This note provides an overview of Canada’s digital education ecosystem, including the digital tools for system and institutional management and digital resources for teaching and learning that are publicly provided to schools and educational stakeholders. The note outlines how public responsibilities for the governance of digital education are divided and examines how Canada supports the equitable and effective access to and use of digital technology and data in education. This includes through practices and policies on procurement, interoperability, data privacy and regulation, and digital competencies. Finally, the note discusses how Canada engages in any initiatives, including with the EdTech sector, to drive innovation and research and development towards an effective digital ecosystem.
Country Digital Education Ecosystems and Governance
3. Canada
Abstract
Key features
In Canada, the provinces and territories have exclusive jurisdiction over education. Provinces and territories provide school districts with digital tools for system and institutional management, and, albeit to a lesser extent, with digital resources for teaching and learning. School districts and schools staff receive guidance and professional training on the use of those tools and resources, but they can acquire and use those from other providers through their own procurement decisions.
Provinces and territories follow their own digital education strategies and set up their own rules and guidelines as regards the governance of data and digital technology in education. Provinces and territories take action to cultivate students and teaching staffs’ digital literacy, incentivise the use of digital tools in schools, and implement policy mechanisms to support equity of access and use of digital technology, interoperability, or research and development.
General policy context
Division of responsibility
In Canada, responsibility for education at all levels is vested in provinces and territories, and each province and territory has developed its own system of education. These different systems of education reflect the unique contexts of their provinces or territories, thereby allowing them to respond to their specific needs, most notably to their historical and cultural realities. While mechanisms to ensure co-ordination and joint activities across provinces and territories are in place, there is no federal ministry of education or national policy in education.1
Provincial and territorial departments and ministries responsible for education define the policy and legislative frameworks to guide management and teaching practices and provide administrative and financial management of their respective education systems. At a more local level, the governance of education lies in the hands of sub-provincial and sub-territorial units, which are called school districts (or school boards). Each school district is responsible for the administration of a group of schools (including the financial aspects), setting school policies, hiring teachers, implementing curriculum, and making decisions about new major expenditures.
Expenditure on public education comes from municipal, provincial, territorial, and private sources. Most public schools receive a per-student amount.2 Private or independent schools also receive funding from government sources in six provinces or territories provided that they meet certain criteria, such as following the provincial or territorial curriculum and employing provincially or territorially certified teachers.3
Public responsibilities for providing access to, supporting the uptake of, and regulating the use of digital technologies in education follow this division of responsibility. Across Canada, the provincial and territorial governments would typically be responsible for providing digital tools for system and institutional management, supported by school districts, while the responsibility for providing digital resources for teaching and learning would be delegated to school districts mainly, occasionally supported by their provincial or territorial governments.
Digital education strategy
As provincial and territorial governments hold exclusive responsibility over education, there is no digital education strategy at the national level. Provinces and territories have developed their own strategies. The province of Québec, for instance, released a comprehensive Digital Action Plan for Education and Higher Education in 2018 to support the development of digital literacy, enhance teaching and learning practices with digital technologies, and create an environment conductive to the development of digital technologies in the education system.4 At the pan-Canadian level, provinces and territories do come together to share best practices and learn from one another’s digital strategies, policies and initiatives; this forum is coordinated through the Council of Ministers of Education, Canada (CMEC).
The COVID-19 crisis has sped up both the implementation and uptake of the measures initiated by the digital education strategies across the country. Since 2020, most provinces and territories have significantly increased their expenditures on schools’ broadband connection or digital devices (in schools as well as for students directly, sometimes on a one-to-one basis). For example, Newfoundland and Labrador invested CAD 20 million (USD 14.8 million) for the purchase of laptops for all teachers, and Chromebooks for all junior and high school students across their primary through secondary education system. Some of the provinces and territories have also invested public funding to improve Wi-Fi connection and Intranet servers in schools, as well as to provide specific devices for students with special needs.
Beyond education policy, several provinces and territories have instituted regulations to ensure a coherent use of digital technologies across different policy areas. For instance, the “User Acceptable Use Policy” from Saskatchewan outlines policies, standards, and guidelines that should be followed when using the Government of Saskatchewan’s digital assets (i.e., computers, software, communication tools, intranet, the Internet, etc.).
