Like organizations across Europe and North America, successive governments in Ontario, Canada, have pointed to online learning as a means of “modernizing” and transforming its public education systems (Roumell & Salajan, 2016, p. 381; Williamson, 2021). The province’s online learning strategy was launched in 2006. It was one many reforms introduced to elevate the economic and vocational purposes of education to help ensure Ontario and its residents could successfully compete in the global marketplace and digital economy. Many of these policies promote values and practices of the private sector and shift responsibility for funding, delivering, and governing education to private actors (Hedges et al., 2020). These policies often rationalize this shift by deferring to international education discourse on 21^st century learning, within which countries are positioned to compete.

Our paper presents findings from research that asked: what has been the trajectory of e-learning policy in Ontario, Canada?

Theoretical Framework: Our study is grounded in (critical) policy sociology, which emphasizes reflexivity, historical study, and policy actors, rather than decontextualized documentation that limits focus on the formal mechanisms of government (Ozga, 1987, 2021). What makes policy sociology critical is its emergence “within and against the dominant political culture,” and its attention to “underlying assumptions that shaped how a ‘problem’ was conceptualised and how solutions’ were selected (and who did the defining and selection)” (Ozga, 2021, p. 294).  

We view policy processes are neither linear nor complete. They are sites of struggle over in which meaning is encoded and decoded in complex ways and are shaped by policy actors’ “history, experiences, resources, and context” (Ball, 1993, p. 11). As texts, policies are “textual interventions into practice,”, however, their meanings are contested rather than fixed and delivered, serving as problems posed to subjects “that must be solved in context” (Ball, 1993, p.12). Policy texts are also (and constituted by) discourse: “Discourses are about what can be said, and thought, but also about who can speak, when, where and with what authority. Discourses embody the meaning and use of propositions and words. Thus, certain possibilities for thought are constructed.” (14) Practice is part of a definition of policy, though this paper focuses on textual representation of policy and its constitution of/by discourse.  

We bring our critical orientation and understanding of policy as text and discourse to our study of the policy trajectory of online learning in Ontario. Policy trajectory is an approach that, following Trevor Gale (2001), draws on the heritage of policy historiography (among others) to ask:   

(1) what were the ‘public issues’ and ‘private troubles’ within a particular policy domain during some previous period and how were they addressed?; (2) what are they now?; and (3) what is the nature of the change from the first to the second? Critical policy historiography adds to these a further two: (4) what are the complexities in these coherent accounts of policy?; and (5) what do these reveal about who is advantaged and who is disadvantaged by these arrangements? (pp. 385–386)  

Gale (2001) explains that the term historiography refers to temporary hegemonic policy settlements that can contain crises or interact with other settlements defining policy production. He introduces the dimension of ‘policy as ideology’ to describe the interdiscursive politics in which dominant discourses are sustained as settlements that are “asymmetrical, temporary and context-dependent” (p. 401). Our paper, in examining three historically specific phases of online education policy settlement, explains the issues and troubles of these periods in Ontario with emphasis on those impacted by this change.

Data for our study include government texts and media reports. Government texts include formal policy documents, service agreements, legislative documents, and commissioned reports. In total, we reviewed approximately two dozen government texts from 2006-2022 including: E-Learning Ontario Policy Document (Ontario, 2006); Policy/Program Memorandums 164: Requirements for Remote Learning (Ontario, 2021) and167: Online Learning Graduation Requirement Ontario, 2022); the provincial e-Learning Strategy User Agreement, (Ontario 2013) the provincial backgrounder for “modernizing learning” (Ontario, 2019); and the draft proposal “Expanding Online Access to Online and Remote Learning,” (CBC News, 2021). In total, we reviewed approximately two dozen texts from 2006-2022. Further, we examined news media coverage because of its power to influence “knowledge, beliefs, social relations, social identities” (Fairclough, 1995, p. 2). Media language is an important element within research on social change as it works discursively to represent the world and constructs social identities, and social relations (Fairclough, 1995, p. 12). Specifically, we searched two papers with the greatest national circulation: Globe and Mail and Toronto Star alongside news media coverage from nationally funded broadcaster, the Canadian Broadcast Association (CBC). We used newspaper databases to conduct our search: Canadian Major Dailies, Gale OneFile CPI.Q, ProQuest Globe and CBC Search Engine. Search terms were e-learning or online learning or online education and Ontario, limited to full text, excluding advertising and postsecondary. We examined approximately 40 media reports. We analyzed the data using critical discourse analysis (CDA). Discourse analysis, as Fairclough (2003) explains, involves textual analysis of specific documents but also an order of discourse that includes a hegemony of meaning-making contrasted against marginal, oppositional, or alternative orders. Critical discourse analysis (CDA) “attends simultaneously to linguistic elements in spoken or written texts, such as grammar, vocabulary, and cohesion, and to the broader socio-cultural and political context that shapes the formation of texts and how people think, feel, and act in response to them.” (Bartlett & Vavrus, 2016, p. 83) “Critical” in discourse analysis attends to economic, social, and cultural change include processes that take place outside of discourse (Chouliaraki, 1999, p. 5) which is to say that it acknowledges reality co-constituted by materiality and representation or meaning-making. Our paper primarily examines orders of discourse, with an emphasis on the broader socio-cultural and political context of online education policies.

We discuss three phases of Ontario’s e-learning policy trajectory. The first phase began in 2006 with the E-Learning Ontario policy (Ontario, 2006), ostensibly designed to deliver an expanded range of single credit asynchronous courses to secondary students in rural and remote communities. This strategy was supported by the software company Desire2Learn, which received millions of dollars from the provincial government. In response, school boards began offering asynchronous single credit courses. Phase two began in 2019 when Ontario government’s declared it was bringing “Learning Into The Digital Age” (Ontario, 2019) by announcing an e-learning high school graduation requirement. The rationale for this announcement depends on a geographical imagination of internationalism within which success is defined relative to a competitive global economy. Debate on this policy receded with the emergence of the Covid-19 pandemic. In March 2020, the beginning of a temporary third phase, schooling transitioned to an emergency model of primarily virtual education. Initially, the government specified the number of hours per week students should be learning at home with teacher support, and later introduced expectations of daily synchronous teacher-led instruction. In June 2020, Ontario’s government instructed school boards to provide families with the choice whether to return to in-person schooling or remain learning virtually in September. In September 2022, most students returned to in-person learning. We view this as the end of phase three and a return to phase two wherein high school students must complete two e-learning credits to graduate. However, a document leaked by a school trustee in 2021 suggests Ontario may be on new trajectory. This document showed the government is exploring ways a crown-owned company, TVOntario, can offer e-learning courses internationally. We conclude with an analysis of these projections within the context of current internationalization strategies in and outside Ontario, which extends e-learning to foreign markets.

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