Centre for Advanced Placement Education

The province of Newfoundland and Labrador is located on the far east coast of Canada. It has a long and rich history, being Britain's oldest colony and Canada's youngest province. The region which Vista School District serves is a large geographic area covering about 7,000 square kilometers. The region has a population of about 35,000 located in 24 municipalities and about 80 unincorporated communities. The district has approximately 4500 students being taught by 350 teachers in 18 schools.

As with most schools in rural areas, many of the schools in the Vista School District did not have the required number of students, many were unable to offer such a curriculum (or did so to the disadvantage of other students and teachers, who found larger class sizes to accommodate the few students taking these AP courses). In this closed environment, rural schools could not compete with their larger, urban counterparts. It was at this point, that the Vista School District embarked on the first of its second online AP initiatives.

The movement to add Advanced Placement programs was also given impetus by several government commissions. A Royal Commission on Education was appointed in 1990 and the a major focus of its final report recommended sought to address the inequity that existed between the number and variety of courses that large, urban schools were able to offer, compared to the number and variety of courses at smaller, rural schools. The Royal Commission also argued against amalgamation of smaller school districts. In one of the commissioned studies for the Royal Commission, Garfield Fizzard posed the question "Do we have to continue to worship at the altar of the Goddess of Proximity?" An earlier report, the Report of the Small Schools Study Project stated that "the delivery of courses by correspondence, computers, videotapes or a combination of these appears to be a most desirable way of ensuring that a greater variety of subjects are available to those who attend the small high schools." Building on this idea, the Royal Commission recommended the creation of a School of Distance Education and Technology which would "seek to deliver full credit senior high courses that meet provincial learning objectives."

As the year 2000 dawned on the Newfoundland and Labrador school system, a Ministerial Panel on Educational Delivery in the Classroom, made the exact same recommendation when it called upon the Government to create a Centre for Distance Learning and Innovation. At the time of the Ministerial Panel report, the Department of Education offered most of the high school French, mathematics and science courses through distance education. However, during the same seven year period between these similar government recommendations many school districts, individual schools and educational organisations have made other significant advances in the field of distance education. The Vista School District is one of the organisations which has been involved in making many of these advances, in particular online course initiatives involving the Advanced Placement curriculum.

The Advanced Placement (AP) program was first introduced to the province of Newfoundland during the 1992-93 school year. (As a grade 12 student, the author was member of the first class of the AP European History ever offered in the province). Table 1 indicates several significant trends. One is that only AP Social Studies course, European History, was ever offered on a consistent basis. There were instances where other AP Social Studies courses were offered, for example during the 1998-99 school year ten students enrolled in the Comparative Government and Politics, but these courses were usually discontinued after a year or two (largely due to low subscribership).

Another trend is that AP Mathematics and Science courses did not experience the same problems on their introduction to the province. Courses such as AP Biology, AP Chemistry, AP Mathematics, AP Physics have not experienced the same growing pains that any of the AP Social Studies courses have. This has largely been due to a general push in the subjects areas of Mathematics and Science began in May 1989, with the Task Force Report on Mathematics and Science Education, Towards an Achieving Society, which recommended that "some courses be at a more advanced level than typically found in high schools and that there be some provision for advanced credit at the post-secondary level for such courses."

The development of the Vista District Digital Intranet (VDI) was a step towards creating open schools within the school district, that is "schools academically and administratively integrating with one another for at least part of a school day." The Vista District Digital Intranet, or by its full name "The Vista District Digital Intranet: The Delivery of Advanced Placement Courses to Young Adult Learners in Rural Communities," was a project of the Vista School District and the Centre for Tele-learning and Rural Education at Memorial University of Newfoundland. The project, which was funded by a federal government grant in 1998, saw the school district and the Centre develop four Advanced Placement courses for online delivery to students throughout the entire school district.

