English, the National Center for Distance Education, or CNED), a public education institution started by the French government nearly 100 years ago (in 1939) whose focus is the development of materials for use in the distance learning context. As explained by Olivier Marty, a scholar at CNAM:

The existence of both CNAM and CNED are important keys (although not the only ones) to understanding how the French educational system has regarded technology- and/or online-based education. For example, in October 2013, the French Ministry of Education extended the move toward online, digitally based education by deploying FUN-MOOC, or France Université Numeriqué-MOOC (France Digital University-MOOC). FUN-MOOC is a centralized MOOC portal that serves all categories of universities and the Grands Écoles within France (FUN-MOOC, 2019). A partial screenshot (Figure 2) of FUNMOOC’s splash page of participating French universities on their website provides evidence of the institution’s reach within French higher education.

In spite of FUN-MOOC’s size and high growth rate, the historical background of France’s CNED and CNAM institutions are essential to understanding the current state of French distance education, and so we now briefly look in turn at both of these organizations.³⁸

Earlier in this article, we stated that there is no open university in France. CNED, the French National Center for Education, however, quite nearly qualifies for this categorization due to its operational mission, size, and history. CNED is an official organization of the National Education Ministry of France and is often the educational system of choice for families that have moved outside of France but still require that their children receive higher education credit recognized and aligned with traditional, face-to-face programs located within the country. Working in partnership with traditional existing French universities, successful completion of CNED online programs permits students to become admitted to any French higher education institution, whether that institution is situated in Métropolitaine France, or in a French overseas Region, Collective, or Territory (Ministère de l’Europe et des Affaires étrangères, 2015).

CNED, however, is not limited to French citizens or residents. CNED provides online learning opportunities to nearly a quarter of a million students at all grade levels through some 250 online courses. With an 85 million Euro budget (about 97 million U.S. dollars), the organization is the largest lifelong learning school in Europe. CNED courses are provided in numerous languages to serve a diverse group of learners inside and outside of France, and courses are open to any individual, regardless of location or nationality.

CNED is physically headquartered at the ultramodern Futuroscope center in Poitiers, France, and the organization employs 2,200 individuals at Poitiers as well as other physical locales, including Grenoble, Lille, Lyon, Poitiers, Rennes, Rouen, Toulouse, and Vanves. CNED provides courses directly to students but also supports traditional French schools in the use of digital devices in the classroom, remediation for younger students, and the teaching of foreign languages, a key skill for the 21st century workforce.

The level of sophistication accomplished at CNED is easily seen with a visit to the institution’s main online web portal at http://www.cned.fr/. The online educator specialist is encouraged to review this site to see the scope and depth of CNED’s activities.³⁹

The breadth of CNED programs and courses available is undeniably impressive. Self-remediation courses, programs leading to licensure, certification, and even preparation for entry to the highly competitive Grands Écoles system are available, and topical areas include education sciences, professional training education, administration and public management, marketing, and sales, cinema, foreign language studies, mathematics, epistemology of science, medical and forensic secretaries, physics, chemistry, and many more. Prices for courses and programs vary depending on the type of student applying (i.e., Is the student currently studying at a school? Is the student at a school participating in a large school initiative agreement with CNED? Is the student a postbaccalaureate life-long learner? Is a degree being sought?, etc.). Regardless of specific price variations, a quick review will reveal that these courses and programs are highly cost competitive with other online instruction programs around the world.

An examination at the student demographics reveals the reach of the CNED organization (CNED, 2017). For example, 57% of CNED students were of age 18 years or older, with 52% being classified as adults. Sixty-five percent of the current (2017) body is female. In addition, 13% of the student body is from outside of France (4% in Europe, 4% in Africa, 2.7% in America, 2% in Asia, and 0.3% in Oceania). These percentages reflect the Francophone World, but also provide evidence that CNED is serving both lifelong learners, learners retraining for new careers, nontraditional learners, and that within a majority body of female learners.

As previously covered, CNAM was created during the French Revolution, and is therefore approximately 230 years in age. Originally developed as a repository for technological and scientific crafts and inventions (one of the foci of the French Revolution that continues to this day to impact scientific methods, quantification, and analysis), the institution has since that time undergone structural divisions. One such division, le Musée des Arts et Métiers (in English, the Museum of Arts and Trades) is one of the world’s oldest and largest museums of technology and scientific crafts and holds its collection for the Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers (the National Conservatory of Arts and Industry).⁴⁰ The museum’s collection comprises items within the categories of scientific instruments, materials, energy, mechanics, construction, communication and transport (le Musée des arts et métiers, 2019a). Some 2,400 technology and craft-related objects within these sections are on permanent display; the museum’s off-site permanent reserves, which hold the totality of the museum’s holdings far too extensive to be on continuous display, is located on the north side of Paris, and contains over 80,000 historically significant technology and craft items, as well as 15,000 historical drawings of historic technology-related inventions (le Musée des arts et métiers, 2019a, 2019b).

