The International Section of QRDE is pleased to announce the fourth entry into our series “The State of Distance Learning Around the World.” Begun in 2017, the goal of this series is to update distance education practitioners, scholars, and researchers—and particularly, online distance educators—in how distance education is being implemented within countries that are not as frequently represented within the professional academic literature of North America. This series therefore omits distance learning experiences arising from North America, for this is the region in which the majority of reports, studies, and descriptions of distance learning endeavors appear. There are any number of reasons for this phenomenon: a greater number of schools, a larger economy (both at the national and the local schools levels), a greater number of participating scholars who document and subsequently publish their experiences and studies, and, of course, the use of the English language, a language spoken by some 1.5 billion individuals.
The reality, however, is that, because online distance learning is a worldwide phenomenon, there are, unfortunately, a very large number of projects, integration programs, experiences, and “lessons-learned” occurring in nations across the world to which the North American audience may never be exposed in the scholarly literature. The scholarly literature of France is an excellent case in point.
When thinking of “France,” most people envision a principal member of Europe, a highly developed technological and economic power fully vested, not only in its own history, but in the history of the world. Those notions would be correct. And although French students studying in the French government’s approved curricula for education do indeed learn English as a second language, such language learning may not always be sufficient in duration and scope for French educators working in higher education to feel comfortable developing and submitting English-language manuscripts to North American journals. Because France already has a lively and extensive scholarly French-language publishing ecosystem, it is a much more straightforward task for these academicians to continue working within their national system and to do so using the French language. There is no surprise here: how many North American scholars, for example (with the exception of Canadian authors who work with two national languages, English and French) professionally write in any language other than English? As the saying goes, “The road runs in both directions,” and so this is not a phenomenon unique to France.
As we will point out in our fourth entry in this series which immediately follows this introduction which focuses on online distance education in use in France today, this is an unfortunate circumstance, for France is heavily invested in online distance education at the higher education level. France produces numerous case studies, theoretical analyses, practical guides, and empirical studies conducted on distance education experiences from within the country. Yet the “average” North American reader (Canada excluded, of course) has been, to some extent, “closed off” to this wealth of information because of the language issue. It is doubly unfortunate, too, because France, with such an extensive history in education, has much to share with the world concerning its experiences in this historically new field (i.e., online distance education) that would benefit nearly any distance education worker anywhere in the world. The proliferation of automatic text translation tools is a help in this respect, but we must also admit that the average individual will not likely go through the steps needed to have a manuscript translated. Moreover, such automatic translations, although now more sophisticated and easier to use than ever before, are not yet able to promise delivery of the various true intended meanings represented within the original source document, a factor of great concern when dealing with academic literature. Nevertheless, there is a wealth of French-language academic literature on distance learning, much of it very current in nature, that awaits those who are willing and able to enter it.
Those who have been following this series in QRDE know that we began by covering countries from widely diverse parts of the world, including Japan (Far East), Saudi Arabia (Middle East), and Romania (Far Eastern Europe). Each of these countries have significantly different goals for online distance education at the national level, and each therefore is reflected in the individual manuscripts published in QRDE.
In this current entry, we now move to the very heart of continental Europe, France, which has its own history of education that arguably is as old as 1,200 years, and has been a leader in educational reform, particularly in the last two centuries. France embraced distance learning relatively early compared to many other countries, and its timeline of online distance education has similarly made France an “early adopter” of this computerized, networked, and electronically mediated education modality. And although Romania and France are both full members of the same European Union, the goals and motivations for utilizing online distance education within the two countries vary widely due to their historical backgrounds. This means that “Part 4” of our series continues to serve its function in providing information of widely disparate, underrepresented literature for the English-speaking context.
The history of France, along with its concurrent history of education, is so vast that it could not possibly be done justice in a single article of a single issue of a professional journal: such as a task generally requires volumes for those who have done so to capture the details of even all the main events of the topic. But in keeping with the goals of this QRDE series, article four, on France, continues to follow the identical format for all articles in the series: (1) An introduction to the country itself; (2) A brief overview of the traditional educational system; (3) Some key aspects of how online distance learning is currently being implemented in the country; and (4) A closing discussion that comments on some of the article’s content.
At stated in the abstract, there is a significant amount of information to be found in endnotes throughout the article. This important information is placed in footnotes only to facilitate readability of the main text. The reader is strongly encouraged to read the endnotes in order to fully benefit from the content which the article seeks to convey.
We hope you enjoy and benefit from “The State of Distance Learning in France.” We also hope that the content provides a platform of knowledge that provokes thought on the meaning of education, as well as distance learning’s place within it. A common French phrase is “Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose” (“The more things change, the more they stay the same”). We trust that this article will provide evidence that, in the case of online distance education in France, that is most certainly not the case. As highlighted in the introduction article prefacing the third article of this series (focused on Romania, found in QRDE Volume 19, Number 3), distance education is the reflection of a transformation taking place within the educational world. The same is true for France, but for entirely different reasons.
