The province of Newfoundland is one which has been a leader in the field of technology in education for many years. A chief example of this leadership has been the Student Teacher

Educational Multimedia Network, or STEM~Net system, which has provided Internet access to students and teachers all across Newfoundland since September 1993. In recent years, there have been a number of individual partnerships in the province, which are also leading the way in technology in education. These partnerships have primarily been in the area of enhancing rural education. Over the past two years, the Vista School District (the smallest school district in Newfoundland) has seen two partnership initiatives that have dealt with offering courses in the Advanced Placement (AP) curriculum to students within their district. The first was the Vista District Digital Intranet, an initiative of the Vista School District and Centre for Tele-learning and Rural Education at Memorial University of Newfoundland. The second will be the CAPE Bonavista Initiative, an initiative of Discovery Collegiate School.

The region which Vista School District serves extends from the tip of the Bonavista Peninsula in the north-east, to Swift Current on the Burin Peninsula in the south, and from Port Blandford in the north-west to Little Harbour on the isthmus of the Avalon in the south-east. It 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 4744 students being taught by 350 teachers in 18 schools.

The Advanced Placement curriculum are university-level courses, which are offered by the College Board in the United States. These courses are taught to senior high school students in their own schools, who then take a standardised exam in early Spring to determine their ranking on a scale of 1 to 5. The vast majority of universities across Canada and the United States will offer university credit to students who receive a 3 or higher (in some cases, particular institutions will require a 4 or some institutions will require a 4 in certain courses).

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," is 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 grant from Industry Canada in 1998, saw the school district and the Centre develop four Advanced Placement courses for online delivery to students throughout the entire school district. With their initial funding in place, the Vista School District and the Centre for Tele-learning and Rural Education sought partnerships with Addison Wesley Longman, Department of Education, ITP Nelson, NewTel Communications Inc., Prentice Hall Ginn Canada, SchoolNet, STEM~Net, and STENTOR Alliance, which enabled them to purchase the equipment necessary for this project.

This was a significant project, not only for the Vista School District, but for all of rural Newfoundland and for rural educational authorities across Canada. In the past, the Advanced Placement curriculum has only been offered in larger school, where the number of students would warrant the allocation of a teacher for a particular course. As most of the schools in rural areas 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 teacher, 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. The development of the Vista District Digital Intranet 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." This was accomplished by allowing any student in the district to enroll 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).

Building on this concept, the CAPE Bonavista Initiative, or by its full name the "Consortium for Advanced Placement Education on the Bonavista Peninsula," is a project of Discovery Collegiate in Bonavista. This project has received developmental funding from Human Resources Development Canada (HRDC) to create the necessary partnerships and draft a business proposal which will be used as an application for project funding from the Community Learning Networks, an initiative of the Office of Learning Technologies (a division of HRDC). These partnership will include the Vista School District, various post-secondary institutions (including the Centre for Tele-learning and Rural Education at Memorial University of Newfoundland), local development associations, and the provincial Department of Education.

The CAPE Bonavista Initiative will build upon one of the short-comings of the Vista District Digital Intranet: "only science subjects are currently provided in the Intranet." In this regard, the CAPE Bonavista Initiative will place nine AP Social Studies courses on the Internet over a two year period (i.e. Art History, Comparative Government and Politics, European History, Human Geography, Macroeconomics, Microeconomics, United States Government and Politics, United States History, and World History). In the third year of the project, these courses will be available to any student within the nine rural school districts in Newfoundland.

These two projects raise a number of issues which could be discussed in the context of a chapter on "Effective Partnerships: Variety of Cases and Insights." The first issue is one raised in the request for book contributors "that partnerships are becoming another level of governance for education," as both projects remove the administration from an individual or from the school district and place it in a committee where individual schools and/or the school district are just one voice among many. Another issue which could be discussed is the area of jurisdiction, as education is a provincial jurisdiction, however, both of these projects are being made possible through federal funding. These are the two chief issues that stem from these two examples.

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

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.

Vista School District, A Handbook of Essential Information: Designed for New Teachers with the Vista School District. Vista School District: Clarenville, NF, 1999.