E-Learning for the Public Good? The Policy Trajectory of Online Education in Ontario,Canada

Abstract

Our critical historiography of e-learning policy in Ontario, Canada, traces the policy’s trajectory through three settlements (2006-2022) and shows how successive governments have mobilized neoliberal discourses of personalization, access, and choice to justify new arrangements with private actors, within a broader sociopolitical context that includes increased privatization and commodification of public institutions, cuts to public spending, and imagines individuals as rational subjects driven to maximize their economic potential. This context exacerbates challenges students marginalized by schooling already face. Findings from our critical discourse analyses of government documents and news media reports also demonstrate that online learning in Ontario is neither personalized nor customizable but instead is centralized, standardized and, by design, operates independent of rather than interdependent with community. Further, our findings highlight the interdependence of schools – online and in-person – with social processes that create and perpetuate inequality, including gendered and racialized poverty, locally and abroad.

It is nearly impossible to decouple online education from its association with pandemic schooling during COVID-19 closures. In Ontario, Canada, in-person schooling was closed a minimum of 27 weeks between 2020 and 2022; in some jurisdictions across the province, where COVID-19 was widespread, closures were longer (Rushowy, 2022). The impact of closures accompanied by crisis remote learning was unprecedented, especially for those already marginalized by systemic inequities (Farhadi & Winton, 2021; Gallagher-Mackay et al., 2021; James, 2020). To account for these consequences, failures must be put into a context that is intensified by but also precedes the pandemic (Reimers, 2021).

In this paper, we situate online education not just as a modality time-bound with COVID-19 but examine its trajectory since 2006, when the province adopted an e-learning strategy. Accordingly, our case study of Ontario contributes to the critical research on EdTech in schools, which, before the pandemic, “tended to escape close attention from policy scholars” (Selwyn, 2018, p. 459). This includes policies that promote digitalization (Selwyn, 2010; Van Dijck, 2014) through the expansion of education applications (Arantes, 2024; Decuypere, 2019), learning management platforms and infrastructures (Grimaldi & Ball, 2021; Gulson & Sellar, 2019), as well as big data, artificial intelligence, and predictive analytics (Gulson et al., 2022; Lupton & Williamson, 2017; Raley, 2013; Williamson, 2017, 2020). While the incursion of corporate interests through digitalization in education have since intensified since the pandemic (Cohen, 2022; Norris, 2023; Williamson, 2021; Zancajo et al., 2022), the field of EdTech was already “a complex, multimillion-dollar industry, with various hubs in the USA leading the boom” (Regan & Khwaja, 2019, p. 1000). Consistent with this literature (Macgilchrist, 2021), our focus on online education centers inequity in education policy, where growing global influence of corporate interests impact public governance and privatize the policy making process (Ball & Grimaldi, 2022; Ljungqvist & Sonesson, 2022; Roumell & Salajan, 2016).

Prior to COVID-19 school closures, debates about learning online in Ontario made headlines because of the government’s extraordinary and controversial attempt to institute mandatory asynchronous online learning for secondary students under the rhetoric of “modernizing” and transforming its public education systems (Ontario Ministry of Education, 2019). The context for and outcomes of these debates is the subject of our research, which shows how, through the recontextualization of policy over time, online learning in educational policy has exacerbated social inequality. Through a lens of critical policy scholarship, we show that the story of online education in Ontario is incomplete if it is treated as linear and subject only to the disruptive force of the pandemic, or if it is contained to the space of the “local” without considering the asymmetries of scale: the local is simultaneously global, in ways that require attunement to in analysis.

More specifically, we draw from the heritage of policy historiography (Gale, 1999, 2001) to shape our approach to studying online education’s policy trajectory in Ontario. Policy historiography troubles apolitical accounts of policy that are decoupled from historical, political, social, and cultural contexts across time and space. Through this approach, we argue that the history of online education policy in Ontario has contributed to inequity in schooling by facilitating a process of privatization that disassembles resources from the public sector (Farhadi, 2019; Farhadi & Winton, 2021; Winton, 2022). The enactment of online education is the product of a dominant neoliberal ideology in which a marketized education system encourages consumer behavior based on individualism and a definition of schooling narrowly focused on accreditation. It accelerates the commodification of schooling, as a strategy of neoliberal capitalism, through the discourse of choice and access designed to materialize for those already socially advantaged.

In what follows, we review the theoretical framework and methodology for this study and analyze shifting discourses in online education through three phases of policy settlement in Ontario. As we explain more fully below, a policy settlement is a temporary period of discursive consensus following struggle and crisis (Gale, 1999; Grace, 1991). While the particulars of a policy may change, its “discursive and strategic framing” are what define the parameters of its settlement (Gale, 1999, p. 402). We have organized this paper as three settlements framed by the discursive parameters of personalization, access, and choice negotiated within the context of neoliberal political strategy. First, we discuss the launch of the Ontario’s e-learning Strategy in 2006 and the conditions that enabled this initial policy settlement. Next, we examine the emergence of a second settlement following the proposal for mandatory e-learning in 2019, which manufactured an education crisis during historic labor negotiations. Finally, we show how the COVID-19 health crisis in 2020 accelerated the trajectory of Ontario’s e-learning policy in directions unimagined in previous years. This includes the institution of full-time synchronous remote learning during the pandemic, a policy that remains dormant following the stabilization of the virus’s transmission in May 2023 (Press, 2023). Our findings highlight the intertextual relationship between the province’s policies and their contexts, demonstrating the political nature of the very infrastructure of online education and the discourses that rationalized its expansion.

Theoretical Framework

Definitions of policy are contested and often taken for granted. Ours draws from the tradition of (critical) policy sociology, a term developed by Jenny Ozga that emphasizes reflexivity, historical study, and the inclusion of perceptions shared by policy actors, rather than the formal mechanisms of government (Ozga, 1987, 2021). What makes policy sociology critical is its emergence “within and against the dominant political culture,” and its attention to “underlying assumptions that shaped how a ‘problem’ was conceptualised and how solutions were selected (and who did the defining and selection)” (Ozga, 2021, p. 294).

Policy processes are neither linear nor complete. They are sites of struggle over which meaning is encoded and decoded in complex ways and are shaped by policy actors’ “history, experiences, resources, and context” (Ball, 1993, p. 11). As texts, policies are “textual interventions into practice”; however, their meanings are contested rather than fixed and delivered, serving as problems posed to subjects “that must be solved in context” (Ball, 1993, p.12). Policy texts are also (and constituted by) discourse: “Discourses are about what can be said, and thought, but also about who can speak, when, where and with what authority. Discourses embody the meaning and use of propositions and words. Thus, certain possibilities for thought are constructed” (Ball, 1993, p. 14). Practice is part of our definition of policy, though this study focuses on textual representation of policy and its constitution of/by discourse.

