Institutional Memory

The staff of the Alberta Correspondence School, 1942

Distance education was an early vision of the Alberta government. In 1921 the government realized many students in the province did not have access to an education. In 1923 the Alberta Correspondence School Branch was formed to serve rural students, kids who were housebound, and adults looking to upgrade their education. That vision has been the cornerstone of distributed learning in its many forms for the past 95 years as teachers and support staff strive to provide equality of educational opportunity to all Albertan students, regardless of their location and environment. 

The first director of the Correspondence Branch was Elizabeth Sievwright who worked out of a tiny office in the back room in the legislature, making up her own lessons and mailing them out. In its first two months, 100 families requested lessons. Five years later, there were over 1000 students. In the 1940s, lessons were broadcast over CKUA radio. By the 1970s, some lessons were broadcast over ACCESS Television. For decades, teachers and support staff -working for the government- created the resources students used to learn at a distance and through which they were assessed. Assessment of student work largely fell to contracted teachers who worked from home.

In 1980, as part of a larger government plan to relocate government services to rural communities, Premier Peter Lougheed's government announced that the correspondence school would move to Barrhead where the province commissioned a new building that opened its doors in 1983. At the time, dozens of employees who had previously worked in Edmonton were forced to relocate. For a time, many of them commuted by van to Barrhead every day. Eventually, many sold their homes in Edmonton at a loss- due to the economic downturn at the time- to buy homes in the Barrhead area. This provided a boost to the Barrhead economy and over the next four years, the population of Barrhead increased from 3500 to 4000 people. Even the post office expanded to deal with the anticipated increase in lessons coming and going. Meanwhile the Edmonton office remained open, receiving a great deal of foot traffic. It moved to an office in Harley Court, then to the Devonian Building, and then back to Harley Court.

In 1991 this government funded programme, operated largely by trained teachers working under government contracts, was renamed Alberta Distance Learning Centre to reflect the modernization of delivery.

In 1996, Pembina Hills School Division, with its central office in Barrhead,  created Vista Virtual School to deliver online education. 

In 1997 ADLC was divested from the government and contracted to Pembina Hills School Division to manage. The creation of print resources was left to the Learning Technology branch (later renamed the Distributed Learning Branch) of Alberta Education, a government department that operated out of the ADLC building in Barrhead. 

In 1998, Vista Virtual had 6 online teachers who worked out of the ADLC office under their own principal. They created their own courses and taught students at a distance using internet technology. Numbers skyrocketed almost immediately. In the fall of 2001, the two programmes began working together to deliver instruction and create courses. The division between Vista Virtual (a school in Pembina Hills Public Schools with its body of students who are not assigned to any other jurisdiction) and ADLC (a provincially mandated school managed through PHPS that delivers instruction to students enrolled through other schools in the province) was blurry for some time until 2004 when a separate assistant principal was brought on. A full-time principal came in not long after and at that time, Vista Virtual students and ADLC students were separated with both schools having their own classlists, administration and teachers- all using the same course materials.

ADLC isn't a school, it's an opportunity. For kids wherever they may be, in location or education, to have a chance at something bigger. (Paul, one of the first students in Alberta to receive the bulk of his education online)

Contract markers continued to be used, both online and print, allowing both Vista Virtual and ADLC to offer students the flexibility of year round instruction and continuous enrollment. A new office was opened in Calgary. The Edmonton office relocated to a new location on Jasper Avenue. In July 1999, ADLC merged with Distance Learning Options South (DLOS) in Lethbridge and DLOS maintained the DLOS financial operations for course materials. By March 2006, DLOS completely dissolved all financial operations and was fully incorporated by ADLC.

ADLC students attending a climate change conference from St. Albert

In 2001, a common English 10-1 was written in both online and print formats by ADLC teachers to roll out in time for the implementation of new curricula-abandoning the tradition of using print courses developed by the government’s Learning Technology Branch which were always a year or more late in production. Soon more and more core and elective courses were developed in-house and shared province wide. In 2006, ADLC began to share online courses to schools across the province via a “team teaching” approach. This allowed partner schools to use ADLC infrastructure and courses to teach their own students- a model of instruction in use by hundreds of schools in Alberta today. In time, the Distributed Learning Branch of Alberta Education, slow to adopt online learning opportunities, ceased to exist and the development of online and print materials for all students in the province became part of the service ADLC’s was contracted to provide to the students of the province.

Today, ADLC has 73 teachers on continuous contract, 21 in Barrhead and 52 elsewhere in the province. Having such a diverse range of teachers ensures that teachers understand the nature of their students because they know the regions and schools where students come from-from First Nations communities, to isolated farms, to small towns to urban centres. Many teachers work from home, allowing them to understand the isolated environment in which many students work. This provincial presence allows ADLC to hire excellent mid-career teachers from across the province-teachers with strong backgrounds in not only classroom instruction, assessment and subject area expertise but also instructional design and distance education pedagogy. ADLC and VV teachers and support staff know that it is possible to teach and learn and work together for a common goal at a distance because they do it every day.

A couple of our excellent support staff at teachers' convention.

According to Socrates, “To know thyself is the beginning of wisdom.” Can you really know where you are unless you know where you have come from?

Institutional memory matters. From the very beginning our programme was designed to teach students who do not fit into traditional schools and to help schools offer options for their kids. As our school moves down an uncertain path, knowing who we are and how we got here can be helpful.