Distance education gains new life with electronic mail

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With the use of computers in Native schools and communities, many Native children and adults are using the Internet to receive an education.

On a chilly Tuesday morning, a Lakota woman sends her two children off to school. It's a busy day for her; she is working on her masters degree thesis in business administration. The is attending a university over 2,000 kilometres away via e-mail and discussion groups on the Internet.

No, she does not compute off the reserve to this university. In fact, she has never been to the University of Phoenix. Her dream is to live with her people and build a successful business.

On a Navajo Nation in southwest United States, a Grade 8 social studies class has just finished sending their e-mail about aspects of their language, customs, traditions, and current events to a Metis settlement school in northern Alberta. Both Native peoples are swapping ideas and learning from one another via the Internet.

These Native peoples are examples of using distance education. This is not such a new term. If we look back, less than 30 years ago some people in North America used distance education to finish high school courses and receive diplomas.

This distance education was called correspondence studies. The person would read chapters, do the questions or writing assignments, and after so many chapters, would mail chapter assignments to the central correspondence officer.

The problem with this type of education was that the students were separated from the educator. Communication between both parties was very slow in response. If a student asked a question about an assignment, getting a reply from an educator would be weeks later.

One of the major improvements in distance education is that students are not isolated form the educator any more. With 4-mail, students are able to keep in touch with their instructors quickly and efficiently because Internet e-mail usually takes just minutes to send and/or receive anywhere in North America.

As more Native communications link to the Internet, Native schools are using three major e-mail networks on the Internet for distance education.

They are NativeNet which is based in Boston, the Canadian SchoolNet, main office being in Ottawa, and EducationNet - ednet, from Vancouver, British Columbia.

Basically, the NativeNet education group works as an electronic discussions group for Native educators and Native students across North America and also for other Indigenous peoples around the world.

The Canadian SchoolNet works mainly like an e-mail discussion group, with education news specifically for Canadian schools linked to the Internet. The education discussion group that has the highest population is ednet. In this group students form kindergarten to Grade 12, post-secondary, teachers and university professors discuss all different aspects of distance education.

From these electronic discussion groups Native educators ask other educators for an interested school-to-school distance education project. In fact, in some instances, there are more than 50 different schools throughout the world that link together via e-mail on a class project.

Indeed, schools and universities are slowly becoming very important aspects in Native communities throughout North America, thanks to electronics and what are becoming more common in reserves and settlements - computers and modems.