The public digital education infrastructure
Across Canada, provinces and territories publicly provide several components of the digital education ecosystems. Schools and teachers can choose to acquire additional elements, either directly from the private sector or from other education stakeholders that release tools and resources for free (e.g., philanthropists, education publishers, universities, teachers, EdTech and other companies). This section reviews two aspects of the public digital infrastructure in education across Canada: digital tools for system and school management, and digital learning resources for teaching and learning.
Digital ecosystem for system and school management
Student information and learning management system
A student information system typically sits as the cornerstone of a digital infrastructure for education management. In Canada, most provinces and territories have one or more student information systems. They tend to be owned and developed by public authorities – rather than purchased from commercial providers, and sometimes managed at the school district level. Most systems store student data tagged with unique and longitudinal identifiers, which can sometimes be linked with students’ teachers (at the district level, not above) or with standardised tests results – as many provinces and territories have their own standardised assessment, administered on a census basis, sometimes digitally as discussed below.
In New Brunswick, for instance, public authorities use a Student Registration System that they have developed and operate for primary and secondary education levels. This system allows schools to access analytics dashboard at the school district level. There is no dashboard at the provincial level yet, even though data are transferred to the provincial databases in real time.
In Manitoba, public authorities use their own student information systems (SISs) that are managed by individual school districts themselves. The province does not have a real time access to school district data. Instead, a snapshot of some data is collected on a regular basis and reflected at the provincial level in a system called Education Information System.
At the Canada-level, however, CMEC and Statistics Canada do not rely on the provinces’ (and territories’) student information system(s) to collect data for the Pan-Canadian Education Indicators Programme; instead, they send questionnaires that all 13 provinces and territories answer in aggregate format, providing no micro data.5
Provinces and territories, as well as some school districts, usually provide schools with learning management systems (LMSs) to help them manage their operations and student information at the school level. Contrary to student information systems, learning management systems are typically licenced from commercial providers by provincial and territorial governments and distributed to schools, although generally there is no obligation to use them. Most learning management systems display analytics dashboards and provide learning repositories. They are sometimes interoperable with the student information system used in the province or territory (or the school district), but more rarely with other data management and learning systems used in schools because privacy and data protection rules would prevent it. For the same reason, learning management systems are typically not the solution used by schools to communicate with parents. A separate customer relationship management system fulfils that function, as is the case in New Brunswick where schools use SchoolConnect. In Canada, the operational decisions regarding the tools used to communicate with parents are often made at the school or school district level.
In Alberta there are eight vendors providing learning and education management services integrating with the Provincial Approach to Student Information (PASI, a student information system) - systems such as PowerSchool, SchoolCloud and Edsembli, which are licensed from commercial providers, and managed at the school district level. PASI was developed by Alberta Education to enable schools, school authorities, ministries, and authorised organisations in Canada and internationally to effectively share student information in real-time for a seamless transition from school to school. In Alberta, the Provincial Approach to Student Information (PASI) is a province-wide student information system that allows schools, school authorities and the ministry to share student information in real-time. Currently, 97.1% of student enrolments in Alberta are tracked in PASI via schools and authorities’ learning management systems. The remaining 2.9% are schools who are using PASI directly, even though the use of PASI is not mandatory.
In New Brunswick, public authorities have procured the license for the Desire 2 Learn’s Brightspace learning management system and mandated schools to use it. Microsoft’s OneNote for classrooms is also procured by public authorities and used as a lighter system for learning management. In Manitoba, public authorities have also procured the licence for Brightspace, but its use is not mandated for schools, and school districts can provide a different solution instead. In other provinces or territories like the Northwest Territories, the choice of a learning management system entirely rests on school districts.
Admission and guidance
In Canada, neither provinces or territories nor school districts provide student admission management systems. Student admission into primary or secondary institutions is managed by schools themselves, and rarely so via a digital solution. The province of New Brunswick is one of the exceptions, as it provides a government-level system of online pre-registration to public schools, which parents and legal guardians can access through their Parent Portal, along with other online services and information about education in the province.6
Similarly, only a few provinces or territories provide study and career guidance platforms for students, although more and more provinces and territories are now developing such platforms. Manitoba has developed its own platform, Manitoba Career Prospects, to help students navigate the education system and find information about their future career.7 The platform also provides guidance for educators to help young people in Manitoba explore career options and appropriate study paths in the province.