We bring our critical orientation and understanding of policy as text and discourse to our study of the policy trajectory of online learning in Ontario. Policy trajectory is an approach that, following Trevor Gale (2001), draws on the heritage of policy historiography (among others) to ask the following questions:

(1) what were the “public issues” and “private troubles” within a particular policy domain during some previous period and how were they addressed?; (2) what are they now?; and (3) what is the nature of the change from the first to the second? Critical policy historiography adds to these a further two: (4) what are the complexities in these coherent accounts of policy?; and (5) what do these reveal about who is advantaged and who is disadvantaged by these arrangements? (pp. 385–386)

Rather than conceptualizing history as self-evident time periods that follow one another in progression (Gale, 2001), Gale’s critical historiography sees history as a series of temporary hegemonic policy settlements. Policy settlements are the discursive frames that define policy production at specific geographical and historical moments (Gale, 1999). Policy settlements contain crises and alternate possibilities and thus are “asymmetrical, temporary and context-dependent” (Gale, 1999, p. 401). Policy settlements are asymmetrical because they favor the interests of dominant policy actors and are shaped by these actors’ discursive and strategic framing. They are temporary because policy asymmetry often produces an unbalance or crisis in social processes. Policy settlements are themselves context-dependent, shaped by dominant discourses that impact the settlement parameters within which the particulars of policy are negotiated.

Our critical historiography of online education in Ontario identified three phases of policy settlement and, in this article, we discuss discourses that connect settlements while emphasizing the contextual and distinct dimensions of respective policy domains.

Notably, there is little consistency in the definition of online education (Singh & Thurman, 2019) which is an umbrella term describing a variety of spatiotemporal configurations shaped by technology that mediates interactions between instructors and students. These arrangements are adopted for various purposes and include asynchronous or synchronous environments, traditional or emergency hybrid learning, blended learning, distance or emergency remote learning, to name those most prominent in research; because there is such variation in the context and application of terms, we do not aim to align with perceived norms but instead to represent terms within the contexts they are situated.

Methodology

Our understanding of policy as both text and discourse and our interest in identifying the shifting discursive frames (i.e., policy settlements) of Ontario’s online learning policy over time prompted us to engage critical discourse analysis as our methodology. Our analysis does not presume that policy responds to objective problems but rather that a policy text creates the problem to which it offers a response: “The premise behind a policy-as-discourse approach is that it is inappropriate to see governments as responding to ‘problems’ that exist ‘out there’ in the community. Rather ‘problems’ are ‘created’ or ‘given shape’ in the very policy proposals that are offered as ‘responses’” (Bacchi, 2000, p. 48).

Discourse analysis, as Fairclough (2003) explains it, involves analyses of specific documents but also of an order of discourse that includes a hegemony of meaning contrasted against marginal, oppositional, or alternative orders. Critical discourse analysis (CDA) “attends simultaneously to linguistic elements in spoken or written texts, such as grammar, vocabulary, and cohesion, and to the broader socio-cultural and political context that shapes the formation of texts and how people think, feel, and act in response to them” (Bartlett & Vavrus, 2016, p. 83). Our study, while attending to linguistic elements such as vocabulary and cohesion, primarily analyzed orders of discourse, with an emphasis on the broader sociopolitical context of online education policies.

Data Collection and Sources

Our data sources include government texts and news media reports that address online education. We highlight the dominant role elected politicians play, as domestic policy actors, in making e-learning policies as well as the indirect role of media in the portrayal of public problems. While online education existed in Ontario before 2006 (Farhadi, 2019) a negotiated agreement between the province and global software company Desire2Learn (now D2L Brightspace) standardized service levels across Ontario; directives to school boards were issued through e-learning policy (Ontario Ministry of Education, 2006). As a result, our search begins by locating policy texts produced by the Ontario government between 2006 and 2022 by searching the Legislative Assembly of Ontario and the Government of Ontario website and using the terms “e-learning” and “online learning” categorized under the topic of government, education and training. Relevant results yielded approximately two dozen texts, including policy documents, service agreements, legislative documents, commissioned reports, and meeting minutes. Anchoring policy documents include: E-Learning Ontario: Policy Document (Ontario Ministry of Education, 2006) and Policy/Program Memorandums 164: Requirements for Remote Learning (Ontario Ministry of Education, 2020d) and 167: Online Learning Graduation Requirement (Ontario Ministry of Education, 2022).

We also examined news media coverage because of its power to influence “knowledge, beliefs, social relations, social identities” (Fairclough, 1995, p. 2). Media language is an important element within research on social change as it works discursively to represent the world and constructs social identities, and social relations (Fairclough, 1995, p. 12). Specifically, we searched newspapers with the greatest national circulation, the Globe and Mail and the Toronto Star, alongside news media coverage from nationally funded broadcaster, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC). We used newspaper databases to conduct our search for reports published between 2006 and 2023 (including Canadian Major Dailies, Gale OneFile CPI.Q, ProQuest Globe, and CBC Search Engine) using the search terms “e-learning” or “online learning” or “online education” and “Ontario.” We focused on the papers’ digital platforms because 9 out of 10 Canadians read newspapers weekly and of those, 95% use a digital platform (News Media Canada, 2021). Results were limited to full text, excluding advertising and postsecondary education. We examined approximately 40 media reports. In addition, we searched for news about online learning on the website of Ontario’s public broadcaster TVOntario using the search terms “e-learning” or “online learning” or “online education”, which yielded 101 articles and videos published between 2019 and 2023. We analyzed relevant results, 18 articles and 15 videos, almost all of which covered online education during the pandemic. Further, we consulted existing research to inform and confirm our understanding of dominant and competing discourses, actors, events, and other aspects of the sociopolitical context of the period under study.

Data Analysis

We anchored our analysis in policy texts, as discourse, published within a contextual domain that frames the parameters of action. Through the principle of “making strange” (Bloor & Bloor, 2007, p. 6), our preliminary deductive coding involved identifying taken for granted neoliberal discourses in EdTech policy. These included: modernization, choice, access, flexibility, global citizenship, and innovation. Then we conducted intertextual analysis of news media, promotional material, legislative transcripts, and intersecting policies and guidelines. Inductive codes captured changes in learning models. For instance, the terms personalization and gold standard were frequently used in the context of asynchronous learning with standardized content, while consistency and security were associated more frequently with synchronous remote learning.

We analyzed key aspects of the context of each settlement. The first focused on a rural education strategy; the second on labor negotiations; and the third, on the COVID-19 pandemic. We evaluated their implications for online learning, such as the centralization of delivery, the development of protocols and procedures, communication processes, as well as the interpretive frame. For example, the policy on the requirements for remote learning (PPM 164), provided definitions for remote and synchronous learning and outlined the minimum requirements for engaging students. These parameters shaped the interpretive frame for the institution of hybrid instruction, which saw some school boards meet requirements by compelling teachers to instruct students virtually and in-person simultaneously.

