The need to connect the underserved and marginalized to rich, relevant, and robust education and training opportunities has been salient in the news during the past few years and this concern is mounting during the pandemic. Fortunately, our guest this week in Silver Lining for Learning, Maxim Jean-Louis, has been engaged in a plethora of educational activities, initiatives, and projects during the past 25 years to do just that throughout the Canadian province of Ontario and beyond. Maxim is the President and CEO of Contact North; a progressive, thought leading organization that is expanding its footprint within Canada and throughout the global education community.
More about Maxim and Contact North below the video
Contact North specializes in online, open, and increasingly flexible forms of learning. It utilizes a diverse array of distance learning delivery mechanisms, including teleconferencing, audioconferencing, videoconferencing, and online and blended learning. And Maxim has been a major contributor to this area since the 1980s. As such he will offer us expansive views of what has happened in the past, the status of Contact North’s many projects today, and where this is headed in the future. Today, Maxim is particularly interested new educational pedagogies in this online and blended learning age that are geared to a changing society and workplace; these are collaborative, self-directed, learner-centered, open, inquiry-based, increasingly non-formal, and rich in multimedia, choice, and learner control.
For those interested in exemplary teaching resources, tools, trends, and ideas during the pandemic, you might check out the TeachOnline.ca webinar series at https://teachonline.ca/webinars. It is visited each year by over 275,000 higher education faculty members as well as instructors and support personnel across all educational levels and sectors. Need help with instructional design, quality assurance, open education, or student success, you will find it! Be sure to bring a laptop or pen and paper to this section because everyone is bound to get dozens of potential resources and ideas from this event. And do friend Maxim in LinkedIn.
Maxim Jean-Louis
Bio: Maxim Jean-Louis is President – Chief Executive Officer of Contact North | Contact Nord, Ontario’s Distance Education and Training Network, headquartered in Thunder Bay, Ontario.
Prior to arriving at Contact North | Contact Nord in 1996, Maxim worked in senior management roles for over 15 years at Athabasca University in Alberta, Canada’s open university. At Contact North | Contact Nord, Maxim leads a team of 300 staff supporting the delivery of education and training opportunities from the province’s 24 public colleges, 22 public universities, and 250 literacy and basic skills and training providers to Ontarians in 600 small, rural, remote, Aboriginal and Francophone communities through 112 online learning centres covering 1 million square kilometres. These local online learning centres are equipped with web conferencing, videoconferencing and audioconferencing distance delivery platforms, as well as computer workstations and high-speed internet for students to participate in their synchronous and asynchronous courses. Support services are available in English and French.
Maxim is author and/or coordinator of major publications in the area of online learning and distance education and has been a participant / presenter at major conferences on distance education and alternative forms of delivery, such as the International Conference on Distance Education (ICDE) and the conferences led by the Canadian Association of Distance Education (CADE).
Web Resources:
About teachonline.ca.