Saskatchewan Distance Learning Course Repository
| The Saskatoon Catholic Cyber School (SCCS) is a distance education and educational technology resource programme. It has offered asynchronous high school credit courses via the Internet since its inception in 2000. SCCS currently offers 47 high school courses and is developing more courses every year, as well as curriculum and web supports for students and teachers. The SCCS has also been involved in many innovative |  |
projects that have had an effect, not only on our school division, but also on divisions around the province. One of these initiatives is the Saskatchewan Distance Learning Course Repository.
In an effort to provide structure to distance education programmes in Saskatchewan, a distance education course hub was developed so that students could have a single listing of the distance education courses offered by all school divisions in the province. This hub is also a provincial registration portal for distance education courses.
Since this cyber school had all of the supports in place to host the provincial distance education course hub, as well as provide a free and proven registration portal, it seemed sensible to create such an area for all school divisions to access.
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By using a blog system to create the course hub, authors from every school division have the ability to add, edit, and remove their distance education courses at any time. This system is easy |
to use and does not require authors to have any previous knowledge of website coding. The blog allows users to search a variety of different options and allows students to register directly from the site. This blog system also allows school divisions to host their own website that would reflect their logo and colours and provide pertinent information specific to their courses and registration system as a central administrative hub for the province with the ability for each school division to manage its own distance education offerings.
At present, there are 17 different programmes using the Saskatchewan Distance Learning Course Repository. This represents well over half of the school divisions in the province that have built their own K-12 distance education programmes.
The SCCS feels that the Saskatchewan Distance Learning Hub serves a great purpose in the province of Saskatchewan in that it provides school divisions with free and total access to populate and edit their online course offerings. For students looking for online courses, it would operate as a “one stop shop,” to help provide them with the information they need to make an informed decision that best suits their educational needs.