Monetizing French Distance Education: A Field Enquiry on Higher Education Value(s)

A field enquiry in French distance education allows us to analyze the evolution of a specific institution towards new public management: Parallel to a trend of free courseware and open education, there is a paradoxical reality of distance education monetization. Whereas history shows how traditional French education is a state controlled public good, a new policy is changing the organization’s culture towards a commercial and industrial activity. From inside the institution, we describe the cultural changes, with its human resources, accounting, and marketing dimensions. We relate debates about the institution’s business model within the economy of knowledge – selling either services or contents, focusing on the learner’s experience. Lastly, we analyze the notion of value underlying this monetization of a distance education institution: both the computing of a specific training’s value and the shared values of the workers binding up their collective identity.

ISSN 1492-3831 (numérique) Découvrir la revue Citer cet article Marty, O. (2014). Monetizing French Distance Education: A Field Enquiry on Higher Education Value(s). International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning,15(2), 107-120. https://doi.org/10.19173/irrodl.v15i2.1677 Résumé de l'article A field enquiry in French distance education allows us to analyze the evolution of a specific institution towards new public management: Parallel to a trend of free courseware and open education, there is a paradoxical reality of distance education monetization. Whereas history shows how traditional French education is a state controlled public good, a new policy is changing the organization's culture towards a commercial and industrial activity. From inside the institution, we describe the cultural changes, with its human resources, accounting, and marketing dimensions. We relate debates about the institution's business model within the economy of knowledge -selling either services or contents, focusing on the learner's experience. Lastly, we analyze the notion of value underlying this monetization of a distance education institution: both the computing of a specific training's value and the shared values of the workers binding up their collective identity.

Introduction: From Participatory Observation to Education
Sciences Analysis

Collection of Data
Since 2011 I have been conducting a participatory observation within a French national distance education institution, occupying training engineering and management functions within the organization. My main focus of analysis is education management, since it is the research axis of the education sciences laboratory I belong to (Cnam, CRF, Axis 4).
Attending to the organization's daily life, with a declared research goal, I have collected empirical raw material, archived online 1 . I want now to take some distance to rethink my ethnographical data in order to place it within the long run evolution of French national distance education.
During this ethnographic study, which could become an exploratory work for a larger quantitative enquiry, I have observed a deep change in the organization's culture: recruiting private sector executives to replace civil servants and precisely accounting for every single resource and investment in order to be profitable on the e-learning market.
I want to describe and analyze precisely this monetization of a public institution, conducted in an atmosphere of possible privatization. I will try to show that this mutation is deeply changing education's value: both the estimated value of a particular training course (how much is it worth on the market?) and the workers' values within the institution (what do they value in their educational work?).

