How does "Partial Distance" study work for Counselling?
Full or Part-time Options
Vision College is one of the few providers that offer a Diploma of Counselling with a (partial) distance option. The Diploma of Counselling can be studied full or part-time on-campus or part-time by (partial) distance. Full-time students complete the course in two years, or you can choose part-time study for your first year, spreading it over two years. (Students are required to study at least at half-pace).
Our Distance students have the same deadlines as on-campus students. The reason for having deadlines and a minimum pace is that we really want our students to succeed, and this model helps students successfully complete the course.
We don’t recommend studying full-time as a distance student. But part-time study is common. Part-time distance students should allow 15-20 hours per week for study.
Some On-Campus Time Required
THE FIRST TWO YEARS
The distance option is what we call “partial distance”, because, as you can appreciate, not everything about counselling can be learned out of a text book! About 70% of the course can be done by correspondence, but about 30% of the course needs to be on campus.
Spread over the first two years of the course, part-time distance students need to be attend ten block course weeks on campus (either in Hamilton or Christchurch). The block courses run from Monday – Thursday and consist of eight “Seminar Weeks”, one orientation week and one assessment week. The Seminar Weeks focus on specialised topics, often with a guest speaker.
On top of this, studying counselling obviously requires the development of hands-on practical counselling skills. Our two campuses have some slight variations for how these skills are taught to distance students.
Hamilton Campus
In Hamilton (partial) distance students are required to be on campus for the practical papers each week. Our aim each year is to structure the timetable to have all of these classes on a single day, enabling distance students to only be on campus one day per week. This can’t be confirmed until early January each year, but if your enrolment is dependant on this, you can still apply now, be interviewed and, if accepted, wait until the timetable is confirmed before accepting your place on the course.
The requirement for Hamilton distance students to be on campus each week unfortunately makes it impractical to study the first year of the Diploma a long distance from Hamilton. However, there is one solution for this that can still make it possible. If there is a group of 5 or more students in a geographical region, we can arrange to have a tutor run the practical skills papers in that region each week. So if you are interested in the course, it is still worth applying, as we regularly have clusters on enquiries from throughout the North Island. Or look at the Christchurch option.
Christchurch Campus
In Christchurch, instead of having the practical papers taught each week, (partial) distance students are required to attend three extra block courses – a total of 13 block course weeks spread over the first two years. As well as this there is an extra day of teaching for distance students at the end of each Seminar Week (on the Friday).
THE FINAL YEAR
The final year of the Diploma is placement based. You’ll have a placement with an agency, near where you are, ideally in the area of counselling that you would like to specialise in. All of our students are distance students in this final year. Students do approximately 2 days of placement each week, plus some self-directed study and block courses (7-8 weeks on campus over the year).
