a history of curriculum services canada

1996
September - December
A New Director and a New Vision
Kathryn McFarlane’s mandate as Executive Director of OCC was to clarify and expand OCC’s
role in supporting the Ontario curriculum and to sell a more highly visible concept that could
result in OCC’s financial independence. Such a vision drew heavily upon Ms. McFarlane’s
marketing experience.
Thus a good part of the time between September and the end of the year was devoted to
reviewing OCC’s original goals and developing a new business plan that could effectively place
the organization on a more stable and independent financial grounding. The early days were
spent meeting with the original founding members, teachers, consultants, superintendents,
directors, trustees, and representatives of member groups in an attempt to better understand the
initial purpose, expectations, and perceived problems of the organization’s concept to this point.
By November, a new business plan had been drafted, and selected ministry officials, including
the Minister himself, were approached in an attempt to gain support for this expanded vision of
OCC. To the same end, a response to the Secondary School Reform Discussion Paper was
submitted. OCC was still dependent upon funding from the Ministry, yet to maintain that
support in the short term, it was important to demonstrate long-term measurable objectives
which would ensure OCC’s eventual independence. This approach reflected the new
government’s commitment to cost-effective education in Ontario.
Since it was necessary for OCC to market its products and services in support of the Ontario
curriculum, more emphasis was placed upon the importance of The Evaluation Tool in sorting
out quality curriculum materials. This tool was still in its packaging stages, with December 1996
as its expected date of completion. As indicated earlier, despite the extensive body of materials
collected over the previous years from various boards, none of these materials had been
evaluated by an external evaluation process. Thus the relative value of such materials remained
unknown.
Additionally, because of the government’s planned changes for a shorter secondary school
curriculum, it was pointed out that this evaluation tool could be more quickly and efficiently
applied to the new curriculum materials. OCC could thus present itself as an organization of
expert consultants, able to offer its centralized evaluation services to both the Ministry and other
organizations. The long-term goal, however, was to train teachers and other clients in the
education field to be able to use The Evaluation Tool themselves in the ongoing process of
achieving consistency in the selection and evaluation of learning resources. The implementation
of such a goal would help to ensure that eventually resource development would be initiated with
an evaluation component included at the outset, rather than having a scenario where materials
would have to be altered at a later stage in their development. Advantages would be gained in
time, money, quality products, and teacher education.
The idea of copyrighting all materials and creating an electronic Central Registry on the Web,
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