State of the Nation 2024 – Nature of K-12 Distance/Online Learning Activity

Students from all thirteen provinces and territories continue to have the opportunity to participate in K-12 distance and online learning opportunities. Similarly, while there has tended to be consistency from year to year in types of K-12 distance and online learning programs that exist throughout the country, there has also been minor changes that occur each year. It is in these minor changes where the neat classifications that the research team has used in the past become somewhat problematic. Historically, the research team has described the nature of K-12 distance and online learning activity as falling into one of four categories:

1. Single provincial program
2. Primarily district-based programs
3. Combination of provincial and district-based programs
4. Use online learning programs from other provinces

However, this often led to inconsistency in how the data was understood. For example, there are two provincial programs in New Brunswick (e.g., one Anglophone and one Francophone). While Prince Edward Island had a single provincial program, it also uses online learning programs from other provinces – as does the Yukon and the Northwest Territories. Traditionally programs in British Columbia, Alberta, and Saskatchewan were district-based, but in each case programs had the ability to serve students either in only their own district or province-wide – depending on the desire of the individual program. These limitations have become more nuanced each year.

Due to these limitations, the research team is changing the way it describes the nature of activity of K-12 distance and online learning programs to concentrate on the locus of control and support for these programs (see Figure 1). More specifically, whether the programs are controlled and/or supported at the provincial or district level.

As illustrated above, the four Atlantic Canadian provinces and the two Northern Canadian territories with K-12 distance and online programs have programs that are centrally managed – either by the Ministry of Education (i.e., directly or indirectly) or by a designated, arms-length organization. In these examples, the administration and delivery of the program itself, as well as the hiring of leadership and employees, is centrally-managed. For example, Newfoundland and Labrador have a single centrally-managed program, the Centre for Distance Learning and Innovation. Similarly, Nova Scotia has two centrally-managed programs, the Nova Scotia Virtual School and the Nova Scotia Independent Online Learning program. The two territories have centrally-managed programs as well, the Aurora Virtual School (Yukon) and the Northern Distance Learning (Northwest Territories), and both New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island operate centrally-managed programs from the Ministry of Education.

In contrast, Quebec, Ontario, and Manitoba have district-managed programs that are centrally-supported. The support might be in the form of licenses for the specific tools needed to deliver the program (e.g., a centralized learning management system) or the provision of asynchronous course content (e.g., an online course repository). It might also come in the form of coordination of human resources or other programmatic services. In some cases, the centralized support is from the Ministry of Education, but in other cases, it is in the form of third-party organizations. However, in each instance, the actual administration of the program is done at the district level. For example, the Société de formation à distance provides access to course content and tutors for distance learning programs that are operated by school boards in Quebec. Similarly, LEARN also provides access to tutors and asynchronous resources to Anglophone school boards in Quebec. The Ontario Ministry of Education provides a centralized learning management system and asynchronous course content, as well as human resources in the form of technology facilitators for each school board. At the same time organizations such as the Ontario eLearning Consortium and Consortium d’apprentissage virtuel de langue française de l’Ontario provide centralized coordination of services. However, each school board is still responsible for managing its own e-learning program. Similarly, in Manitoba, the Department of Education and Training provides a centralized learning management system for individual school divisions who wish to manage their own remote learning programs, as well as coordination and technology for the rural school divisions who wish to engage in the Teacher Mediated Option.

The final category is the district-managed programs, which include Alberta and British Columbia. In both jurisdictions, the public programs are managed at the school district or school board level. In Alberta, programs have the ability to operate within their own district or provincially – and, in fact, the funding model encourages programs to operate at a provincial level. However, in British Columbia district programs can only operate at the district level (i.e., as District Online Learning Schools), unless they applied to the Ministry of Education and Child Care and were approved to operate at a provincial level (i.e., as Provincial Online Learning Schools).

The only outlier to the current classification scheme is Saskatchewan, which is coded as both centrally-managed programs and district-managed programs. Beginning in 2023-24 the Saskatchewan Distance Learning Centre was established as a Treasury Board Crown Corporation to be the centrally-managed online education hub for the province. At the same time, there still exist numerous programs managed by individual school divisions.

One aspect of this new classification system is that it does not capture the jurisdictions where private or independent K-12 distance and online programs exist. Figure 2 outlines all of the jurisdictions where private or independent programs are known to operate.

At present, four jurisdictions have private or independent K-12 distance and online learning programs in operation. In each jurisdiction, the nature of private or independent K-12 online learning has varied significantly. For example, the vast majority of K-12 distance and online learning programs in Ontario are private or independent. Similarly, the largest K-12 distance and online learning programs in Ontario are operated by independent schools, even though the overall activity of private or independent K-12 distance and online learning programs accounts for a small proportion of the overall K-12 distance and online learning activity. Conversely, the number of private or independent K-12 distance and online learning programs in Saskatchewan, Alberta, and British Columbia are much lower – both in terms of the proportion of private to public programs and their level of activity. For example, only 10 of the 47 K-12 distance and online programs in Alberta and only two of the 20 programs in Saskatchewan were operated by private or independent schools. Similarly, enrollment in private or independent programs in British Columbia only accounted for approximately 20% of the overall number of K-12 students engaged in distance and online learning.