What is Franchise Education

Recent years have seen massive growth in transnational education, and this appears to have arisen from strategies of risk mitigation among traditional educational institutions (Adam, 2001). The results of this process have been for universities from the UK, Australia, and America, in particular, to enter into partnerships with providers around the world who then deliver the universities' programmes at a distance. A consequence of these developments has been a trend in parts of Higher Education for pursuit of growth in non-traditional market segments to change in focus from distance education and to transnational partner-based modes of delivery. However, rather than taking the view that transnationalisation is displacing distance education, the central argument of the chapter is that this process of transnationalisation could actually be understood as a developing form of distance education itself, and it may be time to widen prevailing definitions of distance education.