Mr. Chairman, committee members, thank you for this opportunity to come and talk to you about our initiative and about our contribution to the Roadmap.
My name is Nancie Cantin, and I am the director of Research and Development, Language Training in the Learning Programs Branch of the Canada School of Public Service. On behalf of the school, I would like to thank you for this opportunity to talk about the school's contribution to the Roadmap for Canada's Linguistic Duality 2008-2013: Acting for the Future.
The Canada School of Public Service is the common learning services provider for the public service of Canada. Throughout the country, the school offers a range of training and development activities aimed at strengthening both individual and organizational capacities and fostering management excellence in the federal public service.
In the context of the Roadmap, the school proposed an initiative to enhance access to its on-line second-language training and retention products, with the support of Canadian universities. This initiative, which is being conducted in the form of a pilot project, began in 2009 and will draw to a close on March 31. The school received funding of $2.5 million over three years to implement this initiative. One of the objectives was to help expand the pool of recent university graduates who consider the federal public service as an employer of choice and who meet the Government of Canada's bilingualism requirements.
The school's main activities in the context of this initiative involved negotiating agreements with partner universities, adapting language training products, facilitating access to its products, and finally, evaluating the initiative. This evaluation is currently underway. The partner universities, meanwhile, were asked to provide an environment conducive to learning, to contribute to the advancement of official languages, and to participate in a cohort study.
Concretely, 10 universities participated in this pilot project: Carleton University; L'École nationale d'administration publique; York University, Glendon Campus; Université Ste-Anne; Simon Fraser University; the University of Alberta; the University of Ottawa; the University of Regina; the University of Waterloo; and the University of Victoria.
The school developed two course curricula, one in French and one in English, and organized sessions with the Public Service Commission to assess the participants' second-language competencies, both at the beginning and at the end of the initiative.
The school then provided access to 16 of its on-line learning products to students at these 10 universities. The curricula we developed consist of a progression of educational activities in nine phases. These learning activities are aimed in particular at improving comprehension, pronunciation, grammar and writing skills in the second language. The products are interactive; they include simulation components and language skills self-assessment tools.
In addition, the school created short video sequences with the Commissioner of Official Languages in which the commissioner talks about the importance of Canada's linguistic duality. These video sequences were inserted into the curricula as educational material to create awareness of the importance of Canadian linguistic duality. Preliminary findings indicate that participants were pleased with the quality of the learning tools and with the services provided by the school in the context of the initiative.
Together with Canadian Heritage, the Canada School of Public Service is participating in the horizontal summative evaluation of the Roadmap in order to assess its relevance and the effectiveness of the pilot project.
Thank you for your attention, and I'll be happy to answer your questions.