Some provinces and territories report providing schools with myBlueprint as the career and study guidance platform for students. In those schools, students have access to myBlueprint’s Education Planner. The planner is tailored to students’ province or territory of residence and provides them with a comprehensive study and career planning programme from lower to post-secondary education, self-assessment tools to understand their skills and aspirations, information about eligibility criteria into selective tracks, and province-specific graduation requirements, and more.
Assessment and exams
Across Canada, all 10 provinces, participate in the Pan-Canadian Assessment Program (PCAP) that assesses students in grade 8 (usually 12-13 years old) in reading, mathematics, and sciences. The PCAP is conducted on a sample basis, with only a proportion of students from some schools participating for each province or territory, so that their results are representative at the provincial or territorial level. Most provinces and territories also conduct standardised assessments on a census basis – meaning that all students from a specific cohorts participate in the evaluation. Some regions are working towards the implementation of digital tools to administer their own provincial/territorial student assessments. For example, the province of New Brunswick uses online tools to conduct provincial assessments and evaluations. In Alberta, since 2023, the provincial achievement tests (a student evaluation) in grades 6 and 9, as well as portions of the grade 12 exams (a high-stake assessment) administered by the province are accessible on a new digital assessment platform instead of using the traditional paper and pencil approach. Alberta is using a phased-in optional implementation approach to introduce the new platform to administer these provincial assessments.
Other digital tools
Provinces and territories resort to several other digital tools to support system and school management, although to varying degrees across Canada. Typically, smaller (or less populated) provinces or territories tend to provide additional tools at government level more often than larger ones would do, as the latter would delegate this responsibility to school districts.
This is notably the case for administrative function systems. In the Northwest Territories, teachers employed in six out of eight school districts are public sector employees, hence there is a central system managed by the territorial Department of Finance to support human resources management and pay, and budget functions. This is also the case in New Brunswick.
Provinces and territories also provide knowledge management systems, both for the francophone and anglophone communities. In New Brunswick, schools have access to digital textbooks via OverDrive, for instance; but in other provinces and territories, this type of content repository is directly integrated to the learning management system used across the school districts.
Digital ecosystem for teaching and learning
Similarly to the digital ecosystem for system and school management, Canadian provinces and territories – rather than the federal government – provide digital resources for teaching and learning, which schools, teachers and students are generally free to use.
Open-access resources
Albeit provided by specific provinces or territories, a share of the digital teaching and learning resources is openly available to anyone in Canada. TV education is an example. Provinces and territories provide video contents for teaching and learning that were typically aired on TV during the COVID-19 school closures and that are now curated online. For instance, Québec has Télé Québec’s Passe Partout; other, less populated provinces such as Saskatchewan also have their own educational TV programmes. All contents are mapped to provincial or territorial curricula, but any Canadian can access them.
Some provinces and territories also launched educational platforms for distance learning during the COVID-19 crisis. Some of those platforms are at least partially accessible in an open-access mode. For instance, Québec’s L’École Ouverte (“Open School”) platform opened in March 2020 to enable anyone to access open educational resources (OER).8 Again, although this bank of resources is explicitly mapped to Québec’s curricula from pre-primary to secondary education (including VET), and thus addressed to students studying at those levels, in practice anyone can consult those resources. Users have also access to digital resources for continuous adult learning, as well as pedagogical content to support parents and teachers. In Alberta, students, parents and teachers have access to New.LearnAlberta.ca, a bilingual platform that houses Alberta’s new curriculum, learning and teaching resources, and other tools and information that support the implementation of curriculum.
