Restricted access to private elearning?

Just read on the CBC Ottawa website about a policy preventing Ontario online high schools from offering courses to students outside of Ontario.

An Ottawa private school that offers courses through the internet is appealing Ontario Ministry of Education regulations that ban it from offering credits to students outside the province.

“There just doesn’t seem to be any consideration given to all of these students,” Annette Levesque, principal of the Ottawa Carleton E-School, told CBC’s Ottawa Morning on Wednesday. “We can’t seem to get any information from the ministry at all and it’s our sense that it might be something that actually ends up in a court.”

Levesque estimated more than 15 per cent of the students enrolled in the school live outside the province, but the school will not accept any more out-of-province students while it is appealing the regulations.

The school offers 49 courses online, and Levesque said it serves many students with disabilities and many who live in rural areas across the country.

“It’s very hard to find something comparable within the other provinces,” she said.

Levesque sent an open letter to Premier Dalton McGuinty Tuesday, asking him to reverse Ontario’s new policy for online education, which she first heard about in January 2007, through a voice mail from the Ministry of Education.

Patricia McNeil, a spokeswoman for the ministry, told CBC News that the government’s position is that private schools do not have jurisdiction outside of the province “and do not have the authority to grant Ontario secondary school diplomas or credits to students who are not residing in Ontario.”

She added that there is an exception for 28 schools that have a special agreement with the Ontario government.

But Levesque alleges the government does not have that kind of legal authority over private schools.

“The Education Act states the agreement between a student and a private school [is] a private contract,” she said.

‘Cease and desist’ letter sent

Getting on the list of schools that are excepted from the regulations is almost impossible, she said.

“The average tuition rates from those schools range between $20,000 and $30,000 a year,” she said. “Our courses are $399 a course. They just don’t seem to be happy that we refuse to … move into that elitist model of education.”

The Ottawa Carleton E-School, an accredited private school, opened five years ago and is inspected every other year by a local education officer hired by the ministry.

In November, months after receiving the voice mail, the school received a copy of the new online education guidelines along with the province’s new school inspection guidelines, Levesque said.

A month later, the school received a “cease and desist” letter from the ministry, prompting it to stop enrolling non-Ontario students, including students from neighbouring Gatineau, Que. However, the school is allowing non-Ontario students already enrolled in courses to complete them.

From how this reads, it means that Ontario’s ministry of education is effectively saying that e-learning is all good, except that it has to be geographically limited to the geopolitical limits of the Province of Ontario. The Internet allows us to finally break across these boundaries for communications, business and personal uses, but not for education?

My question is: If the ministry inspections indicate that the courses are good enough for Ontario students, why don’t they feel that they are good enough for the world? It’s not like Ontario taxpayers are paying for this, it’s a private school (and unlike some Provinces such as BC, private schools don’t get any public funding in Ontario).