CANARIE Inc. was awarded $6.6 million in funding from Industry Canada earlier this week that it will distribute to eight public and private organizations across Ottawa.
CANARIE is a not-for-profit corporation that is supported by the Federal Government. Its goal is to foster Canada’s Internet development via its CA*net 4 project – a high-speed optical network that connects the provincial research networks of universities, research centres and government research labs across Canada.
Level Platforms Inc., Global IQX Inc., NovaForum Inc., TrueContext Inc., The University of Ottawa, The Canadian School Boards Association, The Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons and Intermap Technologies Corp. all received funding for their CANARIE application projects under the corporation’s E-Business and E-Learning Programs. These initiatives address the challenges business and learning communities face when using advanced information networks, according to CANARIE.
Industry Minister Allan Rock said the partnership with CANARIE “has delivered advanced broadband networks and applications that have stimulated economic growth, increased Canada’s international competitiveness and brought many benefits to Canadians.”
CANARIE awarded the University of Ottawa $505,000 and it received a total of $1.2 million – the remainder from 14 other partners – for its new e-Learning and e-Kit program, expected to commence this fall. It is designed to build faculty development through e-learning.
The e-Learning aspect of the program involves a Web site, www.facultydevelopment.ca, which is a professional development site for university professors. It will provide faculty members with an opportunity to exchange learning methods or pose questions to professors on dealing with situations that arise from teaching larger class sizes. The e-Kit component is a learning object repository that combines media and technical assets and learning objects for professional development.
Three years ago, the university began integrating technology into the classroom and the need for its e-Learning program grew as a result.
“The project is really geared at training faculty members on university teaching and creating the courses that will enable them to integrate e-learning into teaching more effectively and simply,” said Christian Blanchette, director of teaching and learning support services at the University of Ottawa. Also, with nearly half of Canada’s professors expected to retire over the next decade, new professors will be able to interact with more experienced professors online to discuss how to enhance their teaching skills. “We need to have tools that will allow us to train professors on-demand,” he said.
Some of the other recipients included:
– Level Platforms, which received $1,761,216 for its building platform to help small and medium-sized enterprises manage their IT costs;
– TrueContext garnered $1,519,422 to manage content, data and applications for Canada’s hospitality industry;
– and Global IQX was given $987,000 for its generic financial services administration engine for sales cycles.
In other funding news, Industry Minister Allan Rock, Secretary of State (Rural Development) Andy Mitchell and Minister of Veterans Affairs and Secretary of State Rey Pagtakhan announced 65 recipients of funding in the second round of the Broadband for Rural and Northern Development Pilot Program. The recipients of this funding represent approximately 906 communities across Canada.
Each applicant will get $30,000 to develop business plans. In total, $1,768,777 was awarded. The funds were distributed as part of the $105-million project announced by Minister Rock and Secretary of State Mitchell on Sept. 5, 2002.
The goal of the broadband initiative is to make high-capacity Internet access available to communities across Canada by 2005.
Ottawa-based CANARIE is online at www.canarie.ca. The University of Ottawa is at www.uottawa.ca. Industry Canada is at www.ic.gc.ca. For additional information of the broadband initiative, visit www.broadband.gc.ca.