We also evaluated the ways policy texts and the contextual domain of their discourse constructed subjects. For instance, the institution of asynchronous online learning as a graduation requirement (PPM 167) positions teachers as delivering rather than producing content and students as driving their learning in instances when they are consuming content independently without a teacher. The subject positions of teacher and student are a product of discourse in which learning is transactional, an action of input and output. And lastly, we evaluate changes in governance and their implications for education privatization. Most significant is the inclusion of TVOntario in the licensing agreement and the role of D2L Brightspace in the provision of online education. As part of their mandate, TVOntario must develop a global development strategy to market corporate-hosted courses abroad and generate revenue for the province. This includes an internationalization strategy to market and enroll out of province students.

Neoliberal Ideology: A “Why” of Online Education Policy

Online education has emerged within the broader context of neoliberal ideology: the privatization and commodification of public institutions; state redistributions, which include cuts to social spending, corporate welfare, and attacks on labor; and the constitution of the subject of policy as a self-governing, entrepreneurial, productive, competitive, and efficient individual within a system that filters bodies that are capable, able, and worthy within an economic calculus (Brown, 2015; Harvey, 2007).

Put simply, neoliberalism is an ensemble of economic and social policies, forms of governance, and discourses and ideologies that promote individual self-interest, unrestricted flows of capital, deep reductions in the cost of labor, and sharp retrenchment of the public sphere. Neoliberals champion privatization of social goods and withdrawal of government from provision for social welfare on the premise that competitive markets are more effective and efficient. Neoliberalism is not just “out there” as a set of policies and explicit ideologies. It has developed as a new social imaginary, a common sense about how we think about society and our place in it. (Lipman, 2011, p. 6)

In Ontario, there is a breadth of research that historicizes and contextualizes the process of neoliberalism (Basu, 2004; Bocking, 2020; Chitpin & Portelli, 2019; Fanelli & Thomas, 2011; Pinto, 2016; Winton, 2022). Our analysis leads us to position online learning as a solution posed to a problem produced by decades of austerity, in three phases of policy settlement. We anchored each settlement in policy texts published in 2006, 2020, and 2022 respectively; however, date ranges (2006–2018; 2019–2020; 2020–2022) capture the discursive frame of policy production—the dominant settlement perimeters—within which texts emerge.

“The Sky’s the Limit” (2006–2018)

Discourses of personalization, access, and choice under a logic of neoliberal ideology shape Ontario’s 2006 e-Learning Strategy. The strategy aspired to “meet the needs of a wide range of learners existing across the province” (Ontario Ministry of Education, 2006, p. 1) by making e-learning courses available to all students. The website hosted by Ontario’s Ministry of Education, which houses the courses, explained that “E-learning is one of the projects of the Ministry of Education to help students succeed in school. It gives students more choices to customize their education based on their strengths, needs and interests” (Ontario, n.d.). The brochure promoting the initiative featured an image of senior high school students jumping, with diplomas in hand pointed toward a blue sky. The promise captioned: “The Sky is the Limit!” (Ontario Ministry of Education, 2012). The brochure promised teachers new possibilities for differentiation, access to resources, tracking student progress, collaboration with colleagues, and enhancing technology skills. Students were promised more opportunities and access to “a wide variety of high-quality online courses”; more credit choices for graduation; learning for individual needs; anytime, anywhere access to learning resources; and an enhancement of knowledge with digital tools. The brochure claimed: “Access to high-quality digital support through e-Learning Ontario is key to ensuring that all students succeed, regardless of their location, abilities or circumstances.”

The company Desire2Learn (now D2L Brightspace) licensed by the province to deliver the strategy claims to deeply care about making sure all students reach their potential, through the development of an “innovation” platform to provide “more flexibility to personalize the experience and unlock learner potential” (Edutech, 2024, D2L Brightspace section, para. 1).Like the province, D2L similarly explains the benefits of their software in a promotional video:

Brightspace is a K-12 learning management system that’s designed for the way K-12 educators teach today and will want to teach tomorrow. It helps you deliver a personalized learning experience for every student from young ages to senior grades that works on any mobile device. The students grow and change as they progress. Brightspace helps you adapt and evolve right alongside them. [. . .] (D2L, 2017)

The opening of this video implies that the design of the platform, in contrast to face-to-face settings, sustains “personalized” learning, driven by the student. Differentiation is driven by the teacher, which is both desired and future oriented. Personalization in educational policy, as Pykett (2009) explains, is a concept that puts the individual—rather than community—at the centre of practice and neglects the social context of the personal. Discourses of choice require the conception of a subject who can exercise agency free from constraint, a voice that assumes the role of consumer. “The idea that enabling children and parents to have a voice will create choice is one in which the market and political enablement sit side-by-side” (Pykett, 2009, p. 384). With reference to Biesta (2005) Pykett argues: an “‘underlying assumption that learners come to education with a clear understanding of what their needs are, is a highly questionable assumption’. The emphasis on learner-centred education and consumer voice therefore ‘forgets that a major reason for engaging in education is precisely to find out what it is that one actually needs’” (p. 384).

Desire2Learn’s promotional video continues:

Teaching is no easy task, but Brightspace makes the daily tasks easier. It helps teachers create engaging learning experiences without spending extra hours on the tedious work. Lessons that are aligned to standards can be created quickly using materials from publishers, open educational resources, or Google Drive. With simple visualizations they can check to make sure that the right content is being covered to prepare students for standardized tests. Smart rules and smart tools can also be used to let teachers do more with less effort. Student progress can be tracked with simple dashboards and teachers can provide real time feedback with scheduled personal messaging and discussions. Students are also given more voice and choice with self pacing or pacing based on competency and mastery of content.

Like the Strategy’s promotional brochure, which promises tools to track student progress, the focus of this section of the video is on the efficiency the platform offers the “task” of teaching, where the problem of teaching can be solved by “smart tools” that are aligned with standards. This implies a banking-model of education, in which content is packaged and deposited into passive minds (Freire, 2000), Again, “voice and choice” are coterminous with personalization, where students self-pace and orient themselves as individuals to course content rather than classroom community.

Texts produced by the Ministry of Education between 2006 and 2018 continued to valorize technology for its perceived ability to prepare students for a globalized economy. Here, globalization is conflated with progress and students are entrepreneurial subjects. In particular, its focus on 21st century/global competencies and digital citizenship position the local and global as symmetrical forces that belie unequal power dynamics and adopt private-sector corporate discourse that frame education as a utility (Mehta et al., 2020). This discourse accompanies reforms during a period of successive Liberal governments that conceptualized academic skills “as being a foundation for the development of interpersonal skills for the twenty-first century” (Boyd, 2021).

Discourses on e-learning also aligned access with geography, highlighting a resource gap that was being bridged by asynchronous e-learning courses. For example, the Toronto Star described the provincial e-learning initiative, launched under Liberal Premier Dalton McGuinty, as “an idea that began in the rural and remote classroom setting, where students were limited from taking a variety of courses because there weren’t local teachers to do so” (Javed, 2009). In the report “A New Era of Progress For All Ontario Students” released the year before the launch of its e-learning initiative, the Ministry of Education had boasted fair funding for rural schools, the strategy for which included e-learning and the development of common courses and materials (Ontario Ministry of Education, 2005).

