CANARIE

CANARIE Inc. - Canada's advanced Internet development organization - is a not-for-profit corporation supported by its members, project partners and the Federal Government.

CANARIE's mission is to accelerate Canada's advanced Internet development and use by facilitating the widespread adoption of faster, more efficient networks and by enabling the next generation of advanced products, applications and services to run on them.

Headquartered in Ottawa, Ontario, CANARIE employs 17 full-time staff dedicated to the research and implementation of advanced networks and applications that will stimulate economic growth and increase Canada's international competitiveness.

The national organization was created in 1993 by the private sector and academia under the leadership of the Government of Canada. CANARIE Inc. is supported by membership fees, with major funding of its programmes and activities provided by the Government of Canada through Industry Canada.

The CANARIE web site is http://www.canarie.ca.

Other countries have analogues of CANARIE but they are never exact matches. These include:

• JANET and JISC in the UK
• SURF in the Netherlands

CANARIE furthers this wider brief by promoting and participating in strategic collaborations among key sectors, and by partnering with peer networks and organizations around the world, CANARIE Inc. stimulates and supports research, innovation and growth, bringing economic, social, and cultural benefits to Canadians.

In the past, CANARIE has funded many e-learning developments.

Existing case study

There is a comprehensive but somewhat out of date case study of CANARIE at http://www.matic-media.co.uk/ukeu/EUNI-chap10-CANARIE-2004.doc - it was first written in 2001 but updated in summer 2004 (by Paul Bacsich and Sara Frank Bristow).

The Editor's Introduction to that notes:

Between 1993 and March 2004, CANARIE – a small, non-profit organisation – received government funding of C$360 million (£161 million) for over 225 projects focussed on e-learning, e-content, e-business and e-health. Many would credit CANARIE for assuring Canada’s reputation as a world-leading broadband adopter and innovator (and, more relevant to e-university developments, with helping the country to become a lead developer of learning object repository infrastructure). CANARIE has also helped connect over 2,000 schools, colleges and universities to its advanced CA*NET 4 network, and has created thousands of jobs nationwide.

When this CANARIE Report was written, CANARIE was an organisation “in full swing”, with government funding assured for over two more years. Nearly all of its projects saw completion by March 2004, however, and many of those discussed below finished long before that. During a presentation in June 2004, CANARIE president and CEO Andrew Bjerring noted that CANARIE’s original mandate had been to “visit the future and report back” – now that the future has arrived, it seems, it is the role of CANARIE itself that requires clarification.

At the time of writing [2004], CANARIE maintains some modest funding for completing the roll-out of CA*net 4 as scheduled, but all other project funding is on hold. Several of Canada’s federal departments are said to be collaborating on what might become a national strategic vision to help frame the future of organisations like CANARIE, and perhaps lead to the creation of an agency not unlike the Department for Education and Skills (DfES) e-Learning Strategy Unit in the UK. Until the emergence of this new strategic plan, hoped to be in the autumn of 2004, however, there will be no further funding for the CANARIE projects described below. Thus it remains to be seen whether CANARIE will succeed at reinventing itself in today’s context.

This depressing conclusion seems still to be the case. A search of the CANARIE web site for "e-learning" reveals no hits later than 2003.

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