Over time, CNAM assumed a formal educational mission under the aegis of the French government. Today, the National Conservatory of Arts and Crafts is officially denoted by France as both a Grand établissement and an engineering Grande école (la République Française, 2019a) offering doctoral degrees and a wide variety of classes within the scope of its technology and crafts domain. The main web portal for the institution may be seen at http://www.cnam.fr/portail/conservatoire-national-des-arts-etmetiers-821166.kjsp. The institution’s motto is Omnes docet ubique (“He/it teaches everyone everywhere”) and designates itself a lifelong learning provider (Cnam, 2019b). CNAM first offered limited television-based distance learning as far back as 1963.

In spite of the 2013 creation of FUNMOOC, CNAM remains a large institution of higher education in France which delivers a significant portion of its coursework through distance and technological means. Each year, the intuition has approximately 60,000 course takers and also issues some 10,000 degrees and certificates (Cnam, 2019d). CNAM promotes three main missions: (1) training throughout life, (2) research, and (3) Scientific and technical culture. The institution maintains more than 200 teaching centers throughout France, and is administratively apportioned into two schools, Industrial Sciences and Information Technology and Management and Social Sciences Applied to Firms, each containing seven departments. In conformance with the European Credit Transfer System (The European Commission, 2018b), a part of Europe’s Bologna Process for education (The European Commission, 2018a), degrees are offered at the Licence et Licence Professionnelle, Masters; and Doctorat levels referenced earlier in this article.

It is estimated that approximately two fifths of CNAM students take their courses online through CNAM’s FOAD online program, or Formation Ouverte et à Distance (Cnam, 2019c). In 2010, there were approximately 43,000 student registrations for at least one CNAM course unit (Cnam, 2019e). Currently, there are some 63,000 student course registrations across 36 MOOC’s offered by CNAM (Cnam, 2019a). CNAM’s distance courses include both hybrid and fully online formats, and significant growth in student enrollments in these programs has been experienced in the past 5 years (Cnam, 2019a) There are currently 1 million alumni of CNAM courses, which includes traditional, hybrid, and fully online learners.

The extensive history of education within France has generated a significant body of literature related to distance learning, but unfortunately, this amassed scholarship often remains closed off to non-French speakers. This is unfortunate because much of this information would be of great interest to the world’s distance education community. Only a percentage of these works can currently be translated out of the original French due to cost and time constraints. These works are filled with theory-based content, future casting, practical case studies, and historical documentation, and represent a scholarly collection that begs for translation so that the material could be disseminated to the greater distance education research and practitioner areas. In developing this manuscript, for example, the author benefited from the assistance of Dr. Olivier Marty, a scholar at France’s CNAM, and these interactions reaffirmed to this author that the treasure trove of scholarship and literature within the French context could greatly benefit the worldwide community of distance education scholars.

To provide but a single example of the scholarship produced in France surrounding distance learning, we look at a 2014 article Marty developed (in English; Marty is fully bilingual) manuscript entitled “Monetizing French Education: A Field Inquiry on Higher Education” (Marty, 2014). The monetizing of digital information, of course, is an important and—as of yet—unanswered question both inside and outside the French context in that the debate about the quantification and monetization of digital information involves many previously unexplored concepts brought about by digital technology (Amirault & Visser, 2016). Marty (2014) examines the changes in French education over the centuries to the modern period, and describes the current setting “situat[ing] this monetization of French distance education within two contradictory trends of, on the one hand, free open online education and, on the other hand, privatization of teaching—implying com-modification by a common measure of knowledge’s value” (p. 14). Marty also is able to explicate the tension between the original French vision of Jules Ferry and others in the 18th century of education as a right for all citizens for the betterment of society, compared to today’s common view as education for improving specific skills to improve the working value of an individual in an employment-centric world. According to Marty, “history shows how traditional French education is a state controlled public good, [but] a new policy is [now] changing the organization’s culture toward a commercial and industrial activity” (p. 1). To any individual who works within online education, this question holds immense societal and economic importance, for it is not only a question innate to education as a whole, but it will also play a significant role in the applied direction distance education is likely to take in the coming decades (Amirault, 2012).

