Each week, Eye on the Arctic features stories and newsmakers from Canada’s northern regions
Providing quality education to students in remote Arctic communities is a problem not only in Canada but around the circumpolar world.
Distances are great, courses are limited and in some cases, students have to leave their families and home communities in order to attend high school in larger centres.
But in the Beaufort Delta region of Canada’s western Arctic, the education council is looking to address this with a videoconferencing pilot project.
The project hooks up classrooms in remote Arctic communities like Tuktoyaktuk, with schools in Inuvik, a town of approximately 3500 people, in Canada’s Northwest Territories.
“It’s really difficult when you have some of these small schools that may only have one or two high school teachers to provide the same type of programming to their students as you would in some of our larger centres,” says Chris Gilmour, the IT Teacher Consultant with the Beaufort Delta Education Council.
“Given our geography and where we live (the videoconferencing project) is big news and it’s a big, big step forward for education in our district.”
To find out more about the program and the challenges facing students in Canada’s North, Eye on the Arctic’s Eilís Quinn reached Chris Gilmour in Inuvik, Canada this week.
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