Review of Literature
My article is framed by fundamental research on distance education (Moore, 2012) (2007) and Trowler (2012).
The history of the French education system is a field of research covered by Prost (2007) and Lescure (2010) for the part concerning adult education. The international question of commodification of education has been analyzed and criticized by Shumar (1997Shumar ( , 2008. Finally, the measure of value within an organization has been discussed by Vatin (2008), with an influence from John Dewey (1997). Therefore, medieval universities (La Sorbonne university, Toulouse University, etc.), still partly supervised by Catholic Church powers, were in competition with these public state schools. A new system of production of the elites was created, reinforced by the French Revolution (1789-1799) and Napoleonian Imperial University.
Since then, higher education has been organized by the French state, giving the right to universities and public schools to deliver diplomas. In France, higher education has been and still is a state concern. In 1838 was created the Ministère de l'instruction publique, rebaptised in 1932 Ministère de l'éducation nationale and currently named the Ministère de l'enseignement supérieur et de la recherche, dedicated to higher education.
Private organizations entered this field of higher education in the 19 th century: École supérieure de commerce de Paris, the first private business school, was created in 1819 and other provincial initiatives followed. Today these schools are under state control since their diplomas are evaluated by the Ministry of higher education and research. provided to students coming from low income families and access to training is free.
The main selection is not money-based but made through competition: The difficulty of a "Grande École's "concours d'entrée" is what makes it and its students valuable.
An ideology of equity between all French young students is well spread in the education system: The most prestigious curricula are based on mathematics, where performances are said to be less sensitive to family background than for French language subjects.
Politically, most teachers are on the left wing and French sociologists (like Bourdieu, 1990) are known for their criticism of the system's imperfection (i.e., elites' social reproduction All along its development, the institution has grown into an industrial producer of knowledge, sending lectures and education material to hundreds of thousands of learners (200,000 in 2011). This industrialization, characteristic of a massive education institution, was associated with the experimentation of all new pedagogy technologies: Lectures sent by post were soon accompanied by telephone contact, television, Minitel and finally the Internet with web sites, email, forum, chat, virtual classes, and so on. The institution was a tool to experiment with the massive use in French education of new technologies.
However, whereas primary and secondary education (which is compulsory in France, until the age of 16) are considered as a public service, with a legitimacy to be state funded and free for all citizens, higher education is reconsidering its position. Indeed, the French ministry for higher education and research asks the institution to be selfsufficient as to what concerns higher education and adult learning.
Therefore, the institution has to rethink its business model: Changing Workers' Habits I first observed confusion in the vocabulary used to designate the audience targeted by the institution. Whereas former employees use the word "usager" (which is the French word for any user of a public service), the new generation more often talks about "clients". The ideology of public service and common good is therefore replaced by the notion of private interest and the transaction of money opening rights to the consumer.
However a compromise is found around the notion of "learner" ("apprenant"), designating neither a student nor a pupil but an adult engaged in specific training. This term refers to the institution's sector of activity and not its mode of operating (public/private activity).
Another difference appears in the way people are dressed: Whereas the old generation of teachers have a casual style, the newcomers more easily come to work with a formal costume and a tie. The notion of time tends to be stricter: Employees' schedules are controlled by a time-machine (they have to badge in and out of the institution) in order to measure how much time they spend within this industry of knowledge. This is a major cultural change since none of them had this habit of accounting -and a few among the eldest had difficulties with the Excel computer tool. This reform led to a great deal of trouble among the workers (at least the ones of the older generation, judging the tool as impossible to handle given the complexity of their training projects).
It took a few months to accept the use of this tool and it is still not well considered by all.  Commodification of education in America has been described by Shumar (1997Shumar ( , 2008.
In our European case we saw that it implied a few business tools to estimate the economic value of a specific training course in order to be profitable on the market. For both there is common evidence: Education is a product that can be sold.
At the institution I studied, however, there is still a debate about what is to be sold. In an interview, the general director of training declared that content was no longer the core of the institution's business model. Delivering a document (either paper or online), mere reading material or a video, is not the main added value of the training. It is the job of publishers to edit such content and sell it in the market. What I would call "method" 2 , that is to say courses' content, is what is traditionally seen by the consumer as the materialization of knowledge. Method is the result of the learning process, what has been learnt. However, the general director of training puts forward another item as more important: pedagogy.
Pedagogy 3 is a set of services provided by teachers to the learner. They orientate before any engagement in a curriculum (by phone), they help in case of difficulties in the course (through an online forum), they correct mistakes (on the hand-ins), they recognize the learning process (through marks and a certificate delivered by the institution), they give pieces of advice about future orientation (for any other training).
This economy of service that would replace the industrial production of content, A training course (or formation) is different from a mere piece of information since it is bigger (it is a complex set of information pieces) and goes deeper in the learner's mind.
Learning a piece of information is an everyday process in order to solve common problems. But learning a complex set of information devices (going through a formation) is a much more important mental activity: It takes time, the learner tends to identify himself/herself with the knowledge acquired, and he/she will remember it for a longer period of time.
Therefore attention is paid to this learning experience. To amplify identification, a service of socialization has been set up. Since the experience of learning is stronger  This new market has been targeted by specific training organisms, but also by universities and public schools, adding new training programs to their portfolio. The institution we studied created a specific department dedicated to this professional market. This department, linked both with the commercial department and the training department, is highly representative of the commodification of education. Indeed, its main activity is to sell training to professional organizations. It is placed near the headquarters and represents modernity within the institution. Whereas most activities are scattered across eight different sites in France, this one is at the heart of the institution.
I therefore observed an institution moving from an administrative culture delivering a public good to an industrial culture selling profitable training on the market. Even if what is to be sold is not yet clearly defined, a tendency of monetization appears. Let's see what the consequences of this new strategy are. We will focus on the very notion of value and its estimation, underlying the question of money.