The VDI project allowed any student in the district to enrol in AP Biology, Chemistry, Mathematics and Physics, however, the courses were offered over the World Wide Web and were only being taught out of one location (Biology -- Clarenville High School, Clarenville; Chemistry -- Discovery Collegiate, Bonavista; Mathematics -- Musgravetown Central High School, Musgravetown; Physics -- Centre for Tele-learning and Rural Education, St. John's). Prior to the creation of the VDI, only two or three of the ten schools with secondary grades were able to offer AP Science and Mathematics courses to their students. The VDI allowed students from all ten schools to take advantage of these courses. Two years later, a second initiative was launched to offer the AP Social Studies curriculum, this second initiative was the Centre for Advanced Placement Education.

The Centre for Advanced Placement Education (CAPE) was the creation of a teacher and an administrator, both with social studies backgrounds, at Discovery Collegiate in Bonavista (the district's largest school). Within the Vista School District and for the most part, all throughout the province, the social studies curriculum had taken a backseat to mathematics and sciences. To illustrate this fact, while there were six AP social studies, during the 1998-99 school year only the European History course was offered. This occurred in two different schools: both of these schools were urban schools. During that same period there were four different mathematics and science courses offered in thirty-two different schools: Biology - 13; Chemistry - 15; Mathematics/Calculus - 22; Physics - 10. The online AP social studies course offer by the CAPE were largely a two person crusade to address this inequity.

Unlike the VDI, courses offered by the CAPE were offered in a totally asynchronous environment. This removed the need for schools to synchronise the timetabling to accommodate students' distance learning experience. In its first year of operation, the CAPE offered the AP European History course as a pilot to three students attending two different schools. These students took the online course as an overload to their regular schedule. The fact that the course was asynchronous was useful, as these students simply did not have time allocated in their timetable for their AP course. All three of these students went on to take the AP exam and all three were successful in obtaining the level necessary to achieve university transfer credit (with one student obtaining a level 5).

Building on this success, the CAPE offered four different courses during the 2000-01 school year: the AP European History and AP Human Geography in an asynchronous format and the AP Comparative Government and Politics and AP United States History as an independent study courses. Over this two year period, the online course being offered by the CAPE have been taught as an extra-curricular or volunteer initiative. The teachers that have been involved have maintained a regular in-class teaching load and have taught the online courses in their spare time.

The students who are involved in this asynchronous instruction will actually make use to two different sites on the World-Wide Web. The first site is a publicly-available course homepage. This site contains textbooks information, review activities, and an online resource centre. The online resource centre, which is the most used of these particular items, is basically a collection of links to other WWW sites on a topic by topic, chapter by chapter basis. The online resource centre acts as an online library, in order to relieve the pressure for individual schools to have to purchase their own resources for a traditional library/resource centre.

The second site is a password protected site that uses the Web Course Tools (WebCT) software for the actual course delivery. WebCT is one of the most popular pieces of Internet software for the purposes of course delivery. In terms of available applications, almost anything that can be done in a traditional classroom can be simulated within the WebCT software. For example, there is a section for course content, test taking facilities, assignment submissions, a discussion forum, private e-mail, an electronic whiteboard, a real-time chat area, and a way to track student usage. The CAPE makes use of three of the main WebCT components.

Obviously, as these courses rely heavily upon a wide range of technologies, along with a number of different servers, there exists the concern as to whether all of this will work on a consistent basis. To date, the technology used by the CAPE is fairly reliable. The publicly available site is hosted by the National Capital Freenet, an non-commercial Internet service provider based out of Carleton University. The WebCT servers that the CAPE uses are hosted by STEM~Net. STEM~Net, or the Student Teacher Educational Multimedia Network, has provided Internet access to students and teachers all across Newfoundland since September 1993. STEM~Net is based out of Memorial University of Newfoundland and is much more reliable than a server based out of the school district office or an individual school would be. The only negative feature of this partnership is the fact that as STEM~Net is not a part of the CAPE, when technical difficulties arise or when regular maintenance is required, the CAPE does not have a say in when things will take place and does not have that direct line of communication that one would have if the WebCT servers were hosted internally.

Many of the advantages of the CAPE are self-evident. The ability to share resources among a large number of rural schools which would not be able to offer these enrichment courses being among the most evident. In addition to the sharing of resources, the ability for students to have the same level of access to these as their urban counterparts has been one of the overriding goals of most of the distance education initiatives in rural Newfoundland.

