Quebec invests $54 million for digital platform that helps students learn French

Minister of Education Bernard Drainville appointed monitors to address a 'toxic climate' at Bedford school. (Jacques Boissinot, The Canadian Press)

Quebec has awarded Alloprof more than $54 million over three years to develop a new platform dedicated to learning French to improve elementary and high school students' proficiency in the language.

Education Minister Bernard Drainville made the announcement on Monday in the library of an elementary school in Longueuil, on Montreal's South Shore.

"It's a very important investment. But if we want to improve our students' performance in French, we have to make investments like these," Drainville said at the news conference.

The platform, already available on the web, is called Allofrançais and is designed to complement the work done by teachers in the classroom. Content will be enhanced on an ongoing basis until 2027.

Students will find worksheets, videos and educational games. Starting in the 2025-2026 school year, Alloprof, known for its digital resources in various subjects, promises to offer personalized courses adapted to students' difficulties in French, thanks to a "virtual assistant." Activities will also evolve in real-time as students progress.

"We're putting technology at the service of pedagogy," said Drainville.

Artificial intelligence will be put to good use, but this use will be "within an extremely well-controlled framework," the minister said.

"The new educational tools we're going to create thanks to Allofrançais will be Quebec content. We're going to make sure that Quebec culture is at the heart of this new content", he added, emphasizing that he had promised to put Quebec culture at the service of language learning as part of the modernization of French courses.

Students who need help at the end of their Allofrançais course will still be able to turn to new tutoring services provided by teachers, and be entitled to follow-up appointments.

Alloprof claims to support 550,000 students and carries out an average of 60 million interventions yearly. With this new platform, the organization plans to carry out an additional 22 million tutoring sessions in French alone over the next three years, says co-founder and CEO Sandrine Faust.

"There will be 50 new positions. We're going to use new technologies. There are going to be calls for tender to help us deploy certain more advanced technologies," said Faust alongside the minister.

At the outset of the press conference, Drainville stressed the importance of promoting and mastering the French language among young people, pointing in particular to performance on ministerial exams.

The results of the latest June exams, released in August, showed that the pass rate for the Secondary 5 writing test had dropped to 70.7 per cent, compared to 74.8 per cent last year.

Drainville noted that "the historical trend in French results is not favourable".

"We feel the need for a change of direction. Today's announcement is part of that effort," he said.

Without knowing whether the new platform will be sufficient to reverse this trend, the minister said he was nevertheless convinced that it "will make a difference" among students who are having difficulty, maintaining that Alloprof has proved its worth over the years.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published in French on Sept. 30, 2024.