There were four components to the e-learning strategy: investing in a seat reservation system that permits school boards to enroll students in fully online asynchronous secondary school e-learning credit courses; curating a digital searchable library of courses (Ontario Educational Resource Bank); developing a community of practice (e-Community Ontario); and, as discussed, licensing a Learning Management System (LMS) from Desire2Learn for all school boards to use. The E-learning Ontario policy (Ontario Ministry of Education, 2006) stipulated, among other restrictions, that “Virtual schools or totally online schools are not allowed to be established using the provincial LMS and [Learning Object Repository]” and that “Any student who wishes to enrol in a secondary school e-learning course that is delivered through the provincial LMS must be registered with the board in which he or she is qualified to be a ‘resident pupil’ under the Education Act” (Ontario Ministry of Education, 2006, p. 2).

The distinction of single-credit e-learning courses from fully online schools at the time of this 2006 policy is notable for its rejection of the virtual high school movement in the United States that began in 1996, guided by discourses akin to those mobilized by Ontario’s Ministry of Education:

The vision that led to the birth of virtual high schools and still drives the movement today is one of increased access to additional education opportunities for more students, especially those who currently lack such opportunities. Increased access to education has broad, pervasive implications for the economic growth of countries and political involvement by their citizens; thus, many legislators and school policy makers have high hopes for the success of this movement. (Roblyer, 2003, p. 118)

Despite cautiously optimistic hopes for virtual high schools in the USA, they have since shown “overwhelming evidence of poor outcomes” and are dominated by for-profit Educational Management Organizations (Molnar et al., 2019, p. 4). As Daniela Torre explains: “An important facet of virtual charter schools is their relationship with for-profit companies. The private sector has made a heavy imprint on the growth and development of schooling in general and on virtual charter schools more specifically” (Torre, 2013). Perhaps anticipating business interest in e-learning, Ontario’s 2006 strategy stated that not only was the LMS not to be used for virtual schools, “the marketing of district school board courses in other jurisdictions” or “the commercial use or generating revenue for the board” were forbidden (Ontario Ministry of Education, 2006, p. 4). The inclusion of this caveat anticipates the possibility of privatization but also, as caveat, is subject to revision; this would be the case in a future policy settlement.

Reporting on the strategy by news journalists was sparse during this time, perhaps reflecting its settled status. When e-learning rolled out more broadly in 2009 in the Toronto District School Board (TDSB), news reports mobilized the discourse of access, describing e-learning as a platform where students attend class “whenever and from wherever they want” while also noting that students who more likely to succeed were those who were “self-motivated and can work alone” (Javed, 2009). Missing were reports of government investments in for-profit software company D2L Brightspace, who eventually recruited Premier McGuinty as a lobbyist:

Former liberal Premier Dalton McGuinty, whose government signed the first contract with the learning management software company Desire2Learn—currently the sole provider of e-learning software for K–12 in Ontario—resigned in 2012 to serve as a special advisor to its president, John Baker (D2L, 2012). Eighteen months later, he officially registered as a lobbyist with the provincial government, which fell beyond the twelve-month waiting period needed post resignation to register. At the time, D2L’s contract with the province was valued at $3 million. (Farhadi, 2019, p. 180)

Despite assurances made by proponents of e-learning, the promise of Ontario’s e-learning strategy to increase students’ access to a personalized education program went largely unrealized. Only a small percentage of students enrolled in e-learning courses. In 2013 survey, principals reported that only 3% of their students were participating in e-learning, although 90% of schools had at least one student involved (Kelly Gallagher-Mackay, 2013, p. 33). The survey found that students in small high schools (fewer than 250 students) were nearly three times more likely to take e-learning courses than those in medium and large high schools (p. 33). This article’s first author’s study on e-learning in the largest school district in Canada, the TDSB, offered a case study in the politics of choice (Farhadi, 2019). Enrollment patterns between 2010 and 2017 revealed a 52% concentration of e-learners in schools with greater learning opportunities (compared to 5.9% of those with the fewest). The concentration of e-learners in schools with more resources was not only a function of geography, but also race and class (Farhadi, 2019). Further, rural schools encountered barriers to access that highlighted the inequity of infrastructure required for the most basic requisite for access: an internet connection (Duhatschek, 2019).

In this policy settlement, dominant discourses of choice and access rationalized Ontario’s first provincial e-learning policy. The asynchronous delivery model further entrenched discourses of personalization dominant in the marketing of e-learning by the software company licensed to support e-learning delivery. This resulted in frequent references to flexibility, which rationalizes learning without the live presence of a teacher. Dominant actors include government, which required school boards to comply with their policy to deliver e-learning programs and included the use of a centralized learning object repository for use by teachers. Business, as an interest group, was also a dominant actor. Not only did D2L profit from the license issued by the province, but they also recruited former Premier Dalton McGuinty as a lobbyist, further entrenching their influence on policy processes. The key contextual factor during this phase was the provision for small, rural, and isolated schools, which were not sufficiently funded to deliver sufficient in-person courses to meet the requirements of the Ontario Secondary School Diploma.

Education that Works for You—Modernizing Classrooms: Mandatory Online Education and Labor Negotiations (2019–2020)

In 2019, Ontario’s Progressive Conservative government proposed that students complete four e-learning courses to graduate as part of its vision for education, outlined in Education that Works for You—Modernizing Classrooms (Government of Ontario, 2019a). The courses would be offered by the province and have class sizes of 35 students, which was higher than the proposed in-person average of 28. Related announcements mobilized discourses of personalization, access, choice, and academic achievement. The backgrounder to the proposed policy stated:

The government is committed to modernizing education and supporting students and families in innovative ways that enhance their success. . .

Starting in 2020-21, the government will centralize the delivery of all e-learning courses to allow students greater access to programming and educational opportunities, no matter where they live in Ontario. (Government of Ontario, 2019b)

The use of the phrases “modernizing education,” “greater access to programming and educational opportunity,” and “supporting students and families in innovative ways,” are consistent with discourse used in the 2006 policy settlement. This proposal also aligned with a renegotiated 4-year agreement between D2L Brightspace and the province in 2018, with three options to extend for 2 years each. The value of the agreement was up to $84,200,200.00 and included Crown-owned TV Ontario (Government of Ontario, 2018).

