Globalisation,consumption and the learning business

Distance open learning represents both an outcome of and a primary factor in the intensification of global interconnectedness. For policy makers, for providing agencies, and allegedly for consumers, one of the major virtues of distance open learning is its spatial flexibility. It has assumed an important position in the battery of policies being developed by the European Union in its attempts to fulfil the promises of Maastricht. Yet despite enormous levels of investment in infrastructure, software and human resources, the European open learning market is overstocked with products and underwhelmed by demand. Technicist explanations of this policy failure are inadequate; it is also clear that the EU has repeatedly and persistently overestimated the degree of integration within the European labour market; moreover, its policies rest frequently upon abstract conceptions of a ‘European economic space’ which ignores the real processes of decision‐making within actual places of work and learning. Private consumer demand for distance open learning is meanwhile burgeoning throughout Europe, but with little relationship to the agenda set by the EU. Little serious attention has been given to the role of distance open learning in intensifying the problems of social exclusion. Globalising forces can be discerned within distance open learning in western Europe and beyond, but their relationship with traditional spatial barriers is complex and often contradictory.