Education and DL in Belgium

Published by in edtech on October 26th, 2005

I just had a wonderful conversation with a man named Dirk from Belgium, who works for an adult education school there. I was fascinated to learn that by regulation, at least 50% of all the adult education hours in their programs are required to be face to face. Apparently this pedagogy is based on the need to validate and verify student performance, and the belief is that by requiring at least half the classtime and coursework to be F2F, this can be done better. This reminded me of the session I attended yesterday (which Dirk attended too) entitled “Best Practices for Preventing Cheating on On-line Exams.”

This is the first example I know about of an organization requiring that a majority of classtime be F2F. Very interesting. I was also interested to learn that Belgium is a very wired country, and high speed Internet access has substantial market penetration. Dirk said it costs about 40 Euros per month for high speed cable modem access to the Internet, which translates currently to about $50 US. I also did not know that Belgium is a historically Catholic country, and now has both a public and private school system. The government also funds the private schools, but both were heavily influenced by the Catholic church. The Catholic church also had a major influence on the health care system in Belgium. Dirk reported that the influence of the church otherwise today– in cultural and economic terms, is minimal. It is now typical for there to be one priest for 4 or 5 different churches. Very interesting. Invigorating to be at a world eLearning conference where such opportunities for dialog and ideological interchange abound! I visited last night with a Canadian from Nova Scotia who is a university biologist, and another Canadian who works for the government’s school of public service.

I am particularly interested in the experience of Canadian’s in making bilingualism “work” on a national level. I do not think the US will become bilingual officially, but we certainly are moving in that direction unofficially in many areas (my current home state of Texas included.) I sense that many US citizens are uncomfortable with a national identity that is multicultural and diverse. Canada has clearly has their share of problems with this too. It is good to visit with others about these topics, as well as issues relating to distance education and elearning here.

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