Saskatchewan Correspondence School,
December 1948.
The first distance education school in Saskatchewan was established within the Department of Education in 1925 by Catherine Sheldon-Williams. The mandate of the school was to meet the educational needs of the children of settlers, trappers, and traders in remote and sparsely populated areas of the province where the formation of school districts was difficult. Until 1930, the school offered kindergarten to Grade 8. In 1931, the school expanded to include Grades 9 to 11, and in 1941 Grade 12 was added. Today, the Saskatchewan Government Correspondence School offers courses in Grades 9 to 12. While the Correspondence School began as “education by mail” for school-aged students, its modes of delivery and client base have evolved and continue to do so. In the early days, Sheldon-Williams served less than fifty students from her office in a small room of the West Wing of the Legislative Building. She prepared lesson sheets individually to suit the level of each of her students, as well as doing her own typing and clerical work. Today, the Correspondence School supports each year more than 5,000 Saskatchewan school-aged and adult students by offering a wide range of educational programs to meet their individual needs. Curriculum-based courses, evaluation materials, and educational resources are designed and developed by teams of subject-specialist teachers, editors, and desktop publishers. These educational resources provide the basis of the distance teaching and learning program of the Correspondence School. The materials are also available to classroom teachers throughout Saskatchewan as references for planning and delivering their own educational programs.
Changes in technology have increased the flexibility of the school in meeting the needs of Saskatchewan learners with regard to registration, material distribution, and examination processes. For example, a custom-designed automated computer system provides the school with easy access to course, student, examination, financial, and management information. As well, advances in technology have transformed the distance learning process by strengthening opportunities and options for students, and by increasing student and teacher interactivity in distance learning. The school uses a multimodal approach in course design and delivery which includes print, kits, audio CDs, CD-ROMs, and on-line and televised learning resources. Today, many students submit their assignments through e-mail, and all have access to real-time teacher tutoring and student sharing via the Internet. The school will continue to reach out to the citizens of the province, demonstrating its motto: “No distance is too great.”
Cathy Luciuk