Earlier this week, the researchers from the State of the Nation project were contacted by a journalist from CityTV to comment on a piece related to parent concerns related to a mandated e-learning experience in the Peel District School Board. While both researchers were contacted, and one was interviewed by the journalist, the piece eventually ran with no commentary supporting e-learning or even providing a nuanced understanding of this form of schooling.
‘We’re being left in the dark’: Peel parents concerned about e-learning mandates
Back in March, Mandeep Kandola attended a Sandalwood Heights Secondary School parent council meeting, and what she heard left her deeply concerned.
“We were informed that next school year, there’s going to be 18 sections of e-learning, which translates to more than 500 kids who would have been forced to take e-learning courses. That’s nearly half the students at the school,” shared Kandola.
Kandola’s daughters, who are in grades 10 and 11, have always opted out of Ontario’s e-learning mandate as they prefer in-class instruction. “But now I’m not sure we have a choice.”
Kandola said what’s more concerning is how the school informed parents of the new protocol; it was only verbal at that meeting. Nothing in writing has been sent to students or parents.
To continue reading, visit https://toronto.citynews.ca/2026/05/11/were-being-left-in-the-dark-peel-parents-concerned-about-e-learning-mandates/
Let’s not get into whether it was actually said at a parent council meeting or whether that was the only form of communication/notification that the school or school board used. Let’s just take a look at what this actually means in the broader context.
“We were informed that next school year, there’s going to be 18 sections of e-learning, which translates to more than 500 kids who would have been forced to take e-learning courses. That’s nearly half the students at the school…”
If 500 kids is nearly half the school, that means the school has more than 1000 students. The Sandalwood Heights Secondary School is one of 38 secondary schools in the Peel District School Board. The Peel District School Board has about 41,000 students. The article doesn’t describe whether enrollment in the 18 sections of e-learning will be limited to just Sandalwood school, or be available through the school board (it is online learning after all, which means the students can be located anywhere). Are the 18 sections of e-learning a single course, or does that represent 18 different courses that students can select from?
Even if we assume that it is 19 sections of a single e-learning course and the enrollment is limited to just Sandalwood Heights Secondary School, the Province of Ontario has mandated that students need to complete two e-learning courses in order to graduate from high school. In a school of approximately 1000 students that would mean that over a four year period that the school would need to make available approximately 2000 enrollments (i.e., 1000 students x 2 courses). The availability of 500 enrollments next year is appropriate planning to meet this goal.
Additionally, if one of the criticisms of e-learning is that it isn’t appropriate for all students – yet the government mandates that all students must take two courses – a school board that focuses its effort on a single course so that they can refine different methods of curriculum design and online delivery to cater to a wider range of student interests and abilities is a sound strategy.
Later in the article, the President of the Ontario Secondary School Teachers Federation (OSSTF) joins the conversation:
The OSSTF has been fighting what they call an immense push by Ontario’s Ministry of Education to mandate e-learning, not just in Peel Region but across the province.
“What we’ve been saying is, there are circumstances in which it can absolutely work, but no student should be forced to engage in mandatory online learning,” shared Hradowy
Unfortunately, this notion that e-learning is only appropriate for some students is one of the greatest disservices that the union could have made. E-learning is a medium, in the same way that the classroom is a medium. In the same way, people would object if the union came out and said that “there are circumstances in which it can absolutely work, but no student should be forced to sit in a classroom.” The idea on face value is ludicrous – and the same is true for e-learning. E-learning is a medium through which instruction is delivered. It is neither good nor bad. It is also not specific to any type of student. In much the same way that we have all had positive and negative face-to-face learning experiences, it is all a matter of how the medium is used that will impact the quality of instruction that is provided.
There is a large body of research related to the effectiveness of e-learning in relation to classroom based learning that has generally found that the students in both environments perform at similar levels (i.e., have similar pass rates, have comparative grades, etc.) – but it is the wrong question to ask. It is like me asking this journalist whether television journalism is more effective than print journalism? Both forms allow the journalist to frame and present the content in different ways. As long as the journalist designs their piece to the affordances of the medium, and makes sure to address the challenges of that medium, then the public can be just as effectively informed.