a history of curriculum services canada

1998
The idea of applying for an ISO 9002 number was put forth as a way of establishing OCC’s
organizational accreditation, and representatives of the Business Development Bank were
contacted for preliminary assistance in this endeavour. Early feedback indicated that the
application process could take up to a year, with outside consultation and training services
requiring a certain standard procedure.
Although the partnership with Compucentre Toronto Inc. proved to be unfruitful, with copyright
issues becoming the main stumbling block, other requests for OCC’s evaluation services started
flowing in from organizations such as the Bank of Montreal, the Asia Pacific Foundation, and
the Rosetta Stone Language Library CD-ROM.
With the business partnerships beginning to expand, concerns about the need for more specific
partnership guidelines were soon raised. Thus, work began on the clarification of OCC’s
business principles, and a draft proposal of the Ethical Guidelines for business partnerships was
presented at the March Board Meeting. Feedback from board members was requested by the end
of April, and it was suggested that additional feedback from a variety of outside business people
would also be helpful.
April brought the good news that the Ministry (MET) agreed to a contract with OCC for the
evaluation of learning materials for kindergarten and grades 1 to 8 in Mathematics, Science and
Technology, and Language. This meant that OCC was now acting as an agent for MET, an
initiative which was taken as a step towards the possible long-term management of a new
Circular 14 process. It also meant that OCC was now generating substantial revenue to provide
the kind of expert evaluation services that it had been working towards all along.
The new contract meant that an appropriate training package would need to be developed, and a
partnership with First Folio Inc. was soon established for the purposes of handling the tracking
of the review process, the training of reviewers, and the monitoring of revisions to the evaluation
and bias assessor tools.
To fulfill the new contract, three subject specialists, well respected by educators and Ministry
officials in Ontario, were contracted by OCC to act as Project Directors, and future plans were
made for an all-day training session to include Lead Reviewers from various regions in the
province.
Because the contract with MET was finite, other ideas for expanding OCC’s client list were
actively encouraged. One idea was to look outside of Ontario for possible contracts, while a new
proposal for the Francophone curriculum unit was prepared in April, with two suggestions as to
future partnerships. One suggestion was to hire OCC as an agency to review their materials,
much like the contract already established with MET, while the other idea was to sell them a
license to use OCC’s measurement tools. The latter option was settled upon within the month.
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