As stated earlier, the method of delivery for these online courses is asynchronous in nature. This means that the instructor is not online at the same time that the students are online (although there can be some real-time sessions to provide the students an opportunity to discuss issues with the instructor). The fact that the delivery is asynchronous allows the CAPE to accommodate the fact that individual school schedules may begin before Labour Day or conclude prior to the second last week of June. In addition, the asynchronous nature accommodates for the drastic time difference which could occur (as when we begin our school day, it is 4:00am on the west coast and when we conclude our day, it is 10:30am on the west coast).

Using this method, the teacher can place lectures into a "Course Content" area which the students can access. A weekly discussion question is posted and the students have the ability to reply to these weekly question at their leisure throughout the week. Finally, there is also one piece of evaluation each week which is available during the entire week. These evaluations can take many forms: essay style quizzes (document-based and free-response), multiple-choice quizzes, book reports, mapping activities, and WWW-based projects. In most of its courses, the CAPE presents a full schedule of quizzes and assignments at the beginning of the year to accommodate the asynchronous nature of the instruction.

As evidenced by these numerous features, the asynchronous method of delivery is also one of the main advantages of the CAPE.

However, the asynchronous nature of delivery also presents some challenges for the CAPE as well. The need to include a full schedule of quizzes and assignments at the beginning of the year precludes the ability of an instructor to add surprises to the evaluation. For example, pop quizzes are difficult to manage with students on different timetables as four students may have class today, another two students tomorrow, and five more students two days later. Not only is it difficult for the instructor to manage, students would be able to communicate the content of a pop quiz, creating the need for the instructor to have multiple versions of the quiz.

The other challenge in creating evaluations, particularly quizzes, is the knowledge that each piece of evaluation is an open-book evaluation. One thing that the teacher can do to accommodate this is to create evaluations with this in mind (in a traditional classroom an open-book test would look quite different than a closed-book test). The ability to time the students' access to the evaluation, for example the instructor can direct the system to close access to the evaluation after it has been open for a specific amount of time, can minimise the students' reliance upon textbooks and other materials. If a student only has 30 minutes to type an answer to a free-response question, they do not have the ability to spend large amounts of time looking for the answer before beginning to type. However, the typing ability of some students does permit them to make use of any resources that they have available to them.

Finally, as all these courses are taught using one than one school, each student generally has two teachers, an electronic teacher and a mediating teacher. The relationship that each of these teachers have with the student can present a tremendous challenge in this distance education model. The electronic teacher is the content-based teacher who is responsible for teaching the students. The mediating teacher was available to supervise, track attendance, and provide technical trouble-shooting should the need arise. The experience of the CAPE has been that the mediating teacher should be a technical individual and not a content based individual. The was clearly indicated in a recent pilot project that the CAPE entered into with a school in Massachusetts.

For the first few months of the pilot project, the students in MA were supervised by the school's learning resource teacher, who was also responsible for the school's technology. This individual had little formal training or background in history. The students would go to their learning resource centre during their AP slot, login to their course and were taught by the e-teacher. During this period, the students did very well in the course, participating regularly in the online discussion forum, staying up-to-date on their readings, classwork, assignments, and homework.

However, later in the pilot project, the students began to spend more time with a history teacher from their own school who had an open period during their AP slot. While they still participated in the course, their level of participation decreased dramatically. In addition to this decreased participation, they began to submit work to the content-based teacher in their own school, which meant that classwork and assignments were submitted late, if at all. The change from a technical-based mediating teacher to a content-based mediating teacher had a negative effect upon the students' experience in their online course.

From the students' perspective, it was entirely understandable. The students had two choices. They could receive instruction and support from a teacher that they already know, who is available within their school to them, and someone they can actually see and talk to. Or they could receive instruction from a teacher who they have never seen, who may take hours to reply to their queries, and who isn't readily available to them (due to the asynchronous nature). Many secondary school students, who do not have the required maturity and independence to excel in an online environment, would have made the exact same decision.

This shows that the selection of mediating teachers can be a significant determining factor to the success of any school's adoption of the online courses offered by the CAPE. The selection of a mediating teacher who can trouble-shoot any problems that arise in the technology, while the primary content-based teacher remains the electronic teacher, is the model which appears to have the best success. When the mediating teacher is also a content-based teacher, it creates competition between the mediating teacher and the electronic teacher, and in the case of most secondary students they will select the teacher that they have the most access to: the mediating teacher. Once this selection is made, the benefits of the CAPE's online courses quickly fall by the wayside.