Educational platforms and closed-access resources
In parallel to open-access digital resources, most provinces and territories also provide teachers and students formally enrolled in their education system with closed-access resources. For instance, on the same Québec’s L’École Ouverte platform mentioned above, users with login credentials (provided by their schools) have access to a dedicated Ma Classe (“My Classroom”) space.9 On Ma Classe, students can find the right set of both static and interactive resources to foster and consolidate their learning; teachers can retrieve the peer-reviewed digital teaching resources in Québec or create their own resources, using their individual space as a workshop; and parents can find reference tools to provide their children with appropriate support. The platform features a set of assistive tools for accessibility, and some of the curated resources are tailored for students with special needs. The province of Saskatchewan has a similar educational platform, EDonline, whose access is permitted through a login credential given to all teachers and students in the province.10
Beyond what is developed and provided at the provincial or territorial level, teachers and students in Canada generally have access to sets of more specific digital teaching and learning resources that are directly procured by their school districts from commercial vendors. Virtually every school also offers access to a virtual classroom environment (such as Google Classroom or Microsoft Teams), and to a platform for teacher development. However, these are procurement choices that are generally made at the school district level or lower.
Access, use and governance of digital technologies and data in education
Ensuring access and supporting use
Equity of access
Across Canada, provinces and territories have issued rules and guidelines to ensure equitable access to digital tools and resources. Some equity mechanisms target schools and school districts, from rural or lower socio-economic areas for instance; while others are targeted directly to students from low socio-economic background and rural areas, or with special education needs. For instance, Québec’s Digital Action Plan aims at recognising the diversity of people and needs in education and making sure all profiles can benefit from the Plan’s measures. In particular, the Québec’s ministry of education plans to increase its support on digital procurements wherever it can reduce digital gaps among teachers, students, and parents. Together with the deployment and strengthening of an enabling infrastructure for digital education, this represents the largest spending item in the Digital Action Plan’s investment framework.11
In addition, several equity mechanisms were put in place in response to school closures during the COVID-‑19 crisis. British Columbia, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, the Northwest Territories, and Newfoundland and Labrador provided devices to students with limited or no technology at home.12 On the front of the digital divide, the Government of Canada implemented a federal strategy, “High Speed Access for All: Canada’s Connectivity Strategy”, that aims to connect all Canadians with access to the internet at higher speeds. The strategy is funded by a new CAD 1.7 billion (USD 1.26 billion) Universal Broadband Fund and focuses on rural and indigenous communities with the objective of having 100% of Canadians connected by 2030.13
However, having equitable access to hardware infrastructure does not necessarily lead to equality in the use of software. Sections below describe what efforts Canadian provinces and territories deploy to measure and bridge the gap between the availability and uptake of digital tools and resources.
Supporting the use of digital tools and resources
Canadian provinces and territories use direct and indirect incentives to support the access to and use of digital tools and resources at the system, school district, school, and classroom levels.
First, provinces and territories may mandate the use of some of the tools that they directly provide or procure, for instance through binding regulation, typically when it concerns tools for system and school management that require full uptake to function at their best. Some provinces and territories may require the use of prescribed software, such as the student information system, to facilitate follow-up on students’ educational progression.
Second, while schools and teachers have autonomy to procure additional digital tools and resources at their discretion, provinces and territories support them in the process in various ways. Most provincial and territorial governments directly procure digital tools and resources on behalf of schools using the leverage of larger orders to negotiate lower prices and more favourable contractual conditions with suppliers. Among them, some provinces and territories have mandated regional organisations to handle digital procurements in education, such as Service New Brunswick, Saskatchewan’s Electronics Partnership programme, or Focused Education Resources in British Columbia.14 Typically, provinces and territories provide non-earmarked subsidies (e.g. operational budget) to school districts, but in a few cases those subsidies are earmarked for digital technology. Some provinces and territories also pre-authorise lists of digital resources that school districts can acquire with their own budget, while others impose criteria on the purchase of such resources with regard to equity of access, interoperability, or security. For example, in Alberta, the ministry uses the standard Government of Alberta procurement policies and has requests for qualifications specifically for the procurement of teaching and learning resources, in line with the provincial curriculum. In addition to formal procurement and contracts, the use of grants, permission to use the province’s or school districts’ standing offers (i.e. offers from potential suppliers), and internally developed resources are being leveraged to provide a comprehensive set of resources that school authorities may choose to use.
In Québec, it is the responsibility of school boards and school service centres to purchase digital equipment (e.g., computers) and software (e.g., subscriptions to digital educational resources). Administrators are invited to use the Government Procurement Centre (Centre d’acquisitions gouvernementales – CAG) to make these purchases. The CAG proposes items that have been checked for their security, for example in terms of web hosting and pedagogical qualities. Purchases below a certain financial threshold can be made locally, without the engagement of CAG. In other cases, some purchases are made by the Québec Ministry of Education for the entire public network, such as the audio-visual kits distributed during the pandemic or the national licenses for access to digital educational resource platforms (e.g., Radio-Canada’s Curio).
