These are brilliant thoughts George - I like the idea of opening channels and here with Terry's shared experience with systemic or organized e-learning efforts in Canada, I see better that there is much to do in terms of putting together visions somewhat like those in the CCL report. I'm sorry not to be up on my reading on e-learning as I focus so much on systemic change and instructional design en generale.. but I haven't experienced much on collaborative, disaggregated e-learning strategy 'across jurisdictions' until the CCL report -- and it exictes me!
An organization like CCL has, by my humble understanding and work/study with its founders - a unique place and potential in the learning and education landscape. I think of John Hellewell's great work on Well-Being and see that institutional thought in the creation of CCL - so much potential for the formal and informal build that is needed for a sustainable e-learning initiative. I really believe that R&D in e-learning in Canada, through the great research networks and public intelligence as well as military and private knowledge developments.. could (must) be used help us think ahead to how CCL or any such stategy development process.
As Terry mentions - the funds for developing preliminary ideas of how e-learning can be 'organized' across the country (in a truly 'Pan' way as Terry mentions) appear to have been um.. how does one say... meagure... compared to oh say the even student investment in e-learning (tuition) as a simple measure. I am not calling for funding here but I mean consider the investment countries make in the name of e-learning (access, infrastructure as a minimum).. I'll bet we are talking about nearly a hundred million and perhaps in the Billions of $ when we consider the investment provinces and governments (not to mention corporations and international enterprise) have made in e-learning across this great country. I know well that provincial education jurisdictions are more constrained in scope than say industrial e-learning systems but perhaps a new way of disaggregating the thinking to aggregate vision on e-learning uniquely is possible now... I guess what I am blathering about is caused by my inability to scale the total $-in to e-learning in the country compared to the total $-in to thinking through organizations and planning so we can sustain, lead and leverage both intellectual and operational e-capability so far - as the CCL report reminds.
Perhaps earlier OECD and APEC similar policy/development thinking could be translated into our Canadian context today, so that we can understand net investments in e-learning by government, industry and education systems (K-20) so that we can imagine the total investment in e-learning simply in terms of the inputs as a start to planning to leverage cross-country capabilities and capacities via aggregated processes? I suspect the Auditor Generals of the provinces and of the country have such data, as well as human resource/labor development divisions.. this has me thinking (and learning!). Thanks folks!