New education solution comes to Strathmore, Wheatland County

Shannon LeClair 

Times Reporter

 

Bow Valley College, BVC, is bringing a new academic upgrading program to Strathmore starting this fall with the Real Time Online courses. 

“The Real Time courses offer students access to more of a traditional teaching environment but through technology,” said Debbie Scott, BVC Real Time Online Instructor.

“So they log into a computer and they attend class at exactly the same time as other students attend class. They can communicate with other students, and they can communicate with the teacher all through the technology.”   

The idea is to basically provide opportunities for people to upgrade their high school whether they didn’t finish or didn’t like their marks, said Scott. She said offering the course this way breaks through a lot of the isolation some home study students used to experience.  

During the daytime they have a variety of courses available and in the evening they have the Grade 12 level available. If a student wants to just participate in a class they could sign up for one or two classes. Three classes are considered a full course load, which Scott said would be a lot of time on a computer in a day. She said BVC wouldn’t stop students from doing three courses in a day, but recommends building up to that point. 

Everything for the course is sent out through the Internet so students can download the necessary work directly, and then can email or fax their work back. 

“Another real advantage to these real time courses is, everything is recorded,” said Scott.

“So both what they see on the computer, as well as the audio. If they want to go back and go through the material again later they can re-listen to the whole class and have both audio and visual parts of it all repeated. They can slow it down or speed it up, however they feel like.”

Scott said she thinks a lot of time students would like to study from their home and the advantage of the Real Time Online courses is the students are able to do that while still having access to a real class and a real teacher. 

She said a lot of students really enjoy having the recording. Scott said a lot of students who are upgrading have had difficulty in school, or English is not their first language and so to be able to participate in the class and then go back later is a huge benefit. 

There are fall and springs courses available, the semesters are four months long. For more information or to register for Real Time Online courses, visit www.bowvalleycollege.ca/realtime or call Yvonne Prusak, BVC’s Student Liaison Officer at 403-410-1545.