a history of curriculum services canada

A HISTORY OF CURRICULUM SERVICES CANADA
In less than a decade, Curriculum Services Canada (CSC) evolved from its
establishment in 1994 as a service to Ontario to its unique position on the national
scene as a pan-Canadian agency for the evaluation of learning materials. This
evolution was the result of vision and commitment on the part of educators throughout
the Ontario education system.
Background
Although the earliest configuration of the CSC did not appear until the 1990s, the need for a
centralized operation that could collect and disseminate education documents and help avoid the
expense of duplicated efforts had been acknowledged by the Ministry of Education a few
decades earlier.
In the early 1960s, a number of school boards - particularly large boards like the Metropolitan
Toronto (Metro) School Board - became active in funding educational research, an activity that
was also carried on by the Ministry of Education. By the early 1970s, there was a lot of research
but it was not being disseminated. Reports indicated that research dollars in education in
Ontario were being spent ineffectively. In response to this situation, the Ministry made a grant
available to the Metropolitan Toronto School Board to develop a printed index of research
produced and funded by the Ministry. In November 1974, the Ontario Education Resources
Information System (ONTERIS) database began operation, housed at the Ministry of Education,
with Barbara Beardsley, a researcher with the Metro board, as Principal Investigator of the
project. (In 1980 the Ministry took ownership of the project.)
The Ministry collected the documents, which soon included curriculum as well as research
produced by both Ministry and school boards. Surrogate documents - bibliographic information
and an abstract for each of the originals - were created by ONTERIS and entered into the
database. In the late 1970s the Ministry purchased software that would put ONTERIS online and
by the early 1980s the database was being distributed.
While ONTERIS was seen by some teachers as a potentially useful resource tool, it was also
thought to be too research focused and academic, not "teacher-friendly." The very fact that it
contained a full, unvetted spectrum of resources made choosing good material difficult. And
though state-of-the-art electronically, it doubtless suffered from the fact that few people knew
how to operate a computer, much less how to access and manipulate a database.
In 1992, ONTERIS was moved to the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) and
although still online, became increasingly outdated, partly due to decreased funding, and partly
by the very natural evolution of computer technology where there was a movement to providing
both the surrogate and the actual documents.
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