Nerves have been tested in Canadian distance learning, says Philip Fine

Private-sector instability and government priorities have put a dent in some Canadian e-learning plans this year but the sector has found niches in which it can flourish.

Last autumn's announcement that the Halifax-based ITI Education Corp, which ran ten private colleges in Canada and the US, was to close sounded the alarm for those who thought that the postgraduate e-business school was a viable venture.

And the University of Toronto's decision to back out of distance-education venture Universitas 21 gave pause for thought to other e-learning partnerships. Meanwhile, Cisco Systems's introduction of its for-profit networking and information technology courses to the curriculum at the University of Western Ontario worried those who saw it as an intrusion into the public system.

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But British Columbia may have been the province to cause the biggest worry in e-learning. The Technical University of British Columbia, a three-year-old mixed-mode institution, was turned into a satellite campus of Simon Fraser University. And the Open Learning Agency, a distance education operation that worked with non-traditional learners, is preparing to be gutted. The British Columbia government defended its policy, saying that it was looking for "a collaborative model for online learning (that) would make greater use of the knowledge and expertise across the system".

Tony Bates, director of distance education and technology at British Columbia, said the province's fiscal decisions had been made without thinking about some of the people who will be left out in the cold.

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"This is a real problem because the OLA had an open access policy. Those elements will not be provided by existing institutions," he said.

Dr Bates, who has been working on ways that e-learning can operate more efficiently with traditional universities, said the country needed more sound government direction. "Canada really needs a federal policy to support e-learning."

Critics have blamed a lack of federal support for the imminent closure of the Network of Centres of Excellence, which grouped 60 faculty from 28 universities that evaluated learning tools.

The federal government has instead shown that it has a high-speed system on its list of priorities. Canarie, an advanced national research network that gives its 80 member universities the ability to share high-volume data and computer-intensive scientific modelling, received federal funding last year for a fourth generation of high-speed network.

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Canarie's Susan Baldwin said the government's overall investment of C$28 million (?12.2 million) over five years showed a significant commitment, in line with the federal government's innovation strategy. One of its targets is that by 2005, high-speed broadband access be widely available to all Canadian communities.

Ms Baldwin sees many applications for Canarie, including clearer online pathology slides that would otherwise look fuzzy, and an answer to the dearth of veterinary professors across Canada because vet schools can pool their resources online.

Despite funding changes, there are many universities putting resources into online projects, as Ms Baldwin found in the flurry of project submissions she has seen from universities interested in using her network.

Success for some of the e-learning ventures will hinge on faculty ownership issues. The Canadian Association of University Teachers said in a recent bargaining advisory handbook: "Maintaining member ownership of course content is one of the most important faculty association tasks associated with online education."

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Dr Bates said that learning ventures needed to be realistic about the workload required to design the curriculum for e-learning. Tele-Universite's Gilles Lavigne said little research existed on the workload required to put one's course online. One of the few cases he tracked down showed that the professor required 234 hours of course development as opposed to the 1-hour average for a traditional class.

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