This past Friday the Winnipeg Free Press published the following article.
PC plan for central online high school shelved
Manitoba Education has abandoned plans to create an entirely new online high school to increase access to remote learning and expand e-course offerings coming out of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The department’s planned takeover of InformNet — a Grade 9-12 remote learning program operated by Winnipeg’s St. James-Assinbioia School Division — appears to be collateral damage from the recent government transition.
“We want kids in school. We know how important community is. We know how much the pandemic impacted that, especially for young people. Getting them back in-person with other people is huge for them; it helps with mental health, it helps with (socialization),” said Nello Altomare, minister of education.
To continue reading visit https://www.winnipegfreepress.com/breakingnews/2024/03/22/pc-plan-for-central-online-high-school-shelved
Let’s examine some of the things in this article and try to separate fact from fiction.
1. “We want kids in school. We know how important community is. We know how much the pandemic impacted that, especially for young people. Getting them back in-person with other people is huge for them; it helps with mental health, it helps with (socialization),” said Nello Altomare, minister of education.
There is no evidence to suggest that online or remote learning had a negative impact on student mental health. The research that has been published is “not well-controlled in most studies; …[presents] a very mixed picture, with variability around how mental health and well-being are measured and how/whether any causal inferences are made in relation to online and remote learning.” What does help students’ mental health is not having to worry about family members and friends dying, or not having the panic created from large portions of the public so ignorant to scientists, medical professionals, and the fields of science and medicine in general.
2. “Development and establishment of the virtual school will be in a phased approach, starting with setting up a special operating agency and providing services for grades 9-12,” states an excerpt of the final report delivered that fall. An expansion to younger grades would be explored after the high school is successfully up and running, per the authors.
This is quite common delivery model. The province of Saskatchewan undertook almost the exact same process over the past couple of years, and Ontario has made somewhat similar reforms to the operation of their Independent Learning Centre. Additionally, the use of a province-wide virtual school has been common practice in Atlantic Canada (see Newfoundland and Labrador, Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick), as well as in the territorials (see Yukon and Northwest Territories).
3. Their other recommendations included allocating funding for every school board to hire a remote-learning liaison and bolstering public education to ensure families make informed decisions when registering pupils for full-time e-learning.
This model would be consistent with “funding models across the Canadian landscape revealed three funding patterns.
- Direct government funding and/or resourcing of distributed learning opportunities.
- A fee structure for students who enroll on a per course basis.
- Direct funding through FTEs/CEUs.”
4. The former government identified a gap in service, which disproportionately affects rural and northern students in communities with small populations and shoddy connectivity, and proposed a solution to it, Jackson said.
The use of distance and online learning to provide opportunities for rural, remote, and northern students who do not have access the full range of curricular opportunities that students in urban and suburban areas can access has been a common and longstanding rationale.
5. Current remote learning programs look much different than the emergency ones cobbled together in the spring of 2020, said Kirsten Thompson, president of the Manitoba Association of Education Technology Leaders.
Within weeks of the start of the pandemic, scholars had distinguished between emergency remote learning/remote learning and traditional online/virtual learning. The nature of these differences have been well documented through seven reports published over two years by the Canadian eLearning Network.
6. Thompson noted teachers delivering these programs on an ongoing basis in a post-pandemic world are trained in evidence-based practices for e-learning and enthusiastic in their delivery.
There has been a lot of documented evidence worldwide that teachers were not prepared to pivot to remote learning during the pandemic. Similarly, there is also evidence that distance/online learning was absent from teacher preparation programs – including in Canada. This reality is why there are calls for reforms to teacher education to address this oversight.