A Question of Value(s)
Value of Training I showed how selling specific training implied its evaluation. Within the institution, this is made with particular software that sums up all costs and benefits and makes automatically a financial analysis (margin, profitability, etc.). It is a financial approach to value: All future costs and benefits are summed up and actualized at the present moment, in order to take a decision about whether to invest or not. Monetization implies that all training programs' value can be computed with numbers, quantified and estimated throughout time. This was hard to admit for most teachers but the shift in the organization's culture and employee turnover makes it a common reality for any new worker.
I want now to add a field-based complement to this financial analysis of value. Indeed, discounting coming gains and losses to estimate present value is future-oriented and does not take into account past experience. French teachers within this institution regularly say that school and training courses are here for values transmission. That is to say that a learner going through specific training will be changed deeply, so deeply that what he or she will consider as valuable will be different. But what is missed in this value estimation is the learner's change of values throughout the training. For example, having done a training program in management, he/she will be even more attracted by management than before and value therefore everything that deals with management. He/she will probably become a manager and will therefore retrospectively over-value his/her training in management. Generalizing this idea, training retrospectively increases its own value by itself: Since it implies a new valuation in the trainee's mind, it tends to legitimate itself.
The distance education institution I studied had the intuition of this estimation of value taking into account past experiences, and especially previous training courses. Indeed, a business unit manager wanted to implement a client hooking system: giving free training would hook a learner. Indeed, free training is a way to softly discover the institution and reduce the cost of uncertainty. But it is also a way to get addicted since a first training course leads to self-valuation of other training in the same field. It is an experience that values itself since it changes the learner's vision of the world.
However, if there is a quantification of future value of any training through the accounting tool, past-oriented valuation of a training device is still a qualitative approach within the institution I studied. There is monetization of the first one, not yet of the second one.
Let's move back to a broader analysis of the question of value within the institution. We saw how French distance education was embedded within a national history of state education. In the same way, the question of a specific training course's value and its monetization is embedded within the institution's values, that is to say the values of the As a result, most of the workers agree on a good atmosphere within the institution. Even leavers talk about their attachment to the institution. It is a sign that a fast trajectory leads to a highly integrated community with strong shared values.

Conclusion: Retrospective and Prospective
To sum up, the fieldwork in a major French distance education institution led to an education sciences analysis. I tried to show how state controlled education in France gave birth to a specific distance education organization about 70 years ago. This institution recently moved towards new public management, with a high turnover and many mutations in daily work in order to optimize production. Among these changes, I focused on monetization of training. This led to a description of training marketing, training accounting, and current debates about the institution's business model. If there is still hesitation about whether to sell courses' content or pedagogy services, it is agreed that the learner's experience of the training is central.
Last, I tried to analyze the notion of value underlying this monetization process: both the computation of any training program's value (future or past oriented) and the A prospective could be the institution's stabilization now that it has been so rapidly and deeply moved. Such a possible stabilization in its new identity (selling training defined as private goods to be monetized on the market) could lead to a slower development in the same direction, supported by collective memory of this unique trajectory I described.
More generally and from a long term perspective, we can situate this monetization of