Online education provides more opportunities

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First Nations online education ventures are emerging across the country, each with their own approaches to solving issues like geographic isolation, poor student performance and a lack of cultural diversity in standard education, and giving students more choices.

One of the newest projects has been launched by the Prince Albert Grand Council (PAGC). The PAGC is made up 12 bands, with a geographic reach that extends from the plains through the boreal forest, all the way to the border between Saskatchewan and the Northwest Territories.

Credenda, the name chosen for this initiative that gives Grade 12 students an opportunity to take specialized courses, such as psychology and chemistry, that are not offered in the PAGC's regular high schools, is a word that carries a lot of weight, explained principal Vince Hill.

Not only does Credenda encompass the names of all three First Nations groups within the grand council-CREe, DENe and DaAkota-it is actually a very old Latin word meaning "a thing to be believed" or "to believe in something".

"It just naturally fit together," said Hill. "There's nothing I want more for our students than to believe in themselves, to believe in their potential, that they can achieve excellence ... It conveys such a strength and such a unity. It's bringing the three groups together under one approach and really addressing all their needs together."

"And, as educators, we have to believe in our students," added teacher Kristine Dreaver-Charles, who will offer the humanities courses while colleague Nancy Carswell teaches the maths and sciences.

Credenda will be starting this August in five of the tribal council's 26 communities, each chosen for the pilot year for what it can teach the organizers about how to run an effective online education program. Deschambault Lake got the nod because it was the first community in northern Saskatchewan to get high-speed Internet; Little Red River was chosen for its small size; Wollaston Lake for its extreme isolation; Pelican Narrows to test the effectiveness of independent learning in a school that already offers most of the key courses provided by Credenda; and Stanley Mission to provide a comparison between this and another online model aimed primarily at students who have dropped out of the regular school system.

Credenda's students will by and large be students still enrolled in the local high school who want to pursue careers or university educational opportunities that require specialized courses.

Credenda was a concept first championed by PAGC Grand Chief Gary Merasty, who recognized that in many of the tribal council's small schools, a course such as Biology 30 couldn't viably be offered to the one or two students who wanted to take it, yet those same students would then end up spending a year away at university simply upgrading in order to get into the programs they wanted. With this approach, students will have more career options, and they will be able to return to their communities sooner and share what they have learned.

As well, Credenda will allow students in various communities to get to know one another, creating the connections between peers that will help once they go to university.

In his previous job as director of education for a northern First Nation, Vince Hill saw the problems kids from isolated communities face when leaving for post-secondary education.

"Before long they're homesick, and then our drop-out rate was significant," he said. "They need to build that relationship so they can go (away to school) and succeed."

For their model of education, Credenda drew heavily on the experiences of Sunchild Cyberschool. Sunchild, a project of the Sunchild First Nation in central Alberta, has been working in First Nations online education for six years.

According to CEO and program co-ordinator Martin Sacher, "Sunchild is the only First Nations complete school in the world." Sunchild offers academc courses for Grades 9 through 12, as well as post-secondary courses, thanks to educational partnerships with four public colleges and a private computer-training school.

The cyberschool also "franchises" their expertise in helping other educational authorities develop their own variations on the Sunchild model, using prepared course packages that use Sunchild instructors, as well as student checklists and guidelines for "key teachers", the locally-based student support workers. Credenda's model is quite similar to Sunchild's, especially in regard to the "synchronous" style of delivery in which students log in for live lessons rather than following pre-posted lessons on their own time. But for Credenda, the PAGC has developed their own classes and teachers using the Saskatchewan curriculum.

While Credenda is focused on Grade 12, the Keewaytinook Internet High School (KiHS) in northern Ontario started from the other end of the high school spectrum. KiHS, which was launched in 1999, is operated under the auspices of Keewaytinook Okimakanak, a non-political chiefs' council serving several First Nations in the vast northern region on Ontario.

Traditionally, children from these First Nations have had to leave their communities after Grade 8 to attend school in larger centres such as Thunder Bay, Sioux Lookout or even Winnipeg.

"What KiHS was established to do," said principal Darrin Potter, "was to try to meet the needs of parents and community members who wanted their kids home longer than Grade 8, because a lot of students are not ready to leave."

A lot of these children, not yet emotionally mature, end up getting overwhelmed by the experience of being far away from home, facing academic challenges all alone, said Potter. "They end up quitting and coming back to their home, and that sets up a cycle of failure for them."'

KiHS offers these youth another option: earn Grade 9 and 10 credits online, while still living at home, going out on the traplineand continuing to learn from their Elders.

"It's trying to give students a choice, to give them a better educational opportunity based on whatever their needs may be."

The KiHS teaching model is quite different from either Credenda's or Sunchild's. Rather than basing a handful of teachers in one or two central locations, KiHS hires one teacher for each of its 13 communities or "classrooms". These teachers then develop and deliver lessons to students in all of the communities and also serve as support personnel for their local students. Students are expected to be in class from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m., but their lessons are posted online and students work at their own pace.

While Credenda's primary cost is software licensing, KiHS pours most of its money into staffing. "That makes a perception difference," said Potter. "It's putting the quality in the community." He feels that having fully qualified teachers in each community is one of KiHS's strongest assets, because it gives students access to multiple teaching methods and sources of knowledge.

In its first five years, KiHS has given students a strong base not only academically, but technologically. Basic literacy skills such as reading and writing have been reinforced through the constant use of computers, and students are no longer fearful of the technology. As well, just as Hill hopes to see happen in northern Saskatchewan, students are building relationships across geographic boundaries.

Attitudes are changing as well.

"In the North, you're dealing with decades of students leaving their community after Grade 8. That's a rite of passage for a lot of students ... For years the community members were taught that you had to leave the community to get a good education," said Potter.

What they're learning through KiHS is that that is not the case, he said. "The education of the children is not separate from growing up in the community."