For Doug Ford, e-learning is all about the money
It can be done well, but that’s not the way it is being forced on Ontario students
Last year, our friend’s son tried high school e-learning for the first time. To set the stage, this kid is very bright and the course was a subject he enjoyed, which he decided to take to pull the course forward so he could do more challenging work the following year. He considered himself a lover of the subject.
The subsequent two weeks, as his mother describes, were full of tears, frustration and self doubt. In a matter of weeks, he had gone from being a confident student of the subject, to being convinced he was terrible at it and hating it.
My friend, who is herself a university professor and has designed and delivered dozens of courses over her career, took one look at the course offering and concluded there was no way her son could have been successful with the lessons being offered and the work being demanded.
It turns out, her son’s experience is not uncommon. In Michigan, which has undertaken the longest e-learning program in North America, the drop out/failure rate is 45 per cent across all e-learning courses.
Just think about that. If we had a school board in Ontario where 45 per cent of students flunked every course, the province would step in, remove the trustees and put the board under provincial administration. And they’d be right to do so.
Michigan’s results would be easier to accept if they weren’t so commonplace. The Toronto District School Board’s noncompletion rate is 40 per cent, and other jurisdictions report similar results.
So why is e-learning so unsuccessful at the high school level?
It turns out that in order to be successful at e-learning you need to be a few things. You need to be self disciplined, you need to be a strong student, and you almost certainly need to be in Grade 11, or preferably 12. The majority of Grade 9 and 10 students who try e-learning don’t complete their course.
For students like this, e-learning is an effective tool, often used by academically successful students to score an “easy A” on a course that they don’t particularly need for university. Which in itself is a bit of an indictment of e-learning.
Michigan turned to e-learning to cut costs. Huge numbers of students were streamed into e-learning courses so that boards from low-income areas could let go of teachers and close facilities. Students from these more challenged backgrounds responded by flunking 66 per cent of their courses.
It is possible to do e-learning well. We’ve seen some of this at college level courses. But you need to have well-designed courses that feature group work, experiential learning, and multiple ways for students to interact with each other. This enables students to engage in the type of deep learning that they generally do in classrooms. You also need teachers who are willing to always be available to their students. One college e-learning professor I spoke to said she aspires to respond to student questions within two hours, making her on-call pretty much all of her waking hours. These courses don’t cut costs.
This is not the e-learning that high school students in Ontario face now. To begin with, they face waiting lists for these courses that are hundreds of students long. Then once enrolled, they face courses that are little more than virtual textbooks with problem sheets attached. They face teachers who are so overloaded in delivering these courses that they can take days to respond to questions. They end up spending their time on other educational websites trying to get the instruction they so desperately need. Some of these sites are free, and others are not, further widening the gap between those who can afford to pay for a premium education and those who can’t.
Which is really what all of this is about. Education Minister Stephen Lecce never attended public school, and clearly doesn’t value that system at all. The Ford government has admitted in documents obtained by journalists that their intention in forcing students into elearning was to create a strong selection of courses that could then be sold to other jurisdictions at a profit. It was never about education, it was always about money.
The Ford government wants to turn our kids into a profit centre.
All of this would be upsetting on its own, but what moves it into tragedy is the fact that Ontario doesn’t have a spending problem. The Ontario government generates the lowest revenue per capita, and spends the least per capita of any province in Canada. We have one of the lowest corporate income tax rates of any jurisdiction in North America. And yet the service cuts continue to come, to fuel tax cuts that nobody needs.
Who knows who will blink first, the government or the teacher’s unions, but it’s clear that this battle is about so much more than a two per cent salary increase. It’s about what we value when it comes to education, and everyone paying their fair share.