A provincially funded website that at its peak was helping 234,000 British Columbians trying to further their education appears to be shutting down, after notices were served last week.
LearnNowBC, a web portal that for 10 years has offered free live tutoring, streaming tutorials and homework help to parents, students and adult learners, is winding up operations. The portal is considered unique in North America, but appears to be considered a failure by the Education Ministry.
The portal was created and run by the ministry in 2006, but responsibility for management was transferred four years ago to an education company owned by the Kamloops School District.
That enterprise, School District 73 Business Company, last week notified the contractors it employs, including some in Victoria, that: “The Ministry of Education has decided to not to continue funding the SD73BC to manage the LearnNowBC portal. Due to the loss of funding, SD73BC will no longer be able to support your position.”
The termination dates are this summer. The letter was signed by Dean Coder, vice-president of the company. Coder said Monday that “there have been some changes,” but declined to be specific.
Kamloops school superintendent Karl deBruijn said the district’s company had a contract with the government that ran from March to March, but the province would not commit to renewing it. The district had to give staff enough notice about the future and elected to serve the termination notices.
The government provided about $2 million a year to run the site.
The ministry issued a statement saying that a review found “very little awareness and use of the services” in the distributed-learning sector, “and even less within the broad educational sector.”
Only 10 per cent of the 234,000 registered users logged in during any given year. That equates to $78 per log-in.
The number of new users was also declining, the ministry said, down to 9,728 in 2014.
It said many of the tools and support services will still be available online elsewhere on more current platforms. Resources dedicated to LearnNowBC will be used to implement the new curriculum.
Information technology expert Steve Dotto worked as a contractor providing LearnNowBC course material for several years. He said spinning off the site to the school district’s enterprise was a “dysfunctional use of a great resource.”
“It was a weird sort of entrepreneurial entity within government that offered valuable help to thousands of people,” he said.
Users included disabled students, English-as-a-second-language learners and parents and students needing help with homework. Services included free live homework help, learning activities for primary-grade students, test preparation, literacy help and dozens of course guides.
Dotto said the direction the portal was taking in the education world started to “wobble” after the transfer. “It was a real shame. We had something that we thought was a model.”
When it was launched in 2006, it was hailed in the throne speech and aimed at giving students through B.C., particularly in rural and remote areas, more flexibility and avenues of study. Some were finding it difficult to get the courses they wanted and some urban students were having trouble getting courses that fit their timetables.
One of the features was a link to provide distributed-learning courses offered by 47 school districts to any student in B.C. The start-up cost $1 million, and another $5 million was earmarked to expand the website and improve the services in the first few years.
Sources said some officials in the Education Ministry lost interest in the portal and it was divested to SD73BC because it wasn’t considered to fit within the ministry. It was originally the operational arm of the Virtual School Society, set up by the government at the same time. That society was dissolved when it was handed over to the Kamloops district’s company.
Over the past four years that it’s been managed by that company, other web portals have come online and there are indications traffic started to decline.
LearnNowBC retained educators on contract to advise students on course selection. Others did one-on-one web advising most evenings to anyone who called in. Numbers weren’t available, but there are indications the number of people working for LearnNowBC has declined.
It seemed like a great idea at the time. But it was either overtaken by other developments or the management started to fail.
Either way, it looks to be gone soon.
