Fly-in education a new trend.

Algoma University College is airlifting its knowledge base in community development to the James Bay coast this summer.

The Sault Ste. Marie post-secondary institution plans to offer the first off-campus delivery of its innovative community economic and social development (CESD) program at a seven-day workshop in July at the Fort Albany First Nation.

The one-of-a-kind program is geared toward marrying both economic and social approaches to community development for small northern towns and First Nations communities.

The multi-disciplinary accredited program prepares graduates to become certified officers with either the Economic Developers' Association of Canada (EDAC) and/or the Council for the Advancement of Native Development Officers, the indigenous sister agency for EDAC.

"We're very excited," says Alice Corbiere, the program's co-ordinator, who will be making the July 25 to August 1 trip with program instructors, Judy Syrette and Dr. Gayle Broad. "(The First Nations) contacted us and asked us if we would develop the course off-site."

The Fort Albany workshop is an off-shoot of Algoma's intensive one-week Spring Institute (June 13 to 20) held annually on the Queen Street campus. It provides upgrading classes for those working in economic and community development fields.

The institute, as with the upcoming Fort Albany workshop, crams in a semester's worth of material into seven days. It is an introductory course to the 30-credit certificate program with which attendees receive the equivalent of three credits toward a CESD certificate.

At $500 tuition per person, 12 people from the remote coastal community of 1,000 plan to attend the workshop, most of whom work in the First Nation's administration department.

The Fort Albany First Nation is covering the cost of the instructors' airfare and accommodations. The pilot course will examine the overall role and values of community development in northern and rural areas, introduce some tools and techniques, and will familiarize participants with the language and policy issues of community development.

Participants will be required to do some pre-course study and submit an assignment prior to the workshop and file another assignment within three weeks after the workshop ends. Broad says the Fort Albany trip will be as much a learning experience for the instructors as it will be for the participants.

Additional inquiries for more off-site courses have come from development agencies on Manitoulin Island, Sioux Lookout and Burn's Lake in the B.C. interior.

Down the road, Algoma hopes to eventually offer some learning modules via distance education, says Broad."

Since the program was launched in January 2002, 66 full- and part-time students have taken a combination of the certificate and the full four-year diploma course.

In Algoma's main on-campus program, students are grouped together for the first two years before branching off in their third and fourth years to specialize in either social or economic development.

The course material was developed in concert with the Centre of Community Enterprise, a B.C.-based non-profit community economic development agency, that has worked with First Nations communities on the West Coast.

"We're trying as much as possible to tailor our learning material to the context of the environment with which people are living," says Broad. "We hope that the students who graduate here will eventually become. agents of change in their community.

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