Contact North is Canada’s distance education organization. Thanks to its activities more than four million Canadians in remote corners of the country study at schools and universities in the comfort of their own homes.
Higher education institutions treat both traditional students and home-schoolers equally. If a distance education institution is accredited, an online high school diploma is treated the same as a regular high school diploma.
Canada is considered one of the world leaders in distance education, and there is nothing surprising about that. First of all, it is a very advanced country in terms of computers. For Canadians, going on the Internet is like smoking a cigarette for us. Secondly, the problem of distance is acute here. There are a lot of communities scattered across the vast expanses, and many of them are in places that are difficult to reach. All of these factors spurred the development of distance learning in Canada.
The first Canadian correspondence courses appeared exactly one hundred years ago. That’s when McGill University in Montreal took advantage of teachers who were not able to attend its full-time department. In 1920, the British Columbia Ministry of Education responded to appeals from outlying communities, and the first provincial courses were established. In 1941, Canadian farmers on the prairies heard the first radio broadcasts of educational programs, and in the 1960s Memorial University used television for the first time to broadcast them.
Today there are hundreds of thousands of distance programs in Canada. They are offered both by the ministries of education of individual Canadian provinces and by individual universities, colleges and companies (for professional development of employees). The Independent Learning Centre (ILC) in Ontario alone organizes up to 50,000 different courses annually. The University of Toronto offers distance learning courses in management and Mount Saint Vincent University (Halifax) offers courses in hotel management.
A few years ago, there were about 420,000 distance education students in Canada. The largest number of distance learning students were aged 24-35. They cited “being able to do my job better” as their main motivation (61% of those surveyed).
Practical Canadians see this form of learning as a good opportunity to save money. Since they can learn on-the-job, they see savings of up to 30,500 Canadian dollars (CAD) over 5 years, compared to full-time students for whom this is a “lost income”. Again, not having to pay for room and board, gas, parking, etc.