The Walkerton Clean Water Centre (WCWC), an Ontario crown agency, to provide training courses are accessible and tailored to meet the needs of drinking water operators in small and remote communities. In addition to the training oriented objectives, WCWC focuses much effort on research and technology transfer, dealing with new drinking water technologies, including optimization approaches.

This paper proposes that distance education technology can be utilized to facilitate proper training and sustained competency for operators, not only in the more densely populated areas of southern Ontario, but also in more remote locations in northern Ontario.

The SECTIONS model proposed by Bates and Poole (2003), will be utilized to assess the applicability of distance education technology to a specific course called “Entry-Level Course for Drinking Water Operators.”  This paper focuses on two (2) aspects of the SECTIONS model — students and teaching — which are largely independent of the technological aspects of distance education.