Shortly after the announcement, the Ontario eLearning Consortium removed a disclaimer from their website that read: “e-learning may not be for everyone.” The Consortium, which originated in 2006, consists of “21 publicly-funded member Boards, both small and large, public and separate, urban and rural, from across the Province.” In a published overview, the following benefits for students are cited: The “[d]evelopment of 21st century skills” and the “[a]cquisition of experience and skills associated with eLearning and Learning Management Systems that will better prepare them for success in post-secondary and/or the world of work [. . .]” (Nielsen & Pottle, 2017). Andrea Horwath, the leader of the New Democratic Party (NDP) referenced the removal of the Consortium’s disclaimer during a debate in the legislature when she asked Minister of Education, Lisa M. Thompson: “If e-learning may not work for every student, why is the minister forcing every student into it?” Minister Thompson responded:

What we’re talking about in our rollout of online classes is that by the time an Ontario student graduates from high school they will need to have taken four online courses. This is something that absolutely is a fit in today’s world, based on the realities of jobs—not only today, but into tomorrow as well.

For goodness’ sake, there are colleges, there are universities that have the bulk of courses online, and we’re just following suit. . . (Government of Ontario, 2019b)

In this response, aligned with the logic of the Consortium, the goal of schooling is framed as serving economic ends, “based on the realities of jobs.” This logic is rationalized by so-called precedent, where the needs of secondary and postsecondary students are conflated, and the democratic function of public education dismissed. We refer to this rationale as “so-called” for its claim that expanding online education would meet the perceived goals of colleges and universities, who have “the bulk of courses online.” A national survey of online learning in Canadian post-secondary education reports that in 2015: “Just under half of the [203] responding institutions [in Canada] reported that in up to 10% of their courses, some of the face-to-face teaching has been replaced by online study, and in about a quarter of the institutions, more than 10% of the teaching was in this format” (Bates, 2018). This contrasts the perception that the “bulk of courses” are online and highlights how such statements discursively mobilize a (neoliberal) social imaginary and common sense about the role of technology in society, at a time preceding the expansion of online education under the pandemic.

Public broadcaster TVOntario “graded the plan” on their flagship program The Agenda. Randy Labonte, representing non-profit CANeLearn, commented on the policy:

I think that e-learning is an excellent vehicle and forum for learning to occur, but the challenge, in terms of the scalability of the announcement, is what causes me concern. And, without details, it’s very difficult to comment. There are no comparables to a program announcement such as Ontario has, we have not found anything in other jurisdictions that is at that level. And if it is mandatory, that also sets requirements, which may again be very challenging and difficult to move forward with. The Minister of Education, just on the program earlier, had announced that the focus on teachers and support for teachers was a primary driver and I’d like to take the Minister at her word on that. (The Agenda, 2019)

This statement highlights a traditional “rationalist” approach to analysis that positions policy outside of political context. In this case, a spokesperson from an interest group that seeks to be a leading voice for K-12 e-learning in Canada highlights the lack of comparable programs and the challenge of logistics that impacts their networks. He concludes: “without details, it’s very difficult to comment.” Such an approach takes the Minister of Education “at her word” and in so doing, depoliticizes Conservative representation and the material context of this announcement, which was austerity reform and the onset of negotiations with unions representing education workers. It was, in short, a presentation of an ideologically objective argument, the neutrality of which is itself an ideology of high modernism whose technocratic approach, and command theory of control, positions the analyst as outside power (Goodin et al., 2008).

In contrast, a critical approach speaks truth to power and puts the proposal for mandatory online education in the context of the entirety of reforms introduced, which include “sustainable” adjustments to how public education is funded and an increase to class sizes. These reforms to the province’s publicly funded secondary schools were understood by labor unions to pose a crisis in public education, disrupting the prevailing e-learning policy settlement and creating the possibility of alternative settlements (Gale, 1999). Importantly, the reforms were announced just as education unions were set to begin labor negotiations with the provincial government. The Ontario Secondary School Teachers’ Federation, which represents 60,000 members (most of whom are secondary teachers in the province’s public schools), announced on November 18th that 92% of their members voted to give their union a strike mandate (People for Education, 2019). By January 2020 all four public sector unions representing teachers and many other education workers went on strike, the first time they were collectively engaged in job action since 1997 (Star Staff, 2020).

An analysis of news media one month following the announcement reveals the role journalists played in refereeing the public debate about labor negotiations over cuts that would increase class sizes and result in a reduction in teacher and educational support positions central to supporting students most vulnerable to systemic inequity. Unlike the previous policy settlement, the connection of the announcement to proposals to increase class sizes, coupled with labor unrest, resulted in significant news coverage. Policy actors cited in news media include proximate decision makers, such as school board chairs and superintendents; knowledge generators, such as academics in research institutes or prominent think tanks who offer data that can be used to make decisions; and knowledge brokers, who serve as intermediaries (Dobuzinskis et al., 2007, p. 5). Speeches in legislature, interviews with sources, precedent in the United States, reports by think tanks, student and education associations, teacher unions, academics, and the official opposition party, were frequently referenced in news media.

While students and parents were also interviewed, teachers were frequently a missing voice. Also missing was the context of a public-facing negotiation between the Progressive Conservative government and labor unions; the announcements featured in the headlines preceded their first meeting and to this end tested the waters of public support. The debates raised in news media expressed concerns about the use of online education as a cost saving measure and the increased demand on school facilities. Many cited equity concerns such as a lack of access to connectivity and technology—not to mention the fundraising that is often used to meet these gaps—and the inevitable inequity that results (Winton, 2018). Skeptics pointed to high attrition rates in online courses and only limited benefits for those best positioned to excel (i.e., students with self-motivation, digital literacy, and a conducive home environment). There was also competing discourse about a public education crisis that began in the 1990s and a simultaneous positioning of the Ontario education system as high ranking and world-class. What is unique about newspaper texts as a source is that often they “do not report what has already happened at all but report what ‘is to’ happen (hypothesized by drawing on such things as press releases from film distributors, research bodies or government press conferences)” (Bloor & Bloor, 2007, p. 51).

When read in the context of these broader series of education reforms announced, during historic labor negotiations, it was clear that Ontario’s Progressive Conservative Government intended on using e-learning as a means of drawing “efficiencies” from the system; however, the infrastructure and discourse to realize this vision was enabled by the 2006 policy settlement. This settlement had allowed previous successive governments to renegotiate licensing with D2L (extendable to 2028) to deliver online learning across the province through Crown-owned TVOntario (TVO) (OTBU D12, 2021, p. 12). Labor negotiations and historic strikes came to a quiet halt shortly after the first state of emergency during the COVID-19 pandemic was announced. Both sides agreed to two mandatory e-learning courses as a graduate requirement, with an opt-out clause that would still result in reduced funding and an increase in class sizes.

The asymmetry of this policy process highlights the strength the government, as a dominant policy actor, was exercising over labor unions with whom they were negotiating publicly. The temporary nature of this settlement was not only a product of asymmetry under neoliberal austerity, but also contained by the context of the pandemic, which forced resolution. With schools closed to in-person learning and students eventually forced online, the struggle over e-learning policy transitioned from the discursive terrain of choice to continuity of learning.

