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Pre-tertiary distributed education in Canadian urban centers.

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Abstract

For the most part, the focus of distributed learning has steered away from pre-tertiary education; however, there is a growing demand today to consider alternative methods of delivering instruction at this level of education. While this is not a new concept, and distance education has been used in the past to service high school students residing in remote areas, falling enrollments, financial cut-backs and escalating drop out rates now make it conceivable to provide correspondence courses to schools located in major urban centers. These "schools within schools" can function only if effective organizational structures are applied at the host institution. Furthermore, support systems must be employed in order to ensure that adolescents learning at a distance are successful. These strategies may need to sacrifice some of the student's autonomy and as such, fall beyond traditional notions of distributed learning designed for adults.

On the whole, distance education has tended to focus on the mature learner. Yet, there is a growing demand today to examine unique delivery systems for the many high school students who can no longer be serviced by conventional instruction. The latter includes but is not limited to students who reside in areas that are geographically isolated from metropolitan centers. In fact, escalating drop out rates, continuing budgetary constraints and falling enrollments in some regions have made it not only feasible but imperative that urban schools now consider alternative methods of distributing education.

Current Canadian statistics are staggering. For example, some Canadian school systems report that 3 out of 10 students do not complete high school (Employment and Immigration Canada, 2001). Seeing that employment opportunities for unskilled workers continue to disappear in the North American context, these figures are extremely alarming. In a highly competitive global market, it will be difficult to maintain an economic foothold with a weakened manpower base. As newer jobs demand specialized skills and training, dropouts will not be marketable and will eventually be forced to rely on social services in order to survive. The increased stress on these programs will be costly for everyone, and will burden and perhaps even collapse already fragile systems.

Isolating a single factor for the drop out problem is a complicated task. Social, financial and personal components must be examined. However, what is certain is that many of these students terminate their studies prematurely because they can no longer cope with traditional, classroom instruction (Beatty, A., Neisser, U., Trent, W.T., & Heubert, J.P., 2001). Continuing cutbacks in educational budgets have also drained many of the resources previously available to metropolitan school districts. As such, many of these institutions have been hard pressed to provide services to those high school students who (because of particular circumstances i.e., illness, involvement in external,...

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