Ontario Online Will Expand Access to Courses for Province's Students
Plans
are
moving ahead for Ontario Online to become available to almost all of the
province's college students in fall 2015.
Ontario
Online,
an initiative of the Ontario Online Centre of Excellence, will offer
online courses from many of the province's colleges and universities
that
students at other institutions can take for credit.
For
instance,
the University of Toronto (UT) plans to offer seven courses via
Ontario Online. A student at the University of Western Ontario can pay
tuition
and take the course for credit.
Ontario
Online
was seeded by $42 million in funding from the provincial government.
While there are 44 accredited colleges and universities in the province,
Ontario Online administrators are still working on signing the
institutions up
and it is not yet clear how many will be involved.
It
is
likely the 2015-16 school year will open with a schedule of courses and
more
will be added in succeeding academic years.
Ontario
Online
was initiated by the Ontario
Ministry of Training, Colleges and
Universities with the goal to "share best practices in
pedagogy and online
resources, as well as offer state-of-the-art scalable courses that are
recognized for credit across multiple institutions."
Sioban
Nelson,
vice president of academic programs at the University of Toronto, said
academic credits will be transferred by way of the normal transfer
credit
processes at each university. A student's home university will also have
the
authority to decide which transfer credits to accept. A list of which
courses
are acceptable by which universities will be available well before
students
need to register for the 2015-16 school year.
"One
of
the big problems in the past is that a student takes a course at another
university and finds out they can't use it for their degree,' said UT
Senior
Lecturer Don Boyes, whose course, Geographic Information and Mapping I,
will be
available with Ontario Online. "They're trying to eliminate that
problem."
About the Author
Michael Hart is a Los Angeles-based freelance writer and the former executive editor of THE Journal.