The EDEN Project:
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Grayley (Luke) McWatters and Larry Thompson
VOL. 12, No. 1/2, 277-284
The EDEN Project was pioneered by the staff of the Orillia Learning Centre, an adult high school operated by the Simcoe County Board of Education, in Ontario, Canada. The EDEN Project’s mission is to deliver the highest quality educational and training courseware to anyone, anywhere. The end user could be a student experiencing a barrier (geographic, economic, physical, etc.) to gaining access to high school courses in a traditional classroom or one or more students in a LAN environment in a traditional secondary school.
Our model includes:
In February 1995, The Learning Centre in Orillia, Ontario, part of the Simcoe County Board of Education (Ontario), obtained funding from its local Canada Employment Centre to develop and deliver full credit high school courses to adult students who were unable to attend regular day classes. We were the first high school in Canada to deliver full secondary school credits completely online, including curriculum, teacher delivery, evaluation, and student management. A pre-service “Electronic ACCESS” course and a step-by-step manual were developed to equip potential students with the electronic skills necessary to participate effectively. This Access component is a 20-25 hour, non-credit course that takes a novice user from the basics of computer use through to the more advanced telecommunications skills needed to function successfully in future credit courses.
In September, 1995, four Grade 11 General credit courses were delivered to a variety of student populations, including adult dayschool, regular dayschool, alternative education, workplace training, and continuing education.
By September, 1996, The EDEN Project had formed a Consortium consisting of Simcoe County Board of Education, York Region Board of Education, Stormont, Dundas, and Glengarry Public School Board, Board of Education for the City of Hamilton, and Etobicoke Board of Education. In December, 1997, the Dufferin-Peel Roman Catholic Separate School Board entered the partnership.
In February, 1997, with ongoing revisions to existing courseware and the addition of a Grade 11 Advanced Chemistry course, the EDEN Project launched its new Internet/Intranet delivery system. Based on a customized version of Galacticomm Inc.’s Worldgroup software, the EDEN Project’s free client software package communicates with our Worldgroup server. This software is available on our web site at . This client software is able to connect to the server in a number of ways:
The client software is easy to use and provides both the student and teacher with feature-rich applications for electronic mail, file attachments, electronic discussion groups, real-time teleconferencing with a shared “whiteboard,” simple upload and download procedures, and so forth, and all within a common user interface. This interface makes it possible to train and equip novice users with sophisticated communication tools quickly. The server software provides substantial administrative advantages: online student registration, a system of locks and keys to provide security features and manage student access to resources, remote administration to audit and monitor system usage, and so forth.
In this paradigm, where the teacher and learner interact electronically, the keys to effective learning and student retention centre on dynamics and continuity. The content must be presented in an interactive and failsafe fashion. Few assumptions can be made about the learner’s perceptions, and content must be thoroughly sequenced to eliminate every possible misinterpretation by the learner.
The courseware designer must have a firm knowledge of the curriculum. This is one area where one’s experience with the content and with a variety of learners and functioning levels is a vital asset.
All the courses, by nature of their varying content and subject matter, offered us different opportunities and challenges in terms of the individual “look and feel,” the tools and resources we could use to present the content, and the instructional strategies that were employed. Part of the instructional mix involves the selection of available and effective market software for the presentation of content or to provide a medium for the student to work within. In some cases, two or three different software products are used within a single course.
For example, the bulk of our Grade 11 Advanced Chemistry Course was designed entirely with Toolbook (Asymmetrix) authoring software. The result is downloadable, executable files that feature a lot of interactivity within the content, hyperlinks to the WWW for research, built-in support tools, such as a calculator and glossary, and a variety of self-checking, self-marking features. The teacher controls how many times students are allowed to do the exercises as well as the length of time allowed in testing situations. An encrypted log file is created as soon as the student begins working with the file, and it tracks the student’s activity and performance. This log file is sent back to the teacher for decryption, and the student’s performance is recorded in a database.
One superb feature is that the Toolbook software allows us to embed “hot links” in the presentation, which will automatically launch the students’ browsers, take them directly to the designated site for research, and then return to where they left off in the instructional material. (The log file even tracks whether or not the student went to the site and how long they spent there.) The Toolbook design also allows us to integrate a calculator program, a notebook, Microsoft Notepad for word-processing, and a graphing tool called “Mr. Plot.”
To prevent us from trying to re-invent the wheel, and to cut down on production time, we have attempted to incorporate effective third-party digital resources wherever possible. However, it was essential that any such material be deliverable down the phone lines in relatively acceptable download times.
In the case of our Introduction to Computers course, we negotiated with the publisher of a CD product that contained simple animation and some self-checking, self-marking features. In our contract, the publisher broke the entire CD up into downloadable, executable modules. This arrangement offered us the technical feasibility we needed as well as the flexibility to place modules strategically into our curriculum sequence. The simple animation provided us with sufficient dynamics, and the self-checking/marking provided feedback for the student as well as objectivity and efficient recordkeeping for the teacher.
In addition, this Introduction to Computers course uses Microsoft Works 2.0, under agreement with Microsoft Corporation, and it is downloadable from our server. Web pages are also used to provide instructions, assignments, screen captures, scanned documents, and links to related Web resources. All of this curriculum and delivery efficiency is necessary to free the teacher for coaching and facilitating the online conferences and forums and to have more time for addressing individual student needs and weaknesses.
