Canada Lags Behind in Online Learning

A new report by the Society for Quality Education has found that Canadian schools are falling behind the rest of the world in the online learning arena.

A new report by the Society for Quality Education has found that schools in Canada have failed to embrace the opportunities of online learning and are falling behind their United States peers.

The practicalities of online learning would seem appealing to many Canadian school districts, which have to deal with remote and widely dispersed student populations. Online capabilities could help minimize commutes and provide greater access to a wider array of courses, writes Kate Hammer at the Globe and Mail.

However, recent enrollment data has shown that Canada has fallen behind in the amount of students studying online, far behind the much larger proportion of students in the United States participating in distance education.

Paul Bennett, an education consultant and author of the report, said:

“We lost the competitive edge because we didn’t follow up the infrastructure and the deployment of computers to the schools with any meaningful initiatives to lower the walls and open the doors to online learning.”

About 30 per cent of Canadian elementary schools and 40 per cent of their high schools offer online/distance learning. And while participation rates have steadily increased over the years, according to data collected by the International Association for K-12 On-line Learning (iNACOL), that number looks like it is reaching a plateau.

British Columbia had the most distance learning students in the 2010-11 school year with around 88,000 participants. A unique funding model for education in that province facilitates online programs, which now services around 13.5 per cent of the student population.

However, enrollment has failed to grow in other districts like Alberta, Manitoba, Saskatchewan, New Brunswick, Newfoundland and Labrador.

Bennett blames teacher union contracts and cites the situation in Nova Scotia, which includes almost a dozen online learning-specific clauses. Bennett also points to what he believes to be exaggerated administrative concerns over internet access.

“It was a critical issue five years ago,” Bennett said.

“Before cell phones became ubiquitous and smart phones became something that every child had to have.”

But Michael Barbour, an assistant professor at Wayne State University in Detroit and one of the authors of the iNACOL report, said:

“Canada along with New Zealand are probably the two jurisdictions where unions have been most supportive of K-12 distance education.”

Barbour doesn’t believe the Canada is slipping behind the U.S. at all, saying that the online enrollment data are collected differently in each country.

“I’d say we’re either keeping pace or we’re ahead,” he said.

Comments

Linda Brees

January 27, 2012 at 12:21 pm

Before we say that Canada is falling behind, shouldn’t we first ascertain if online learning is something beneficial? It could be that they are just being cautious in introducing a new approach that hasn’t been thoroughly tested. That’s hardly a bad thing.

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- Paul W. Bennett
  
  January 30, 2012 at 1:39 pm
  
  I tend to agree with you, Linda. You will see from my actual report that I’m not advocating a headlong rush into online learning or full-day virtual schools. My goals were more modest – simply documenting the barriers to expansion of online learning in each of the 13 provinces and territories.
  
  Assessing the state of Canadian K-12 online learning is very challenging. The recent iNACOL report (Nov 2011) provides solid data and highlights the successes. It puts far too much emphasis on BC, the only province with rapidly expanding distance education.
  
  My goal in producing the report was to raise a few critical questions and to hold up the iNACOL reports to some closer scrutiny. It’s healthy to consider different viewpoints on public policy issues.
  
  Reply
Doug

January 27, 2012 at 1:32 pm

Online learners says the NYT do not do as well as either PS students or charter students.

It is a really bad idea to lead in technology education. That is where the white elephants come in. Far better to sit back and assess what works.

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Kevin

January 27, 2012 at 4:13 pm

Do you have a link by any chance, Doug?

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Michael Barbour

January 28, 2012 at 4:41 am

Since you’ve used my quote here I figure I should respond. Whether or not Canada is falling behind the United States all depends on what numbers you use to compare. If you use the numbers from the US Department of Education, which says approximately 1.8 million students are learning online, that represents a little better than 3% of the US K-12 population. If you use the numbers coming from Ambient Insights (a market analysis company), which says there are approximately 4 million students learning through online and blended methods, that represents a little better than 7% of the US K-12 population. In Canada, there are 4.2% of the population learning online. So if you use the official DOE figures Canada is still leading. If you use the figures put out by a company who’s purpose is to help corporations see trends in the marketplace and maximize profit than yes, Canada is falling behind.

I should also note that the Canadian figures do not include students who are learning in a blended format. For most educators in Canada, blended learning is not something that we consider as a separate class or a separate type of learning. For most Canadian educators, blended learning is simply good technology integration using the Internet and something many of our teachers have been doing for decades. Blended learning has become tied to online learning in the United States largely as a way to try and maximize the industry, as corporations begin to dominant (and also drive policy in) the K-12 online learning field.

