Lessons from the US, Australia and British Columbia

There can be little doubt that Ontario is the Canadian leader when it comes to online learning.

Ontario’s public colleges and universities support more than half a million student registrations annually in their online learning courses.

Ontarians have access to more than 20,000 online courses and over 1,000 online programs, with every single one of the province’s colleges and universities offering some form of online learning.

And those numbers are growing.

However, as with any endeavour, there is always more to learn and Ontario can benefit from the experiences of other jurisdictions.

When searching for specific models of how online learning in Ontario could move to the next level, we tend to look to three important examples:

• Western Governors University

• Open Universities Australia

• BCcampus

Here we seek to find out what the strengths and weaknesses are of each, and what Ontario can learn from them about how we can use online learning to make our post-secondary system more accessible to students, and to do so in an more effective and efficient way.