Career Pathways is the next wave in education. For the student, it’s all about making a roadmap to the place you want to be. The concept has been tried and tested all over the world and will become a regular part of High School and Post Secondary education in many Provinces.

In this work, we will launch a Shared Service to support the development of various “Pathways” to prepare students for the world of work. Alberta Learning is funding the effort and the intention is to build a system that is flexible and responsive to the needs of our varied users.

SAIT is actively involved in Applied Research in a number of areas. This project will explore the existing and emerging technologies of the SuperNet, Server-Centric Computing and Digital Object Repositories. The findings will be used to inform the Learning Ministry of best practice by lessons learned in the design and deployment of SAIT’s new support system for Learners and Instructors.

Top-down design is common in many IT environments. Many technology projects have come and gone without major adoption because the users were not made part of the design process. In this case we say “Let the Users make the decisions”. Although this sounds like a bottom-up approach to IT design, in practice we see more success from a top & bottom approach where the efforts meet somewhere in the middle.

We anticipate that the users of this service will be Teachers in the K-12 system and Instructors in Post Secondary institutes such as SAIT. Users will be allowed to collaborate and share ideas, lesson plans & teaching material to ease the transition of our students from High School into the various forms of Post Secondary.

By extention, the Technology resources can be given to the students so that they can “play” with Post Secondary at a distance and see how their own life skills and portfolios match up with the many options.