Title: EDUCATION-CANADA: University Coming to the Arctic By Mark Bourrie OTTAWA, May 16 (IPS) - The University of the Arctic, an institution without walls, will begin enrolling students next year in areas north of the 60th parallel. The university is aimed at students who live in hundreds of communities above the Arctic Circle - towns and villages among the most isolated in the world. The new institution will use satellite technology and the Internet to reach people who previously had no chance of a post- secondary education in their home community. The University of the Arctic is an international effort of the countries that make up the membership of the Artic Council - Canada, Russia, Finland, Sweden, Iceland, Norway and the United States - that advises governments on pollution issues in the far north. Using new information technology, distributing course material will be inexpensive, according to organisers. The 1,000 students expected to enrol in the University of the Arctic are people who would probably have left the region to get an education and would never have returned, or who would simply have never studied at the post-secondary level. "One of the benefits is that northern people in Canada can complete degrees without leaving the region," said Aron Senkpiel, dean of arts and sciences at Yukon College in Whitehorse. His college is lending office space for the new University's administration. "Those degree opportunities will be relevant like no other program that's ever been offered," Senkpiel said. "It will specifically look at the land and the peoples of the North. "The problem with high-tech distance education years ago was that nobody had video or some other technology. The intention here is not for the University of the Arctic to compete with other colleges in the host countries, but to add to them." There is a pressing need for educated people in the North. On the Canadian side of the region, more than half of the 13,000 government jobs in the new aboriginal territory of Nunavut, an area three times the size of Germany, are going to non-Natives from outside the territory because of the lack of administrative and research skills among the indigenous population. University of the Arctic will offer bachelor degrees in circumpolar studies, a catch-all that includes research on environment, social issues, and local administration. It will have no main campus, relying instead on teleconferencing, correspondence courses and the Internet. Circumpolar studies are designed to help students, mainly indigenous people, understand the issues that are faced be all of the peoples living in the Arctic. Therefore, all students, whether in northern North America or northern Europe and Asia, take the same core courses, no matter in what language. The university will stress environmental studies and regional issues. Its founders have created a circumpolar PhD network in Arctic environmental studies, and are developing research projects on peoples, cultures and environmental changes in the north, including the impact of transboundary pollution in the region. The goals of the university are to share knowledge among northerners to face the challenges of regional stability; harmonise learning systems of traditional and scientific knowledge; integrate multiple disciplines to investigate contemporary issues in the region from a comprehensive perspective; combine classroom, mobility and distance learning methods to overcome barriers to education in the north; and provide the knowledge and tools for northerners to meet the responsibilities of regional autonomy. "With the possible exception of Iceland, the fundamental problem for all of us (in the northern post-secondary education field) is: how do you provide relevant, affordable programming to a small, dispersed population? That's the challenge," Senkpiel said. The University of the Arctic's International Co-ordination Centre is based at the University of Lapland, in Rovaniemi, Finland. Its co-ordinator, Richard Langlais, said the administration costs of the university will run to about 450,000 dollars a year. Costs of developing courses and creating the university's distribution systems are being picked up by Arctic Council governments who are partners in the project. But the main support for the university has come from the indigenous people of the circumpolar regions, Langlais said. "They know the needs of the region and have jumped at the chance to help organize this project," he said. (END/IPS/mk/mk/99) Origin: Montevideo/EDUCATION-CANADA/ ---- [c] 1999, InterPress Third World News Agency (IPS) All rights reserved May not be reproduced, reprinted or posted to any system or service outside of the APC networks, without specific permission from IPS. 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