Despite the unfolding pandemic and likely in anticipation of its end, the government continued to pursue its vision for e-learning in the province. In a 2020 mandate letter, from the Minister of Education addressed to the Chair of the Ontario Educational Communications Authority, the government finally clarified its intentions to assign central leadership to TVO to coordinate an online learning system and deliver e-learning courses. The letter offered its rationale by framing the organization as a champion for public education and exalting the “potential of technology to stimulate students’ curiosity, teach them important employable skills, and prepare them for the global economy” (Ontario Ministry of Education, 2020c). In the letter, the Minister of Education explains the problem posed of exponential demand for e-learning that TVO’s new role is poised to solve:

As of 2018-19, about 60,000 students took online courses through their local school board. By 2023-24, when the first cohort of students subject to the online learning graduation requirement begins to graduate, the system will need to accommodate up to 250,000 students in online courses annually. Expanding to meet this demand while also maintaining a consistent, high-quality educational experience for students will be challenging without centralized coordination and support.

The government’s proposal for TVO included establishing a centralized course catalog, developing a library of courses, and expanding access to online learning. This proposal is, in short, scaling up the 2006 strategy by including a new registration system and repository of courses; however, unlike the 2006 strategy, TVO will be responsible for proposing how to “maximize use of existing resources in the sector and minimize costs, including through revenue generation strategies” (Ontario Ministry of Education, 2020c). This new arrangement will remove local decision-making authority from school districts, who are currently delivering online education; expand part-time labor (teachers at TVO are not dedicated full-time to the student), and generate revenue supposedly foreclosed to district school boards. By the time the final policy text was released in February 2022 (Ontario Ministry of Education, 2022) news media coverage was competing with headlines about COVID-19, permanent remote learning, and mask mandates. It was old news. Research suggests that catastrophe enables the context for privatization (Klein, 2009, 2020; Verger et al., 2016) and indeed, the pandemic enabled governments to pursue their interests with less resistance (Buras, 2020; Miller & Liu, 2003; Williamson, 2021) as democratic debates on education policy are limited under crisis. Further, crisis itself is often leveraged as the problem privatization is positioned to solve, long after crisis has passed (Williamson, 2021; Zancajo et al., 2022).

The policy settlement, in which an education crisis met a health crisis, is poised to scale up inequities established in the previous settlement. Students who were previously reaping the benefits of so-called choice would continue to do so; however, under the context of increased class sizes, they may not have a choice but to take their courses online if the courses they need are not offered in person. Increases in class sizes mean cuts to staffing, which results in fewer course offerings. For students who struggle in school, who may be forced to learn in a modality that mitigates their connection to the classroom community, the implications of inequity are significant. Inequity refers not only to digital infrastructure but also the infrastructure of a quiet and supportive physical environment; this includes access to a caring adult who is able to respond to the needs of a whole child in real-time. News coverage, projecting the impacts of this settlement, highlight the contradiction of access under potentially high rates of attrition, as well as the limitation of choice under the constraint of ballooning class sizes. The province’s mandate to the organization responsible for centralizing online learning—TVOntario—is further tasked with generating revenue, and in so doing engages the process of privatization that dissembles public resources in partnership with corporate actor D2L.

In this policy settlement, discourses of choice and access that rationalized Ontario’s first provincial e-learning policy remained prominent. Dominant actors include government aligned with corporate interests, whose agenda would scale up the 2006 e-learning policy and remove stipulations that protected public education from privatization. News media also played a significant role in agenda setting and portraying e-learning as a public problem; while government has historically had influence over the message in news media (Howlett, 2020, p. 83), the perspective of opposing political parties, progressive research organizations, labor unions, and community organizations were also dominant in representation. D2L Brightspace, as a business interest group, continued to profit from the renegotiation of the license, but in this agreement TVOntario—as an arm of the province—further centralized the provision of e-learning. The key contextual factor during this phase was labor negotiations, which ended at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Emergency Remote Learning and Virtual Schools (2020–2023)

The next phase of Ontario’s e-learning policy saw the convergence of a crises manufactured during labor negotiations with the public health crisis of COVID-19. The host of TVOntario’s The Agenda noted the confluence of these events in an op-ed following school closure: “Two months ago, [Minister of Education] Lecce couldn’t convince anyone that even two mandatory online course credits would be appropriate for the education system. Today, most parents I talk to seem happy that at least some formal education is happening; it’s all mandatory, and it’s all virtual” (Paikin, 2020). The statement to close schools was not released by the Ministry of Education but notably through a joint statement by the Premier and the Ministers of Health and Education (Government of Ontario, 2020). They initially ordered 2 weeks of school closures from March 14 through to April 5, 2020. On March 20th the Ministry launched a website with supplementary resources, the majority of which were delivered by TVO. Secondary students were directed to online modules, the majority of which were English, Math, and Science. The website made clear that “While these materials do not replace what students have been learning at school, during this unusual time, these at-home activities offer quick and easy access to some of Ontario’s best online kindergarten to grade 12 learning resources” (Ontario Ministry of Education, 2020a).

In this case, “access” refers to students’ ability to continue learning; however, the discourse of access mobilized during this state of emergency shifted, often referring to a digital divide between students. School boards attempted to address this divide by “working around the clock, preparing, delivering and organizing drive-through pickups of items such as Chromebooks, iPads and internet sticks to thousands of students” (Teotonio & Rushowy, 2020). Despite the acute health crisis, the Minister of Education made a causal link between access to devices and engagement: “We took two million kids who are in class in March, and, within days, we pivoted to distant virtual learning. Our new teacher-led program is keeping students engaged in learning. And I’m proud of this province, of our ingenuity, of the can-do spirit, of our people, doing whatever it takes to support our kids” (Teotonio & Rushowy, 2020). In reality, the thousands of devices lent to students took months to deliver—until May in the TDSB (Patel, 2020)—and once received, created a deficit of devices in schools that boards struggled to replace in the fall (Mahoney, 2020; Rushowy, 2020). Further, the digital divide was not just a matter of getting devices in to the hands of students but about engaging the “mediating role of economic, cultural, and social forms of capital in shaping individuals’ engagements with ICT” (Selwyn & Facer, 2010, p. 1). This is to say that it takes more than a computer and connection to engage students in learning.

Discourses related to achievement during the first school closure also transformed as districts elevated the importance of relationships, well-being, and equity. The largest district in Canada, for instance, listed principles for remote learning that included a directive to:

1. Prioritize the health and well-being of everyone. 2. Focus on the continuation of learning in a variety of ways. 3. Maintain relationships and connection to one another. 4. Engage all students, especially those who have historically been underserved and those who may not be able to participate effectively in remote learning for a variety of reasons. In other words, we want to remain in contact with students and their families, even if they are not able to submit work or participate in learning sessions. 5. Build staff capacity to be effective in this remote space. (Toronto District School Board, 2020)

The Ministry of Education approved flexibility with assessment, indicating that grades could not drop below students’ mark on March 13th when schools first closed: “In keeping with the understanding that marks should represent the most accurate reflection of student work, based on what is reasonable and in the best interest of students during this time, and in recognition of performance prior to March 13th, teachers can adjust the weighting of assigned tasks in their determination of a final mark as needed” (Miller, 2020a). Adjustments to assessments and the prioritization did not last, however, as the return to school in Fall 2020 ushered in a business-as-usual approach (Farhadi & Winton, 2021) entrenching policy particulars temporarily interrupted during the initial months of the COVID-19 crisis. This revealed a continued emphasis on academic achievement.