Therefore, the questions raised in 18th century France, with its emphasis on education for all and existing as an individual right, continue to hold import today. Indeed, these very questions continue to be debated, and arguably with additional vigor, in today’s context: American student school loan debt, now held by some 44 million individuals, surpasses 1.5 trillion U.S. dollars, averaging some $23,700 per student (Friedman, 2018), and cannot be forgiven, even through bankruptcy. Added to this complexity is that the delivery of education is not a free endeavor, either: training, labor, materials, facilities and more all add to a financial cost of education. This means that such massive amounts of student debt will eventually affect not only students, but the educators who supply that education. In contradiction to some early predictions, online learning does not necessarily significantly reduce the costs of either delivering or receiving education. In today’s concerns surrounding sustainability, surely education, too, must be included, because the loss of quality education can have incalculable economic, political, and social effects (Amirault & Visser, 2010).

In reflecting on the monetization of information, and by inference, education, the inevitable question must arise: what is the quality of the instruction that is being provided, and what impact does that quality have on that education’s monetary value? It has been repeatedly shown that distance-based education can be either equivalent, better, or worse than traditional education: modality is no longer the question nearly as much as education’s implementation (Amirault & Visser, 2016). Therefore, we must ask: How should society settle on monetizing educational content? How will society pay for that education? To what extent should individual learners themselves bear the cost of education? We must also look at these issues from the reverse perspective, as well. How do society, government, and nations later profit from higher educated individuals (e.g., Better political choices? The collection of taxes? The betterment of society?), and how is the sum of that learning quantified? Should any fiduciary gains to society be apportioned to learners in order to reduce the price they pay for education? These are all questions inherently subsumed in the educational debates brought forward over 200 years ago in 18th century France.

We daresay that the vast number of educators who have engaged in distance and online education see the many benefits that are made possible to a vastly greater number of individuals through online learning, a sort of democratization of education, and therefore, information. This view is somewhat parallel to the goals espoused by 18th century France (cf. Amirault & Visser, 2010). But these benefits are not a given, and any number of unsuccessful online education endeavors can be conjured up in the imagination to ostensibly refute this view. But to this author, such arguments fall short when considering the apparent shortcomings that are also witnessed in traditional education: poor educational outcomes, recidivism, unre-payable debt, and individuals trained in areas that will be of little use to them in today’s economic setting are no strangers to traditional educational modalities, not simply the distance learning setting.

1. Large. Online learning in today’s France is significant in size, both as regards the number of programs, courses, and participating institutions, but also in the number of enrolled students, instructors, and technical personnel required to deliver online content.

2. Growing. Data collected by institutions such as CNAM provide clear evidence of the enormous growth of the number of students taking courses either in hybrid and/or fully online modalities. This trend is estimated to continue.

3. Government supported. The French Government provides significant financial support to institutions, instructors, staff, and learners throughout the distance learning ecosystem.

4. Future looking. French online distance learning is not simply a response to students “not wanting to attend classes,” but is inimically bound to an understanding of the importance of technology as a 21st century reality in which all learners will be required to interact.

5. Vested in the outlook of education that holds not just economic, but societal value. Today’s French educational system still aspires to the 18th century goals of education as a societal right, and one that similarly benefits society, not simply wages.

6. Supporting lifelong learning for all learners. Organizations such as CNAM, with its explicit emphasis on lifelong learning, have leveraged the opportunities provided by hybrid and fully online learning to allow individuals to continue to learn throughout their lives, not just during school years.

7. Emphasizing the need for continuous workforce retooling. Without contradiction to the perceived societal value of education, France understands that individuals require training for today’s jobs to allow learners to successfully enter well-paying jobs, and subsequently successfully navigate a career that will experience multiple points of inflection as technology continues to evolve.

A lesson, then, can be learned from 21st century France’s large and growing aspect of distance education. There are reasons for this growth, and they do not lay primarily in learners who do not want to perform the work of traditional education (to the contrary, many distance education students report significantly more challenging and time-consuming work in their online courses when compared to traditional settings). As French society continues to move forward in a technology-centric world where retraining is often required, and lifelong learning looks more and more a necessity, distance and online education attempts to address this requirement in a manner that can at times be virtually impossible using traditional modalities. France undoubtedly has an enormous advantage in that the country has a rich and storied history in the arts, sciences, and technology, and, additionally, has an extremely large economy that can help absorb transitional costs.

This transition, however, nevertheless remains complex in nature. As in every other country which has significantly undertaken online education, the task requires the combined commitment of government, educators, families, and learners in order to make the approach successful and to achieve its stated goals. But for the distance education scholar, it is beneficial to witness how France is accomplishing this transition without casting aside traditional educational values, including an innate appreciate for the arts as educationally significant and the recognition that education holds both applied and societal worth. The Revolution of 18th century France is far from over, as far as education is concerned. That is the true state of distance learning in France today.