Distance education is one of those topics that seems to come into vogue every few years, usually in conjunction with some new technology that promises to revolutionize the delivery of information to inquisitive minds. It happened with radio, television, videotape, videoconferencing, and, most recently, with the World Wide Web.

Despite some fanciful predictions, none of these breakthroughs led to the abolishment of face-to-face classrooms. Still, over time, distance education has become more credible and its planners have steadily refined their techniques. Between the peaks of popular interest, universities and colleges continue to develop course-ware materials and design curricula for remote learning. Every major B.C. institution now offers at least some courses on-line, and several are actively pursuing that market.

In fact, there are so many on-line offerings these days that the time has come to put some order into the system. That's the mandate of BCcampus ( www.bccampus.ca/ ), which aims to provide a gateway to all of the distanceeducation courses and programs offered by 27 postsecondary institutions in B.C., from UBC and SFU to the Justice Institute of British Columbia and the Nicola Valley Institute of Technology.

According to BCcampus executive director David Porter, interviewed at his office in BCIT's downtown location, a conceptual change is taking place. "Over the past number of years, pretty much every university and college on the planet has developed the capability to offer on-line and distance learning. The way it works now, a student has to go to each institution and individually monitor, manage, and navigate their Web sites. Students want it to be smooth and seamless. It's not, at the moment. There are a number of hurdles to getting access, often to do with admission procedures, registration, and transfer of credits. Our hope is to automate as many of those services as possible and localize them at one site."

Porter's goal is to establish the schooling equivalent of the Expedia.ca travel-booking site, a single portal that consolidates offerings from several institutions. Students can then conveniently assemble an individualized package. "With Expedia I can book with an airline, a hotel, and a rental-car company--and choose from a whole bunch of different ones--and it all works the same. Nobody's really doing that effectively [in education]. We [BCcampus] are not an educational institution. We don't have faculty or courses. We're a service structure to allow students to get access, working on building institutional connectors so that your transfer credit moves seamlessly behind the scenes and your money is passed to the right place."

The provincial government has committed financially to BCcampus to establish those connections between schools. Currently, a small group of institutions is developing the necessary software tools, with a project deadline of spring 2005. At that point the "connectivity toolkit" will be ready to integrate the rest of the participants, so Porter expects it will be another year or two before BCcampus becomes a comprehensive access point.

Smoothing out the registration process is only part of BCcampus's aims. It also receives funding to create innovative on-line resources for students, such as Canada's first Web-controlled telescope at Tatla Lake, southeast of Bella Coola, which students in North Island College's Introduction to Deep Space Astronomy course use to complete their assignments from wherever they are. Another example comes from Interactive Dental Anatomy, a new course created by UBC's faculty of dentistry that uses three-dimensional models of real teeth.

Collaborative projects such as these point to a new reality in distance learning: you can now do things that were never possible before. Biology and chemistry labs can be re-created virtually, and complete libraries of information can be visited from almost anywhere with Internet access.

In order to promote the development of course materials that can also be used by other institutions, BCcampus has adapted Creative Commons, a licensing model for academic work developed at Stanford University. "Academics have very strong feelings about their intellectual property. Essentially, anything we've funded for collaborative course-ware must be reusable in British Columbia--you have to license your colleagues to use it--but beyond B.C., the rights vest with you if you want to commercialize it outside the province or write a book. The other stipulation is that your colleagues who use it in B.C. have to contribute back any derivative work they've built. Good stuff depends on what went before. Make it available, but be clear about who owns the rights."

And while distance education has often been defined by what it can't provide (though that list is shrinking), it's worth noting that it can give students a much greater opportunity to ask questions and discuss material than is usually provided in a large classroom. Students can enjoy a certain anonymity and self-confidence unavailable when they're being stared at in a 300-person lecture theatre. This can lead to more collaborative learning than the traditional one-direction information flow.

"Education is a social experience as much as it is a transfer of knowledge," says Porter. "People want to know what others know, and contribute back. The community-based conversation that a lot of on-line courses offer is such that students are engaged and communicate more than they might do. I'm not sure we can say qualitatively that one method is better than the other. They're different. People don't necessarily consider distance courses as the way they're going to complete their whole program. It may just be one facet.

"A steady diet of any particular modality for learning is probably going to get a little stale, and people are looking for some variety. And a lot of people are looking for these kind of experiences on-line for reasons other than just what the course content is. What they're looking for is convenience and a different kind of spin on the academic experience. A lot of them are young professionals or they're new students who have experience with the Net and are already into that kind of community conversation mode."

Porter remarks that pretty much every community in B.C. has reasonable Internet access and many are building wireless infrastructure, increasing opportunities for remote learners and mobile workers. "We're starting to get a ubiquitous network, where it's not just recreational or work stuff you're doing on-line. All the factors have begun to come together: the network, a lot of interest from the institutions, and more faculty are convinced they can give a quality experience to students on-line. It may be a slightly different experience than the classroom-based model, but for a number of subject disciplines it's an excellent way to go."

Once BCcampus is fully implemented, Porter would like to see part of the site opened up to user contributions by publishing some of the specifications it's built on, so that students can write their own site-compatible software tools. "If they want to set up a used-book or housing network, we'd love that. The power of the tools available to students is based on how much they can contribute to shaping their experience. Why shouldn't we give them that opportunity?"