Often misunderstood in discussions about e-learning in the pandemic’s early months was the difference between emergency remote teaching and online learning, as well as differences between asynchronous and synchronous instruction:

In contrast to experiences that are planned from the beginning and designed to be online, emergency remote teaching (ERT) is a temporary shift of instructional delivery to an alternate delivery mode due to crisis circumstances. [. . .] The primary objective in these circumstances is not to re-create a robust educational ecosystem but rather to provide temporary access to instruction and instructional supports in a manner that is quick to set up and is reliably available during an emergency or crisis. When we understand ERT in this manner, we can start to divorce it from “online learning.” (Hodges et al., 2020)

On the ground, enactment of emergency remote teaching was replete with contradictions, reflecting schools’ various situated and material contexts (Gale, 1999). Key influences on their enactment included student demographics, staffing, infrastructure, budgets, and teachers’ attitudes, values, and outlooks (Farhadi & Winton, 2021).

As the crisis extended from months into years of schooling, the media reported on-going debates over about the impacts of emergency remote learning, the effects of rolling in-person school closures on students, and the importance of in-person learning during a public health crisis. By September 2021 emergency remote learning had transitioned into the creation of virtual schools, some of which later collapsed into hybrid learning models where teachers instruct students in-person and online simultaneously. Discourses of personalization and choice informed debates surrounding virtual schools and hybrid learning, which were set up to conform to the requirements detailed in Program/Policy Memorandum (PPM) 164: Requirements for Remote Learning in August 2020. According to this document, the purpose of the policy is to ensure “that students across Ontario receive a consistent approach to remote learning in times of extended interruption to conventional in-person learning, such as when public health emergencies, pandemics, natural disasters, or other unplanned events force the closure of classrooms or schools” (Ontario Ministry of Education, 2020d).

Virtual schools were set up by school boards at the direction of the government to enable families to choose whether to send their children to school in-person or have them continue online; however, Upper Canada District School board set precedent in 2020 with their use of hybrid learning to meet the requirements of PPM 164 to deliver full-time synchronous instruction for students who chose virtual learning during the pandemic. Reporting by the CBC (Wong, 2020) highlighted the logistical impossibility of providing equitable education under this model, quoting the director of education Stephen Sliwa who called the approach: “An imperfect approach during an imperfect time.” While he explained that resources and staffing were driving the decision, he further suggested that it offers “choice” and “flexibility” to families who want to move between learning online and in person (see also Miller, 2020b).

Local unions representing teachers at the elementary and secondary panel highlighted privacy concerns under this model. Simcoe County District School Board, which instituted hybrid learning shortly after, responded to privacy concerns by pointing to their policy on personal information, which rationalizes the expansion of digital tools for educational purposes as “keeping with 21st century technology” (Simcoe County District School Board, n.d.). In the context of hybrid learning, this discourse simultaneously rationalizes the extension of digital tools into the homes of students who have no choice but to learn online. Later, a report by Human Rights Watch detailed the impact of online education policies during the pandemic, after reviewing 163 EdTech products endorsed by governments, including Ontario:

Human Rights Watch finds that governments’ endorsements of the majority of these online learning platforms put at risk or directly violated children’s privacy and other children’s rights, for purposes unrelated to their education [. . .] Children are surveilled at dizzying scale in their online classrooms. Human Rights Watch observed 145 EdTech products directly sending or granting access to children’s personal data to 196 third-party companies, overwhelmingly AdTech. (Human Rights Watch, 2022, pp. 1–2)

The Globe and Mail explained the implications of these findings on students across Canada:

Millions of students in Canada and around the world had their personal information sent to advertisers and data brokers when governments made an abrupt switch to online learning during the pandemic, according to a new report that reveals safety gaps in educational technology. (Durrani & Alphonso, 2022)

Indeed, as more school boards turned to hybrid learning in the 2021–2022 school year, students already struggling under pandemic conditions, whose choice was between increased exposure to illness or learning online, were more likely to be impacted by this model and its potential privacy violations. In Ontario, it was widely reported, not only in news media but in studies later published about the epidemiology of COVID-19, that communities most impacted by the pandemic and those most likely to go online were those racialized and often living in lower-income communities:

The percentage of students choosing remote learning compared to in-person schooling may reflect the racial geographies of Canadian urban centres. A number of reports from the Greater Toronto Area analyzed the demographics of schooling choice during the COVID-19 pandemic. These analyses showed that families living in neighbourhoods with lower incomes and with more racialized residents were more likely to choose online schooling. (Gallagher-Mackay et al., 2021, p. 8)

This was an external policy context that put pressure on “hot spots” like Peel Region, which reflected 40% of COVID-19 cases reported in the 2021–2022 school year (insauga.com, 2022). A report on “Secondary School Teachers’ Experience of Implementing Hybrid Learning and Quadmester Schedules in Peel, Ontario” found that online learners in this model were more negatively impacted by hybrid models of learning and that there were increasing inequities in students’ experiences as well as their access to and use of technology (Campbell et al., 2022).

While emergency remote learning, particularly set out through PPM 164, was intended to serve as a temporary response to a public health crisis, an imperfect approach during an imperfect time, a confidential document containing new proposals for e-learning policy in Ontario leaked in March 2021. Details revealed that the government was interested in making virtual learning a permanent choice in the province’s education systems. The document outlined three proposed forms of online learning:

• Full-day synchronous online learning for students of all ages, which would be run by the school boards and would be “useful for students who cannot or prefer not to access the physical school environment.”

• Individual high-school-level classes taught online by teachers and run by school boards, that take place at a dedicated slot in the student’s timetable.

• Fully independent online learning for high school students who “prefer to learn asynchronously and at flexible hours.” This option would be run by TVO and would require the school board to pay a fee. (CBC News, 2021)

The document provides three rationales for the three models to support “student success” and uptake in online learning: choice, quality, and equity. Under the heading of choice, the Ministry of Education references PPM 164 as an antecedent for the development:

In the 2020-21 school year, parents had the option to enroll their child in either an in-person model of learning at a physical school, or in remote learning classes with real-time, synchronous learning support from a school board teacher. The government is considering introducing legislation to make this a permanent part of elementary and secondary education in Ontario, including after the COVID-19 pandemic is over. (Ontario Ministry of Education Initiatives Committee, 2021, p. 8)

Submissions in response to the Ministry of Education’s plan to expand online learning highlight the diversity of interest pressure groups who organized to oppose this vision. This includes the Halton District School Board (2021), the Elementary Teachers’ Federation of Ontario (Millan & Kearney, 2021), and the Ontario Public School Boards’ Association (2020).

