Collaboration Opportunity in Education: Blended Learning In Canada's Rural Communities

In this blog post, I will share a collaboration opportunity that I had with a fellow colleague Bharat. Bharat is an elementary school teacher in northern British Columbia, Canada.

From the collaboration opportunity, I learned that northern Canada is currently facing a serious crises in education as it relates to the retention of teachers in rural and remote communities. Additionally, the impact of the high attrition rate in these communities at times have meant a delay in the school year for some schools as well as school closures (Ghimire, 2022). For the province of British Columbia more than fifty school districts in northern communities have been unable to find and keep teachers (Ghimire, 2022).

Bharat highlighted that blended learning is being used as a creative solution to mitigate the detrimental impact of teacher shortages in his current professional context. The model of blended learning that Bharat discussed was the integration of traditional learning with face to face instruction and web based online learning or e-learning.

Bharat explained that the solution is not without its own challenges as home access to the needed technology is not readily available for the online portion of the instruction. Face to face challenges that Bharat mentioned were the extensive travel time for the students and episodic disruption in teacher presence for which partnership with education assistants were used to carry out the instruction for pre-planned lessons. See the attached file below for more insights from Bharat on the application of blended learning in Northern Canada.

Blended learning Bharat.pdf

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