CCL Videoconference (June 29, 2005)

On June 29 after attending the OECD Conference on E-Learning in Post-Secondary Education at the Telus Calgary Convention Centre, I went to the University of Calgary iCentre to participate in a cross-Canada videoconference meeting hosted by the newly formed, and federally-funded Canadian Council on Learning (CCL).

Douglas MacLeod, Associate Director, Research & Knowledge Mobilization at CCL was the meeting organizer and brought his usual upbeat and positive attitude to the event. Douglas provided a guiding agenda for the meeting, outlining two main objectives for the participants to consider as they reviewed the current state of the art in e-learning in Canada and looked toward the future:   

1. To not just identify the key issues in e-learning but also to discuss a mechanism for crafting a strategy for dealing with them;
   
2. Give direction to the Canadian Council on Learning so that in the short-term it can help fill in the gaps and in the long-term, aid the community in finding sustained and long-term support.

These were and are good ideas for bringing together a community of interest. However, the participants at the various sites across Canada read like a Who's Who of the usual suspects in e-learning in Canada. This fact alone may spell disaster for this CCL effort. Surely the real answers can and will be found outside this circle of academics and professional research grant winners.

Jamie Rossiter (Rossiter Associates) provided the opening preso and listed some of Canada's strengths and the challenges facing it in implementing e-learning as a viable instructional strategy. He lead the call for:

• An independent arm's length body to organize national standards, facilitate communities of interest, orchestrate discussions and research
• Strategic funding support - especially sustaining funding

My fear continued to rise as the event proceeded throughout the morning, with calls for more government funding, but without any real effort to engage the audience on issues of sustainability beyond sucking at the federal granting teats. Communities of interest arise out of interest, they are not built by government or its agents.  Honest.

One lone voice from Montreal that was almost lost in the videoconference chaos of multiple sites (an Albertan attending a conference in Montreal) suggested that compelling e-learning success stories that would make sense from both a public and/or corporate perspective might invite other levels of participation in research and the implementation of e-learning.

I think the speaker was right on to suggest that the CCL and the videoconference audience consider alternative strategies to the predictable grant grab, and adopt tactics more in keeping with a sustainable approach to e-learning, building a growth pattern more like true communities of interest do, and moving beyond pilot project paralysis.

The videoconference meeting ended with an overview of CCL and a description of the research matrix and funding programs that CCL has created.

Of course, the big questions of the morning came from the academics at multiple sites wondering how much money CCL would make available for their grinding efforts. Answer: 45 projects per year - small and large, full funding with no overhead, not restricted to academic researchers (yeah!!!) - some start-up funding, with about $4M - $5.2M available for research and knowledge mobilization.

In the end, all the lofty talk of collaboration, communities of interest, and dissemination goals conjured up both Yogi Berra and eduSource Canada for me ...

"It's deja vu all over again."

Gee, I hope I'm wrong.