I would also argue that this new report is ideologically motivated in the blame that it places. If you look at a jurisdiction like Newfoundland and Labrador, the teachers union has been very supportive of the K-12 online learning program in that province and has even partnered with them to use the structure and platform of the K-12 online learning program to deliver professional development to teachers throughout the province. As the report uses the Nova Scotia Teachers Union contract as evidence of this hindrance to online learning, it is worth looking at what the clauses say. There are several clauses that focus on a specific structure to provide a local school contact and local school support for the student learning online (and research has shown that the presence or absence of school-based support for K-12 distance learners can be a critical factor in student success). It include mandatory professional development, above and beyond what regular teachers get, largely because the nature of the tools and even what we know about younger students learning online is changing quite fast and this ensures that our online teachers are kept up to date in there knowledge and skills. There are also clauses that are designed to ensure that the workload and working conditions of an online teacher are roughly equivalent (not equal, but equivalent) to a classroom teacher to ensure that teaching online remains an attractive option to allow K-12 online learning programs to attract the best teachers, not just those who couldn’t find a classroom position (which is what would happen if online teaching had a much greater workload and much less favourable working conditions).

There is also a big difference in how Canadian educators view online learning in general, which this report did not capture. If you read this report at face value, you would get the impression that our children are digital learners and we are holding them back by sending them to traditional classrooms. The fact of the matter is that research has shown that our students aren’t digital learners, access to technology is still an issue, and the coverage and cost of data plans still leaves much to be desired. Plus, there is the issue that Linda points out above, that the research into K-12 online learning has indicated that there are only specific types of students that seems to do well in this environment. Because of these reasons, K-12 schools have used online learning largely when face-to-face instruction was not available to the student or when it had been shown to be ineffective for a particular student.

This should be contrasted with the United States where large corporations have basically taken over K-12 online learning and are using millions of dollars to lobby politicians to pass legislation that allows them to boost profits from public education tax dollars. And this kind of situation is acceptable to the sponsors of this report. An organization that favour private education and private investment in education over a single public system. As a Canadian, I believe that the majority of Canadian would have a difficult time accepting an education system that was based on corporations reaping profits from our tax dollars in an effort to provide our youth an education that was based on bottomline thinking. But that is the comparison point this report uses and that is why I’ve taken the time to try and set the record on these issues straight.

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Doug

January 29, 2012 at 12:10 pm

Do you have a link by any chance, Doug?

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/06/education/students-of-virtual-schools-are-lagging-in-proficiency.html

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Paul W. Bennett

January 30, 2012 at 12:47 pm

Methinks he doth protest too much.

Dr. Michael K. Barbour, author of the annual iNACOL reports, was quick off the mark to challenge the SQE report, The Sky Has Limits. With the ink barely dry on the SQE Media release, he posted a comment dismissing the entire report as “ideologically driven” and vowing to dispute its findings.

Since then, here and elsewhere, Dr. Barbour has raised questions about the reliability of the data on online student enrollments, whether Canada is falling behind, and rallied to the defense of the teacher unions. To top it all off, he describes the report as a diatribe that is cobbled together from the research of others.

Dr. Barbour’s response is astounding for three key reasons. First and foremost, I took great pains to assess his iNACOL research and interviewed him at great length to verify the accuracy of the figures. Secondly, I made it abundantly clear to him that I was not “ideologically-driven” at all, but rather taking an independent look and conducting a balanced “literature review.” And finally, Dr. Barbour knows full well that my SQE report accords with the earlier findings of the 2006 Canadian Council on Learning report which he also attempts to discredit or conveniently ignore.

Ascribing motives and going personal is not conducive to serious public discourse. The Online Learning domain is evolving and — as it does –the field will involve more than just compiling data and, in all likelihood, new viewpoints will be more welcomed by the technology experts. Spiking new research and limiting the inputs will also fade in the years ahead.

Online learning “research” is funded by trade associations, large corporations, private foundations, teacher unions, and the odd public sector agency. My report, The Sky Has Limits, is a literature review commissioned by an Ontario parent advocacy group with a miniscule grant from the Atlas Economic Foundation. In 2006, the Canadian Council on Learning ( an independent agency) covered the same ground and reached very similar conclusions. It is, in fact, the iNACOL annual reports that run in the opposite direction, highlighting the e-learning successes across Canada.

The report has generated quite a response, including favourable coverage from coast to coast in Canada. Indeed, it has attracted far more attention than the recent iNACOL report.

It’s also sparking a lively discussion at
http://educhatter.wordpress.com/2012/01/28/online-learning-why-does-the-sky-have-limits-in-canadian-k-12-public-education/

You are most welcome to join in that online discussion!

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Paul W. Bennett

January 30, 2012 at 1:32 pm

Still trying to make sense of where Canada stands in online learning?

The best overview remains the Canadian Council on Learning report, published in 2006:

http://www.ccl-cca.ca/pdfs/E-learning/E-Learning_Report_FINAL-E.PDF

You will note that my 2012 SQE findings generally confirm the accuracy of the overall CCL assessment.

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