The Nova Scotia Teachers’ Union doesn’t want your kids to use technology to learn, it seems.
Junior and senior high school students are increasingly “media-savvy” and aching to use things like laptops, smart phones, and the plain old internet inside their schools. Mobile learning technology has been adopted en mass by the “net generation” and “screenagers,” but Halifax public schools appear locked down against all the kid’s favourite tech.
One of the main obstacles to online learning is the The Nova Scotia Teachers Union, a powerful organization representing 9,800 teachers yielding invisible influence—“a significant cause for concern” in the school system. (EDIT: See the full document here NSTU staunchly defends their provincial Collective Agreement, a 191-page contract, which spells out, in exacting detail, the number of days of instruction, hours, class sizes, and every other bit of their working conditions. Most of these hard-won rights achieved in the mid-1970s seem to put teachers ahead of kids in the system.
And like most Canadian teachers’ unions, it seems the NSTU is dead set against “virtual schools”—they want to keep kids in classroom seats and limit online learning. When new technology innovations arise, the union seems to instinctively resist introducing new programs around them, citing the “digital divide”—the different levels of internet access from none to high-speed—and the system’s inability to guarantee “equality of service” for all students.
E-learning courses and programs and virtual schools are popping up in Ontario and British Columbia, but are almost absent Nova Scotia’s school system. But at the elementary and secondary school level (P-12), regular “brick-and-mortar” schools are acquiring computer hardware and software, connecting kids to the internet, installing wireless networks, and offering training in ICT (Information Communication Technologies) to teachers.
And in spite of laws and regulations, distance education enrollment is holding its own. Schools now have built-in internet access, internet portals, digital libraries, and networks that support wireless and portable devices.
The province is developing a centralized, province-wide online learning program—the Nova Scotia Virtual School (NSVS). The master control base works with the curriculum, communicates with the eight school boards, prodding them to get teachers to provide online content.
But Nova Scotia is behind in providing province-wide high speed internet, grounding the NSTU’s concerns about the urban-rural “digital divide” and altering their educational policy-making.
Online learning can open the door to new innovations. Yet Nova Scotia e-learning programs consist mainly of instructional packets, delivered to students as teacher-evaluated assignments. Social learning with Facebook and Twitter remains extremely rare, as are blogs, wikis, podcasts and virtual worlds. Most teachers only use social networking to communicate with each other.
When it comes to thwarting online learning, the NSTU seems to show remarkable solidarity with the full support of the Education Department’s regulatory regime. Virtual schools are on the horizon and offer a glimmer of hope for realizing the enormous potential in meeting the needs of today’s online learners, if only unions and boards can work together to embrace them.
Paul W. Bennett is Founding Director, Schoolhouse Consulting, Halifax, and the author of Vanishing Schools, Threatened Communities: The Contested Schoolhouse in Maritime Canada, 1850-2010 (2011)
