With the financial support of the Agence universitaire de la francophonie, a team of professors at the Université de Montréal decided to set up the first Distance Learning Doctoral Program in Education Sciences. With a specialization in the Pedagogical Integration of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT), the new program has been up and running for 18 months now, with 21 students from eight Western and Central African countries currently enrolled.

The program features a combination of distance learning with annual classroom sessions, a month-long internship at Canadian research centres, and a cohort approach, or online collaborative learning. This training format offers opportunities to postgraduate students who would otherwise not be able to study abroad. In addition, traditional face-to-face instruction is mixed with distance learning, for a number of advantages. Most importantly, doctoral students are less likely to leave Africa. In fact, most of the students in our cohort are committed to remaining in their countries, in contrast to the stated plans of many foreign students pursuing their studies in northern countries. Second, this educational model marries the advantages of distance learning with intensive classroom sessions in order to train a large number of students very cost effectively.

This document summarizes the program, its founding principles, and the many pedagogical innovations implemented to ensure successful graduates. We also describe the cohort effect, which appears to offer many benefits to students who engage in this type of collaborative group learning. Finally, we consider the challenges inherent to this type of training program, including pedagogical, scientific and administrative aspects.