Wednesday, July 18, 2001

Canada's Education Ministers Seek to Foster Online Learning By JANICE PASKEY Canada's provincial ministers of education want to use online learning to help remove barriers between the nation's provinces and territories, rural and urban dwellers and native and non-native Canadians. The nation's Council of Ministers of Education issued a "vision statement" last week that calls for provincial governments to take steps to foster online learning, in areas such as online infrastructure, digital copyright, content development, promoting research, and international strategy. The statement is available online but requires Adobe Acrobat Reader, available free. The issue of copyright is especially difficult since it falls under the jurisdiction of Canada's federal government. Nevertheless, the ministers' council is asking provinces and territories to work to promote copyright laws that are fair for learners, content developers, and education institutions. "I think those of us in the education field haven't done a good enough job to make the issues of copyright known to our lawmakers," said Paul Cappon, director general of the ministers' council. The council, which represents nine provinces and three territories (Quebec and Yukon are observers at the postsecondary level) believes that Canadian copyright laws need to be changed to keep pace with digital learning. They are recommending that material available free on the Internet should be available to be copied for educational use, for instance. They also said that it should be easier to transfer credits among online institutions. And the ministers said that it should be a priority for Canadian institutions to develop and sell "learnware." The ministers indicated that they are concerned about the possibility of online competition from universities outside Canada. "As online learning opportunities based outside of Canada increase in scope and stature, maintaining Canada's leadership position will require ongoing collaboration and coordination," their statement says. The council is keeping an inventory of all distance-education developments that occur in individual provinces and territories. In Prince Edward Island, Canada's smallest province, education in the French language is now available through cooperative efforts of the Société Éducative de l'Île-du-Prince-Édouard and Collège de l'Acadie in nearby Nova Scotia. A master's-in-education degree is currently being offered to Island teachers of French by the Université de Moncton in New Brunswick. Meanwhile, the western province of Alberta has established the Online Curriculum Repository, which will be a making digital learning accessible to all Albertans, and it has designated $10-million to attract and recruit world-class researchers in selected areas of information and communications technology. Many of these will be university positions. Easy-to-print version E-mail this article

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