The Worldgroup delivery system provides an instructional commonality across our curriculum. All instructors are required to employ the e-mail, conference/forums, and teleconferencing features of Worldgroup. In fact, in each course’s evaluation policy, a minimum of 20% of a student’s final mark is based on activity and performance in the communication tasks. In addition, each curriculum features a strong interactive and collaborative learning component. For instance, after they are given the tools for web publishing and group communication (HTML and teleconferencing) in a series of short, structured tutorials, students can be grouped and asked to use these tools collaboratively in the creation of a publishable team project.
To date, over 1,000 students have participated in our courses with a retention/ completion rate of 87%. The response we have received has been encouraging and validating. The following is a summary of the advantages and benefits that add to the value of what we believe is a comprehensive model for delivery:
School boards and the Ministry of Education and Training in Ontario are also attracted to this model because:
This is a paperless system than can be updated or revised quickly. Once updated, the new version is immediately available to the rest of the world.
The EDEN delivery system is especially viable for adults or teens who cannot get to the traditional classroom, that is, working adults or youth, teen moms, Alternative Education students, home study students, the disabled, and the geographically isolated. EDEN may provide a cost effective alternative for summer and night school.
The project has moved well beyond the traditional or original applications within distance education. By combining distance technologies with classroom schooling, we can increase the options for a larger number of students.
The electronically congregated class is a solution to what is commonly known as the “small school” problem. We are piloting this application in a number of boards now. Many school boards are faced with small schools where maintaining program offerings is a challenge, and very small classes are run at the expense of the rest of the school programs. We are linking small groups of students who want the same course via the Internet/Intranet delivery system. Students do not have to be available at the same time during the day. They just need access to an Internet-linked computer for a portion of their day at school. Students are challenged to work independently and be self-motivated while they learn how to work together asynchronously as an electronic group. The group is linked to one teacher, who can be located anywhere.
In Simcoe County, we piloted a congregated group in our Grade 11 Advanced Chemistry course with a variety of students who would not have been able to take the Chemistry course in their own home school. All were linked to one teacher in Orillia, who worked from his home. The teacher has had to develop some creative strategies for building and stimulating collaborative learning activities.
Here, curriculum, students, and teachers are working within an Internet-linked lab setting. In this scenario, labs filled with students (day or night) are interacting with the same or different courseware at the same time. One teacher facilitates the group. Students could be linked to their subject teachers electronically with some opportunities in their schedule for face-to-face contact.
Destreamed, Integrated, Computer Literacy Program for Grade Nine In the February-June semester of 1997, one high school delivered a nine-week, 55-hour computer literacy course to a class of grade 9 students using a traditional keyboarding approach along with the 25-hour Electronic Access course. In September-January, 1998, this approach was expanded to include all grade 9 students in this high school. In addition, the EDEN Introduction to Computers course formed the basis for delivery of the grade 10 computer credit. Plans for February, 1998, include the piloting of the grade 9 computer literacy course to additional high schools in Simcoe county and our other consortium boards.
Electronic Access: Pre-service for Students, Inservice for Teachers The Electronic Access course, originally written as a pre-service for all students wishing to take full credit courses, is also being seen by our partnering boards as an excellent training component for teacher inservice. This course covers such areas as the Windows/Win ’95 desktop, file management, e-mail and conferencing, the culture of online communication, use of a browser, uploads, downloads, file attachments, and so forth. Many boards have expressed an interest in incorporating the Electronic Access course as part of their inservice professional development plan, and ongoing implementation has seen the course delivered to over 40 teachers in the EDEN partnering boards.
Two related projects developed over the past year add a second and third dimension to our EDEN model.
Two professional Career Counsellors, along with a full-time research assistant, developed a gateway to Career Education resource called Career Connections, which has over 700 hyperlinks to valuable, practical resources worldwide on a variety of Career Education topics. This comprehensive resource directory is divided into two halves. One side is for adults and professionals; the other side is for teenagers. The topics covered include labour market, job search techniques, career profiles, world of work, school-to-work transition, Canadian and U.S. colleges and universities, apprenticeships, and so on.
The third value-added component is literacy training via the Internet. The EDEN Project is negotiating an agreement with TRO Learning, the makers of PLATO, to deliver upgrading for English reading and writing and for mathematics as an independent study service to learners of all ages. A new and fourth dimension to our Internet service is interactive, web-delivered English as a Second Language training. This service is expected to be launched in March, 1998.
Strategic partnerships are being developed with major publishers, such as Prentice-Hall-Ginn and ITP Nelson, who are actively working with us on new courseware development. Their resources, plus those of other third party software developers, are helping us to produce curricula more cost-effectively and bring much needed content to the market more quickly. Currently, the following Ontario credit courses are being delivered to students in mainstream classes as well as remote learners:
New courseware now under development include Grade 11 Entre-preneurship, Grade 9 Mathematics, and Grade 12 general English. In summary, The EDEN Project, originally conceived as a distance education project, has evolved into a multifaceted distributive education solution. Meeting the needs of learners within a system increasingly under stress, The EDEN Project has come to be seen by many as an educationally sound and cost-effective answer to equipping students with the future learning and work skills required for the next millennium.
Luke McWatters
Larry Thompson
Luke McWatters, Program Co-ordinator
and Larry Thompson, Manager of Curriculum Development
Simcoe County District School Board
The Learning Centre
575 West St. S.
Orillia, ON L3V 7N6
Telephone: (705) 325-9279
Fax: (705) 325-3114
http://eden.scbe.on.ca