Finally, provinces and territories provide central and local guidance on the use of the digital tools they provide. For instance, Manitoba’s MERLIN, a special operating agency set up within the Department of Central Services, is responsible for facilitating and coordinating the delivery of technology services to the education community across the province.15 Provinces and territories also offer professional learning opportunities for administrative (government and school) staff to improve their use of data and digital management tools, and for teachers to improve their use of digital resources in their teaching. Here again, the COVID-19 pandemic has boosted the provision of professional learning for teachers in provinces and territories like Québec and Yukon.16
Cultivating the digital literacy of education stakeholders
Canadian provinces and territories aim to engage all education actors in the digital transformation of their education systems and developing teachers’ digital literacy is one way to achieve this.
While setting rules and guidelines on digital competences and qualifications of teachers is a provincial and territorial responsibility, only a few provinces and territories have done so. Usually, teachers have the opportunity to develop their pedagogical competencies of the use of digital technologies through dedicated in-service professional development, on a case-by-case basis. Additionally, initial teacher education programmes offered by accredited institutions may offer courses on the use of digital technologies in teaching.
In Alberta, for instance, teachers and school leaders are held to professional practice standards.17 In particular, the Teaching Quality Standard describes the professional competencies that teachers must demonstrate when working directly with students. The standard “Demonstrating a Professional Body of Knowledge” explicitly references indicators related to digital technology that includes incorporating digital technology and resources to build student capacity for acquiring, applying, and creating new knowledge; for communicating and collaborating with others; for critical thinking; and for accessing, interpreting and evaluating information from diverse sources.18
Another lever through which provinces and territories foster students’ and – indirectly – teachers’ digital literacy is reforms of their curricula. Across Canadian provinces and territories, most curricula now include at least some form of guidelines around the use of digital technology in class and integrate the development of student skills to use and understand digital technology as a learning outcome. For instance, British Columbia’s curriculum includes a course that mentions competencies such as being able to use familiar tools and technologies to complete a task, to identify the impacts and consequences of the technology they use, and to know the history of technology and how to safely use it.
Digital literacy of students could also be the object of collaboration between provinces and territories. In the 2000s, the province of New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Newfoundland and Labrador, and Prince Edward Island developed the Foundation for the Atlantic Canada Technology Education Curriculum, a foundational document outlining the common approach and vision for technology education in Atlantic Canada.19 In Québec, the 2019 Digital Competency Framework promotes the development of digital competence throughout the educational community so that people can be autonomous and critical in their use of digital technology. To facilitate the implementation of the framework, a pedagogical guide and a digital competency development continuum have been developed. 20
Governance of data and digital technology in education
At the federal level, Canada has two laws that define the largest part of the country’s regulation around the protection of data and privacy, in education as well as in other public and private sectors: the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act (FIPPA), and the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA). FIPPA protects personal information by setting guidelines for use and guarantees individuals the right to access their own information held by public bodies, such as schools; PIPEDA ensures that individual consent be acquired for personal information to be collected, used, or disclosed. As most other matters related to education in Canada, it then depends on commissioners from provinces and territories to enact further rules or guidelines about the protection of personal data and privacy that are specific to education. Manitoba’s Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act and New Brunswick’s Right to Information and Protection of Privacy Act, for instance, set out rules that are specific to education in those provinces. In particular, New Brunswick has shared guidelines as regards what commercial vendors can and cannot do with the data collected within education settings, that school districts should verify prior to negotiating procurement contracts.
Beyond rules on data protection, provinces and territories regulate the use and management of education data. Québec has set up rules about the accountability for digital technologies in education, for instance defining responsibility in case of errors due to technology. In Québec, school boards are responsible for ensuring the security of information and the protection of personal information for their employees and students. The Québec Ministry of Education supports these practices through its Cyber Defense Operations Center (“Centre opérationnel de cyberdéfense”), which collaborates with its counterparts in other ministries and agencies, which are connected by the Québec Ministry of Cybersecurity and Digital Technology.
