Adult learners in rural areas will have the chance for more face-to-face, community-driven education with the help of a new pilot project from Campus Alberta Central.
The Facilitated Learning Pilot Project, officially launched on Thursday, will be a supplement to post-secondary learning opportunities available at adult learning sites in rural areas across Central Alberta. Examples of such sites include the Stettler Adult Learning Council and Rocky Community Learning Council.
The project will offer two programs at 25 of these sites.
One of these will be an academic upgrading program for those wanting to boost high school courses, offered through collaboration with Bow Valley College in Calgary.
The other will be an educational assistant program, offered in partnership with Red Deer College.
Learners can complete both programs from the comfort of their homes, thanks to eCampus Alberta. However, the programs will also feature the new option of having a facilitator onsite in their community to help learners with exam preparation, questions, encouragement, etc.
Facilitators also help connect learners with their communities, making their distance educations more accessible and less stressful, said Jean Madill, executive director of CAC.
“We are trying to offer programming that will meet the various communities’ needs and build capacity within those small communities,” she said.
“This will impact the community in multiple ways. . . . The learner gains additional skills and knowledge and is then more prepared for other post-secondary programming or the local workforce. But it also builds capacity by training local people within the actual community to facilitate and promote higher education there.”
CAC is a joint educational venture between Olds College and Red Deer College that offers a variety of courses and programs from accredited learning institutions to Central Albertans who have difficulty travelling to a college.
“They have the bus, we put the wheels on it basically,” said Madill.
The pilot project, carried out in partnership with the province’s new Department of Enterprise and Advanced Education, will run for two years, with evaluations at the end of each semester, said Madill.
“We’ve found that the majority of people need a face-to-face interaction, sometimes a bit of hand holding to be successful in programs,” she said.
“A lot of colleges have satellite campuses but we wanted to focus on reaching the communities directly and providing support on a community driven level.”
CAC will begin training the 25 facilitators in June.
rfrancoeur@www.reddeeradvocate.com