The Emerge One-to-One Laptop Learning Project (Emerge) was established in 2006 by Alberta Education to investigate the efficacy of laptops for teaching and learning in the 21st Century. Alberta Education used a competitive process in 2007 to award three-year grants to 20 jurisdictions, involving 50 schools. Each of the 20 jurisdictional grantees selected a specific target population, or 21st Century Skill set, as a focus for their three-year grant award. Many of the Emerge jurisdictions focused on a common set of 21st Century Skills such as critical thinking, collaboration, global awareness, or information and communication technology (ICT).
The Emerge jurisdictions deployed one-to-one laptop learning at specific grade levels or with specific student populations within their targeted schools. None of the Emerge programs were school-wide deployments. While in some Emerge programs the laptops followed the students (for as long as those students were enrolled in the host school), other jurisdictions made the decision to keep the laptops at specific grade levels, which meant new groups of students in the program each year. Still others had hybrids of the two approaches.
In addition to awarding the jurisdictional grants, Alberta Education established an Emerge Community of Practice (COP) that was facilitated by an annual Summer Institute; bi-annual face-to-face professional development days; periodic professional development webinars; and a virtual site for Emerge communication and online exchanges of information and resources. The three-year project culminates in a final summer institute.