Ministries or departments of education in each province and territory also determine their own policies on the use of personal digital devices in schools. Across Canada, most schools encourage a bring-your-own-device (BYOD) policy in some way for learning purposes. In Prince Edward Island, a minister’s directive has allowed students to use their own mobile devices in classrooms for educational purposes as long as they agree to abide by learning expectations and sign a responsible use agreement.21 On the contrary, Alberta and British Columbia have no ban on the use of mobile phones in primary and secondary classrooms.22 However, schools and school districts can set their own policies.
Only a few provinces and territories have set up guidelines to promote interoperability between their different digital tools. Such guidelines may encourage the use of open standards on educational technologies and on educational data, as well as of specific technical standards, or the use of tools certified by standard agencies. In Northwest Territories, the government promotes interoperability of data as part of the procurement process. In Québec, the ministry of education has set up the Digital Intelligence Task Force (“Chantier d’intelligence numérique”) to address the challenges of harmonising student data across the public network. This work aims to provide easier access to reliable and relevant data to support education stakeholders in their decision-making, as well as to reduce the administrative burden through the sharing of a central information exchange platform between the education network and the Québec Ministry of Education. Moreover, to support the integration of artificial intelligence into the education network, the Québec Ministry of Education has set up a centre of expertise in artificial intelligence, whose objectives include defining a common AI vision for the network and providing expert support to make this vision a reality.23
Supporting innovation and research and development (R‑D) in digital education
Developing a national education technology ecosystem presents challenges both to developing appropriate local tools and to incentivising relevant innovation by external stakeholders. Providing incentives, supporting R-D, and funding education technology start-ups are part of the typical innovation portfolio countries could consider. In Canada, such efforts are under provincial and territorial responsibility.
Canadian provinces and territories are trying to support the use of education data for research. In New Brunswick, for instance, educational authorities aim to reconcile data privacy legislation with the linkage of educational datasets as a way to facilitate equitable access to and use of educational data for research and development. However, provincial and territorial governments rarely interfere in academic research. Recent exceptions arose with the COVID-19 pandemic when governments set up research programmes with a focus on the impact of the crisis on learning and well-being. And in certain provinces or territories, such as Québec, provincial authorities have commissioned academic papers on the use of digital technologies to support teaching and improve school management functions.
Instead of conducting their own R‑D on digital tools, several Canadian provinces and territories have established relationships with other education stakeholders, including from the private sector, to support digital innovation in education. Some provinces and territories provide monetary incentives for the development of teaching and learning resources by organisations as well as by teachers and school staff; as well as non-monetary incentives (such as organising conferences or networking forums) to support collaboration between EdTech companies and educational institutions. For example, in Québec, the Association des Enterprises pour le développement des technologies éducatives au Québec (Edteq) is a central actor in the provincial educational technology landscape and internationally. The aim of the Association is to promote the work of its members and accelerate the digital transformation of education in the province.
In the future, Canadian provinces and territories envision to strengthen their provision (or their support to the provision) of various aspects of their digital infrastructure for education, depending on their current infrastructure. In Manitoba, work is underway to explore the creation of system that will consolidate school districts’ information systems and the provincial department’s system (EIS) into one province-wide student information system; while in New Brunswick, priority efforts will be made towards the implementation of digital exams and digital credentials. More broadly speaking, the digitalisation of different types of assessment is a prevalent topic of reflection across Canada. Similarly, most provinces and territories will continue to develop and improve their provision of online educational platforms and resources for teaching and learning.
Notes
← 1. In Canada, the federal, provincial, and territorial governments have a constitutional responsibility for the education of First Nations, Métis, and Inuit students. While the Government of Canada has a responsibility for education of students who attend schools on First Nations reserves, provincial and territorial public education systems provide education to First Nations, Métis, and Inuit students who attend schools off-reserve.
← 2. A fixed amount of money for each student enrolled in the school. In secondary school, it may be associated with number of credit hours in which the student is enrolled. A fixed amount of money for each student enrolled in the school. In secondary school, it may be associate with number of credit hours in which the student is enrolled. In Alberta, funding provided is not allocated for specific students or schools. Rather, the Weighted Moving Average (WMA) Full Time Equivalent (FTE) enrolment is used to allocate funding for the Early Childhood Services (ECS)-Grade 12 instructional activities of the entire school jurisdiction.
