Shortly before Christmas this report was released by the Government of British Columbia. As folks may remember, the purpose of this process was “to review and provide recommendations to the way funding is allocated in the K-12 public education sector in British Columbia,” including the funding for distributed learning (i.e., distance learning). You can find out more at:
- the website for the process: https://news.gov.bc.ca/releases/2018EDUC0075-002457
- the actual report: https://www2.gov.bc.ca/assets/gov/education/administration/resource-management/k12funding/funding-model-review/independent_review_panel-final_report_2018.pdf
One of the most important items in the report was:
“Recommendation 9
The Ministry should base funding allocations for school age education programming on the number of students, rather than on the number of courses being taken. The Ministry should phase out the current course-based funding model by the 2020/2021 school year.
Recommendation 10
With the shift to a per-student-based funding model, the Ministry should develop a new policy and program delivery model for Distributed Learning to ensure consistent access to quality programming for all students in the province.”
In terms of the actual content, the main section related to distributed learning is for Recommendation 9, which can be found on page 26 of the report. Read as a whole, the report seems to be suggesting that distributed learning should be funding at the same level as brick-and-mortar schooling.
You may recall, that was one of the recommendations that made in the report on the funding of distributed learning in Canada, which can be found at:
https://k12sotn.ca/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/DL-Funding-Report.pdf
We would copy and paste more of the material into this entry, but the Government of British Columbia has locked the document to prevent folks from copying and pasting.
Thank you for this. It is the “consistent access to quality programming” aspect of this recommendation that I find most intriguing and likely the foreshadowing of some substantial shifts in the deployment of DL agreements in BC. The operative word being “quality”.
Jeff, it will be interesting to see how it all unfolds. Given the deliberate way that the BC Ministry has approached this topic in the past, I’m not sure we’ll see much of anything that quickly.