News Article

College, IDON EAST win partnership award


1/12/2001 2:03:43 PM


College of the North Atlantic and St. John's-based IDON EAST Corporation recently won a national award for their teamwork in developing courses for distributed learning. The courses are delivered via the internet using video streaming, animations and richly illustrated textual content.

St. John’s, January 12, 2001 - College of the North Atlantic and IDON EAST have been named the winners of the 2000 Canadian Association for Distance Education’s Excellence in Partnership Award.

The college and the St. John’s e-learning solutions company partnered to create a number of distributed learning programs that benefit from the college’s instructional and content expertise and utilize the innovative technology and e-learning development strengths of IDON EAST.

It was their work together on the Occupational Therapists Assistants and Physiotherapists Assistants Distributed Learning Programs which won them the national award.

“The partnership unites the world-class content development, instructional design and distributed learning expertise of the college with IDON EAST’s innovative e-learning solution development,” says John King, manager of the college’s Distributed Learning Centre.

“This is another good example of the province's capability to forge, nurture and excel at partnerships for growth in the new economy.”

Together, College of the North Atlantic and IDON EAST have completed a number of distributed learning courses in the areas of carpentry, refrigeration/air conditioning technology, early childhood education, construction estimation, occupational therapists assistants and physiotherapists assistants.

The Occupational Therapists Assistants and Physiotherapists Assistants programs are the flagships of the distributed learning services offered by the college. These programs prepare graduates for work in acute care, long-term care and community care settings. They consist of 13 courses available via the internet and a nine-week field placement. The programs utilize the latest new media and internet technologies such as WebCT to reach learners all over the globe. The college and IDON EAST have worked together for more than a year to integrate curriculum with new media components such as video streaming, animation and richly illustrated textual content.

"Institutional partnership success is the outcome of individual members succeeding. In this case, college faculty member Lucy Miller demonstrated exceptional enthusiasm, dedication and leadership in her coordination of the program development with IDON EAST," says King.

“Our partnership with College of the North Atlantic is a long-term one that goes beyond projects to an on-going partnership where we work together to provide quality distributed learning or e-learning within our province and beyond,” says IDON EAST President Cathy Favre.

“Together, we hope to set the standard for high quality distributed learning for adult learners. This Award of Excellence for Partnership, I believe, was well deserved and recognizes the significant national achievement for the extensive partnership capabilities required to design, develop and implement a complete community college program for distributed learning. In e-learning today, this is a major achievement and most would say not possible without strong partnerships such as ours.”

This project was generously supported by The Canada/Newfoundland Agreement on Economic Renewal.


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For more information contact:

Stephen Lee
Communications Officer
College of the North Atlantic
(709) 643-7928
email: stephen.lee@northatlantic.nf.ca

or

Kevin Pomroy
Director of Marketing and Communications
IDON EAST Corporation
(709) 739-6262
email: kpomroy@idoneast.com