May 2005 — Applications

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RACOL Project Delivers Distance Education to Rural Alberta Schools Through Videoconferencing

The Fort Vermilion School Division (FVSD) covers an area twice the size of Vermont, yet the school system only has 3,600 students. This region of northwestern Alberta, Canada, is a mixture of agriculture and oil exploration, with most towns having fewer than 5,000 people. The mandate of the school district is to provide the best possible education to all students, but the distance between communities can often make that difficult.

The most serious educational challenge for the school district has been the delivery of a quality and equitable high school program. The six small high schools in FVSD are so far apart that there is no opportunity to combine them into one or two larger facilities. For the last six years, the district has been using audio graphics to synchronously deliver eight academic courses to all of its high schools. Although this technology has been somewhat successful, teachers and students expressed dissatisfaction with their learning environments.

In response to this challenge, researchers, technologists and teachers developed one of the most sophisticated videoconferencing systems ever created for K-12 education to help provide students with the same quality of education as their big-city peers. The Rural Advanced Community of Learners (RACOL) project was launched in September 2003, after two years of planning and development, with the involvement of the district, two local universities, the provincial government and a host of supporting businesses and partners.

RACOL Teacher at work A small think tank was comprised of Mike Davenport, the school division’s former superintendent; Graham Fletcher, the president of a local Internet service provider; and Dr. Craig Montgomerie, a professor of instructional technology at the University of Alberta. They considered a number of solutions using the existing telephone network and even considered creating their own wireless network on a radio frequency. Most of the ideas proved too expensive or could not provide the transmission quality the team required. Finally, in 2000, the members of the think tank saw a demonstration of an MPEG2 videoconferencing system in Washington state and it became clear that the FVSD required a fiber-optic network.

Around the same time, the government of Alberta announced plans to develop the Alberta SuperNet, a high-speed, high-capacity broadband network linking 422 communities across the province. Knowing an infrastructure was being put into place, the detailed planning for RACOL began its next phase.

The $2.6 million budget for the RACOL project came from the e-learning program of CANARIE Inc., a nonprofit corporation, with matching funds from the government of Alberta. A number of partners also lent their respective expertise to the project, including The Banff Centre, Sonic Design Interactive Inc., the Northern Alberta Institute of Technology, Netera Alliance, SMART Technologies Inc. and Apple Canada. The University of Alberta and the University of Calgary also lent their expertise to the project, and an architect was hired to consult with teachers on the design of the classrooms.