a history of curriculum services canada

IX. 1999
Overall, 100 secondary school curriculum specialists took part in the Course Profile review
process. Team leaders in each subject area were recruited and trained by February 17, and
reviewers were recruited and trained by March 1. Feedback sessions were to take place in
March, while the whole process was to finish in April, with the final documents being mounted
on the OCC website and printed by the Waterloo District Board.
An outside consultant was hired in January for one day a week for a period of six months, in
order to review OCC’s measurement tools, and to revise training manuals in all subject areas.
Also conducted in January was a review of the database and administrative details related to the
hiring of teachers for work on the review; this process was contracted out to the management
services of First Folio Resources, Inc..
In order to protect itself from potential lawsuits arising from publishers who might not agree
with OCC’s evaluations, legal advice was taken, and a more appropriate reformulation of the
original legal contract was made.
The month of January also involved some “house cleaning,” with a focus on a review of the
process and future goals of OCC. This resulted in a one-day Strategic Planning Workshop with
invited participants from key membership groups. Pauline Laing, former Director of the MET
Curriculum Branch, was invited to act as facilitator for the day. A large part of the day was
spent developing a concrete vision of OCC, and this involved reviewing certain aspects of the
operating history of the organization. The day also included a presentation on the future of
education by Michael Fullan, Dean, Ontario Institute For Studies in Education of the University
of Toronto. The day’s work, including the rewriting of a vision statement and a mission
statement, was incorporated into OCC’s literature and submitted to the ISO 9002 application
review process. The idea of producing a corporate brochure was also suggested and initiated,
with a completion date set for April 1999.
In December 1998, OCC had been approached by the chair of Pathfinder Learning Systems
Corporation (PLSC) to explore a partnership in online electronic learning for secondary school
teacher training. This led to the development of a proposal and a preliminary meeting with
Bruce Smith, the Executive Assistant to the Minister, who showed a keen interest in the
proposition. A more detailed proposal was therefore drafted in the new year, outlining the
advantages of a joint venture between MET, OCC and PLSC, whereby MET would assume the
role of curriculum policy expertise, OCC would provide an infrastructure to support training
(i.e., a database of training units linked to MET’s requirements for the new curriculum and
resources), and PLSC would provide the software technology (i.e., delivery systems and
educational design solutions).
PLSC was proposing a search engine called Nautikos, which would allow greater electronic
communication within Ontario and the possibility of connecting teachers to a variety of online
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