Bonnyville Library busy with Distant Education

“It’s often said that libraries are recession proof and tend to get busier,” reports Ina Smith with the Bonnyville Municipal Library. Smith presented an outline of the libraries expected budget to Town Council last week. Along with the budget, Smith reported to Council that the library has been quite busy with distant education.

“One place it’s been really noticeably busy is in exams,” Smith says the library supervises distant education exams for post-secondary programs. “Distant education is really popular.” In 2013, the library supervised ten exams, Smith says that’s gone up dramatically, “this year we’ve supervised 130.”

While distance education is growing in popularity, the exams are growing in complications, Smith explains when the library started supervising the exams they were paper format. “Now, we have a lot of online exams, and you’d think that would be easier… but it’s not,” laughs Smith. “You get a package of 15 papers of instructions from the institution on how the the test has to be done.” Smith explains the library has to set up the internet browser, passwords for access and other technical aspects of the test.

“For one of our full time staff [members] this has been a great increase in her work load to go up to 130 exams this year,” Smith says there’s a multitude of reasons for the increase in distance education; including the obvious job loss and/or change due to the recession. There is also not that many institutions that are set up to supervise distance education exams, “many places won’t do them anymore, because of the amount of work [involved]; including in Cold Lake,” reports Smith.

The library is priced much lower than other established institutions, such as Portage College. “The college charges $100, we charge $25.” Smith reports there are a lot of people coming from Cold Lake and other neighbouring communities.

For more information on distant education and what institutions/exams the library is accredited for supervising, visit the Bonnyville Library or call 780-826-3071.