In this phase, there is a convergence of crises. Chronic underfunding of public education—which reflects a 16.8 billion school repair backlog, increases in class sizes, and reductions in operating funding (Tranjan et al., 2022, p. 20)—alongside the pressures of COVID-19 in-person school closures made emergency remote learning the only choice for some families, but no choice at all for others. For students with medically complex needs, families without support at home, and students who are under resourced, in-person learning was the only choice. For others, learning remotely during closures offered reprieve from the harm of “normal.” As secondary teacher Salisbury (2022, p. 7) writes: “Is “getting back to normal” really the best answer for everyone? Is returning to that “normal” the best we can hope for?”

The push for schools to be safer is essential, but it’s no more critical today, almost two years into a global pandemic, than it has been for all the decades Black, Indigenous, other students of colour, disabled students, 2SLGBTQ+ students, and others who have needed it. (8)

Indeed, as schools continue to absorb the financial impact of pandemic remote learning, they may also have no choice but to offer e-learning to students with insufficient access to in-person course options. Choice and access here are interdependent, rationalized by a neoliberal ideology of personalization that effectively removes students from the community context of their school.

In this policy settlement, dominant discourses of choice and access that rationalized Ontario’s first provincial e-learning policy remained; however, in the context of a health crisis it was a choice between illness and health with racialized and low-income communities disproportionately enrolled online because they carried a higher share of the COVID-19 burden. The synchronous (remote) delivery model displaced discourses of personalization with consistency during interruption to in-person learning, revealing the paradox of a promise that promises all student access online. Since the return to in-person learning in 2023, this remote learning policy remains; the provincial vision for online learning, titled Expanding Student Access to Online and Remote Learning, demonstrates the intertextuality of policy under a unifying discourse. Dominant actors include government, which implemented remote learning requirements during COVID-19 and maintained its policy after a return to in-person learning, and business interests, which proliferated through corporate partnerships during crisis. For example, Ontario partnered with Rogers Communications and Apple to distribute iPad devices with wireless data (Ontario Ministry of Education, 2020c). Corporate platforms were encouraged, as part of the delivery of learning online, turning families into a captive market: “Educators have continued to engage families using a variety of tools such as Google Classroom/Brightspace, Zoom, email, digital newsletters, classroom websites/blogs and Twitter” (Toronto District School Board, 2021, p. 28). Finally, interest pressure groups, think tanks, and mass media were all actors with direct influence on education policy online. The key contextual factor during this phase was the COVID-19 pandemic.

Conclusion

This historiography of e-learning policy in Ontario traces the trajectory of its settlement in 2006 through a sustained period of crises that began in 2019, through the COVID-19 pandemic, and beyond. In contrast to linear accounts of the history of online learning in Ontario (e.g., Canadian eLearning Network, 2023; Ontario Ministry of Education, 2019) that position the current policy as one that simply “modernizes Ontario classrooms”(Government of Ontario, 2019a), we show how successive governments have mobilized neoliberal discourses of personalization, access, and choice to justify new arrangements with private actors, within a broader sociopolitical context that includes increased privatization and commodification of public institutions, cuts to public spending, and imagines individuals as rational subjects driven to maximize their economic potential.

Throughout the three phases, corporate actors demonstrate increasing influence. This includes D2L—the developer of Brightspace—as well as third-party applications and services; the profit-driven technologies of EdTech have exploded during the pandemic (Cohen, 2022). The implications of these developments on educational policy are spelled out by Kalervo Gulson and Sam Sellar, who show how new modes of governance depend on the coordination of multi-actor networks underpinned by data infrastructures:

These infrastructures are an important element in contemporary schooling, which increasingly operates in network modalities that connect a range of organisations and actors, from schools and local school boards to state and provincial education ministries, commercial providers of education products and services, national education departments and international organisations, such as the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. (2019, pp. 351–352)

Policy networks, too, are shaped by socio-technical power that, as Gulson and Sellar explain, cohere through shared standards in forums that include private companies: “The development and implementation of data-driven educational infrastructures is creating opportunities for commercial providers of data-based products and services to participate in novel ways in education governance. The growth of data infrastructure is, therefore, widening the set of policy actors who play a role in education” (360).

The impact of dominant policy actors, of government and allied corporate interests, to “make meaning stick” through discursive strategies, means that they are necessarily asymmetrical and, as asymmetrical, productive of “unsettling effects or crisis” that render policy settlements temporary (Gale, 1999, p. 401). Context dependent, asymmetrical, and temporary policy settlements highlighted in our historiography complicate successive government’s claims that e-learning policies are novel, modern, and expand access and choice for students, enabling them to personalize their education. They show that access to online education is shaped by variables that impact success in-person; it is neither personalized nor customizable but instead centralized, standardized and, by design, operate independent of rather than interdependent with community.

Our case study of Ontario contributes to examinations of digital technology policy in K-12 contexts, which, before the pandemic, “tended to escape close attention from policy scholars” (Selwyn, 2018, p. 459). Rather than limiting our analysis to the temporally bound division of pre and post pandemic, we show how discourse and ideology recontextualize policy and practice over time. In doing so, we problematize policy levers recommended by others, such as “incentives, awareness raising, capacity-building, vision, and engagement” to enable online learning (Robertson et al., 2021, p. 9). In other words, we show how the very infrastructure of online education, and the discourse that rationalizes its growth, is also political. We highlight the interdependence of schools—online and in-person—with social processes productive of inequality. These include gendered and racialized poverty and its disproportionate impact on Black and Indigenous peoples systemically disadvantaged by processes of colonial dispossession, displacement, and forced migration.

We argue that the history of online education policy in Ontario has contributed to inequity in schooling by facilitating a process of privatization that disassembles resources from the public sector and accelerates the commodification of schooling, designed to materialize for those already socially advantaged. The impact of privatization, facilitated by online education policies, is likely to exacerbate challenges students marginalized by schooling already face. Further, we show how these processes of inequity are more than local (and spatially bound to the province) by calling attention to mandates that marketize online learning abroad. In doing so, we highlight the contradictions of global citizenship as a discourse that highlights our interconnection and interdependence with others in the world and emphasizes our social responsibilities to care for our planet and those within it. Attuning to the interconnection between local decisions and global impacts, we highlight the failure of responsibility to care for the outcomes of children vulnerable to the same forces of privatization that we protect children from here, at home.

Ontario’s current Progressive Conservative government ensures online learning remains a so-called choice for families and students by creating demand through the implementation of an e-learning graduation requirement for secondary students as well as through remote learning policies sustained after crisis. Yet, this demand is driven by neoliberal austerity policies that redirect resources from schools to for profit and non-profit organizations. Undoubtedly, the politics of choice and access will be the subject of discussion in years to come.