These are some of the main challenges faced by the CAPE.

For the 2001-02 school year, the CAPE has received funding in the form of an allocation of a half-time teaching unit in order to teach four to six AP Social Studies courses within the Vista School District. This allocation has also allowed the CAPE make plans to offer its courses to educational jurisdictions outside of the Vista School District. These plans are to extend courses offered by the CAPE beyond the borders of our own school district.

The Centre for Advanced Placement Education will be offering its online courses to schools and school boards outside of our own educational authority on a pay-per-use basis. This will provide schools that may only have two or three (or even ten or twelve) students who would like to take a particular AP course, the opportunity to still offer these AP courses without having to worry about allocating a teacher to such a small number of students. The cost of this opportunity will be $300 per student. This amount does not include the cost of the AP exam or the cost of the textbook(s). It does include the cost of a reading package created by the instructor for supplementary purposes. It should note that these fees are a not-for-profit venture. Fees collected by the Centre for Advanced Placement Education will be used for teaching units or the development of new online courses.

The success of initiatives to bring online AP opportunities to students in the Vista School District speaks for itself. During the 1999-2000 school year 2.5% of all students in the Vista District were taking at least one AP course. This figure also represents the approximate number of students who are taking AP courses in the Avalon East School District, which is the educational authority that includes the metro St. John's area and the highest concentration of large, urban schools in the province. It also has about ten times the student population of the Vista School District, with approximately 30,000 students. If the underlying goal of these AP initiatives was to create some form of equity between the large, urban schools and the small, rural schools, than these initiatives have achieved this goal. The equal proportion of students enrolled in AP courses in both districts indicates that equal opportunity for students to take advantage of these higher learning opportunities does exist.

This fact was particularly apparent when it came to AP social studies courses. During the 1999-2000 school year, the only AP social studies course that was offered was the AP European History. Excluding the online AP European History course offered by the CAPE, this course was only available to student attending urban schools. During the 2000-01 school year, excluding the course offered by the CAPE, only two AP social studies courses were offer throughout the province (AP European History and AP Human Geography). However, students in the Vista School District had twice that selection, with the CAPE offering four different AP social studies courses. This trend will continue into the 2001-02 school year, when students in the Vista School District will have the opportunity to take six different AP social studies courses, providing them with a greater number of AP social studies courses than students in any other educational authority.

However, this opportunity will not be restricted to students in the Vista School District. The opportunity for other educational authorities, particularly those located in rural areas, to take advantage of these online AP Social Studies courses will allow these authorities to find themselves in the same position as the Vista School District. They will find themselves able to offer a wide variety of AP Social Studies courses without having to worry about student subscribership or teacher allocation.

Barbour, Michael. "Delivering Distance Education: The Ministerial Panel report and the new Centre for Distance Learning and Innovation." Small Schools Newsletter. 14 1-2 2001.

Fizzard, Garfield. "Distance Education" Our Children Our Future: Commissioned Studies. St. John's, NF: Queen's Printer, 1992.

Government of Newfoundland. Towards an Achieving Society. St. John's, NF: Queen's Printer, 1989.

Government of Newfoundland. Our Children, Our Future. St. John's, NF: Queen's Printer, 1993.

Riggs, Frank. Report of the Small Schools Study Project. St. John's, NF: Queen's Printer, 1987.

Stevens, Ken. "Two Approaches to Teaching Biology, Chemistry, Mathematics and Physics to Senior High School Students in Virtual Classes" Paper presented at the annual meeting of the Australasian Science Education Research Association, Rotorua, New Zealand, 1999.

Stevens, Ken. "A New Model for Teaching in Rural Communities - The Electronic Organisation of Classes As Intranets." Prism - Journal of the Newfoundland and Labrador Teachers' Association. 6 1 1999.

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Vista School District. About the District - The Region/Location. 26 December 1999 <http://www.k12.nf.ca/vista/aboutus/regionlocal.html>.