There are many hundreds of institutions of this model in the EU today, ranging from Leidse Onderwijsinstellingen in the Netherlands with over 100,000 students enrolled in 1997 to small colleges with a few hundred enrolments or less. Other foundations followed in the, then, Union of South Africa in 1947 and in China in 1960. A new series of universities teaching at a distance commenced with the Open University of the United Kingdom in 1969. The importance of the institutions in this model is that they provide specialist distance education courses and support systems for students at university level and provide governments with structures for coping competently with very large student bodies. All of these are national institutions of great prestige and excellent quality.
None is new or experimental.
Most have decades of experience and tens of thousands of graduates already integrated into the national workforce. Such institutions form an important focus for the study of distance education and underline the contribution of this form of education to developed and emerging economies alike. Distance teaching universities In the European Union in 1997 there are two distance teaching universities in Spain, and one each in Germany, Greece, the Netherlands, Portugal and the United Kingdom. Today the model is the usual form of university provision at a distance in many European Union countries, especially Finland, Sweden, France, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Belgium FR - in fact most of the countries that have chosen not to found an open university. The characteristics of this model are that course development is usually by university faculty paid overload to produce the courses or by consultants, and tuition is also provided by the university faculty or tutors hired by the department, and the students study for degrees or certificates awarded by the university.