← 3. Those six jurisdictions: Alberta, British Columbia, Manitoba, Québec, Saskatchewan, and the Northwest Territories.
← 4. Québec’s Digital Action Plan: http://www.education.gouv.qc.ca/en/current-initiatives/digital-action-plan/digital-action-plan/
← 5. Report of the Pan-Canadian Education Indicators Programme: https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/en/catalogue/81-582-X
← 6. New Brunswick’s Student admission management system: https://www.nbed.nb.ca/parentportal/en/PreReg/Home/Index/5/?district=; Parent Portal: https://www.nbed.nb.ca/parentportal/en/
← 7. Manitoba Career Prospects: https://manitobacareerprospects.ca/request-a-speaker.asp
← 8. Québec’s Open School platform: https://ecoleouverte.ca/
← 9. Québec’s Open School’s My Classroom: https://ecoleouverte.ca/se-connecter
← 10. Saskatchewan’s EDonline platform: https://www.edonline.sk.ca/webapps/blackboard/content/listContent.jsp?course_id=_3344_1&content_id=_132842_1&mode=reset
← 11. Québec’s Plan d’Action Numérique: http://www.education.gouv.qc.ca/fileadmin/site_web/documents/ministere/PAN_Plan_action_VF.pdf
← 12. Provision of devices during the COVID-19 crisis: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/343816812_Documenting_Triage_Detailing_the_Response_of_Provinces_and_Territories_to_Emergency_Remote_Teaching
← 13. Canada’s Connectivity Strategy: https://ised-isde.canada.ca/site/high-speed-internet-canada/en/canadas-connectivity-strategy; Universal Broadband Fund: https://ised-isde.canada.ca/site/high-speed-internet-canada/en/universal-broadband-fund; Previous federal plans on universal broadband access include the Connect to Innovate Program, the Rural and Northern Stream of the Investing in Canada Infrastructure Program, the Accelerated Investment Incentive, and connectivity projects from the Canada Infrastructure Bank and the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC).
← 14. British Columbia’s Focused Education Resources: https://focusedresources.ca/en
← 15. Manitoba’s MERLIN: https://www.merlin.mb.ca/
← 16. Professional learning opportunities for teachers as result of the pandemic: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/343816812_Documenting_Triage_Detailing_the_Response_of_Provinces_and_Territories_to_Emergency_Remote_Teaching
← 17. Alberta’s professional practice standards: https://www.alberta.ca/professional-practice-standards.aspx
← 18. UNESCO Education Profile - Technology in Canada: https://education-profiles.org/europe-and-northern-america/canada/~technology#2.3
← 19. Foundation for the Atlantic Canada Technology Education Curriculum: https://www.gov.nl.ca/education/files/k12_curriculum_documents_teched_te_found_nf-lab_full.pdf
← 20. Québec’s Digital Competency Framework, pedagogical guide and development continuum: http://www.education.gouv.qc.ca/en/references/tx-solrtyperecherchepublicationtx-solrpublicationnouveaute/results/detail/article/digital-competency-framework-1/?a=a&cHash=2f4087f0a706e2c970404d73cee9719d
← 21. Rules on students’ own device in schools: Ontario: https://www.ontario.ca/page/cellphones-and-other-personal-mobile-devices-schools#:~:text=Personal%20mobile%20devices%20are%20allowed,for%20health%20and%20medical%20purposes; Prince Edward’s Island: https://www.princeedwardisland.ca/sites/default/files/publications/min_directive_2021_03_responsible_use_agreement_cit_21-22_0.pdf
← 22. FIPPA: https://web2.gov.mb.ca/laws/statutes/ccsm/f175e.php; PIPEDA: https://www.priv.gc.ca/en/privacy-topics/privacy-laws-in-canada/the-personal-information-protection-and-electronic-documents-act-pipeda/pipeda_brief/
← 23. The centre hosts experts from the Institut québécois d'intelligence artificielle (Mila), the Institut de valorisation des données (IVADO), the Observatoire international sur les impacts sociétaux de l'intelligence artificielle et du numérique (OBVIA), the Centre de transfert pour la réussite éducative du Québec (CTREQ) and GRICS.