UBC Response to Improving Canada's Digital Advantage

Summary

The University of British Columbia wishes to convey its support of the government's proposal to create a stronger and more competitive digital economy. As a leader in research, education and information dissemination, UBC is very much connected to the past, present and future of the digital economy in Canada. UBC would like to see a digital environment that fosters innovation, creativity and information sharing through a fair implementation of copyright and encouraging learning and access for all.

The University of British Columbia's vision statement declares, "As one of the world's leading universities, the University of British Columbia creates an exceptional learning environment that fosters global citizenship, advances a civil and sustainable society, and supports outstanding research to serve the people of British Columbia, Canada and the world." UBC is therefore in a unique and exciting position, located on the west coast of Canada and serving as a major hub of research, education and information sharing for the region, the country and the world, to work with the nation in educating the next leaders in the digital economy, helping to nurture and guide the development of that economy and sharing its results with Canadians and world citizens alike.

Submission

Innovation Using Digital Technologies

UBC is helping to create tomorrow's leaders in every major discipline, including business, economics, computer science, medicine, law and arts, among others. Just as a university provides a diverse and fertile environment for learning, the Canadian economy should likewise be prepared for innovation and learning to come from any sector. Focusing on key sectors should be an ongoing and adaptable process that fosters the ongoing evolution of digital technology.

UBC's core academic activities in learning and scholarship often require the use of materials still under copyright. Reasonable pricing for the use of copyright materials has become an issue with recent proposed changes to university charges by Access Copyright. The strengthening of the fair dealing provisions for private study and research in the recent Copyright Bill is an encouraging step. UBC works to provide access to digital information to all campus users, the province, and the nation under the provisions of copyright law. An environment that fosters information sharing to promote education and creativity is crucial in a digital economy.

It is important to support an open access environment, thereby making publically funded research available to the Canadian public rather than having it encumbered by third party, private hands. To achieve a greater level of open access to knowledge, universities across Canada need to support the development of open access journals, to increase the number of university–wide institutional repositories and to work strategically to develop a robust national information repository program. These approaches will enable Canadians to store, preserve and have ongoing access to Canada's digital assets without having to buy back publicly funded information from third parties. An open access culture will drive down the costs of access to research and scholarly knowledge and increase opportunities for the dissemination of Canadian research.

The University of British Columbia is also working to ensure that new ideas and knowledge are appropriately mobilized into society for rapid and efficient utilization. We are creating "open access" platforms to ultimately ensure that all research publications are freely accessible to the world.

Digital Infrastructure

As one of the founding members of BCNet, The University of British Columbia has made significant contributions to the development of British Columbia's and Canada's network infrastructure. UBC has a strong commitment to mobilizing its research, resources and assets in support of Canadian communities. The university sees this commitment as an important return on the investment in public universities that Canadians make through tax support of operating and research costs. The availability of this infrastructure is critical, too, to UBC's ability to deliver its programs beyond its main campuses. UBC's 60–year history as a distance education provider, as well as its recent initiative to double the size of its Medical school to meet the province's need for more physicians, show the critical role that infrastructure plays in connecting UBC to the province.

An ongoing challenge for many British Columbians and for UBC as our faculty, staff, and students seek to contribute to economic, social and community development initiatives is the inconsistent quality and capacity of Internet connectivity, especially in rural and remote regions. As long as this inequality of access exists, Canadians living in underserved areas, such as rural and remote communities, will continue to be disadvantaged in terms of access to information and opportunity to engage fully in the digital economy and society, including participating in and with educational opportunities. More importantly, without that access and easy to use tools for developing digital repositories and communicating with other communities, they are unable to fully contribute their intellectual capabilities and share their culture with the rest of Canada and the world. Accordingly, while basic internet access should be available to all Canadians, UBC is pleased to see the critical commitment to improving broadband connectivity across the country's rural and remote regions, as expressed through important programs such as Broadband Canada and Canarie, which help Canada maintain its leadership role in providing internet access for all its citizens.

The development of Canada's digital infrastructure is not just a matter of increasing bandwidth, however, as we are seeing remarkable developments in the use of web 2.0 technologies, or social media. Simply put, social media are refashioning how communities form and interact within the Internet. These developments are influencing all sectors of our economy, from business to research to education, and it is important for all Canadians to have opportunities to access the tools and resources that will allow them to fully participate in digital spaces. In response to the availability of social media tools and a growing interest in participatory cultures online, UBC is actively developing strategies that extend the learning and research spaces of the university, and many of these approaches link directly to the benefits offered by open access approaches to knowledge and educational resources.

In addition to networking infrastructure, the current heterogenous privacy policies across Canada restrict our ability to make use of low cost storage and Web 2.0 applications based in countries other than Canada. Creating incentives for the development of cloud computing infrastructure within Canada, along with encouraging research into improved digital identity management systems would provide a competitive edge to the private and public sectors.

Growing the ICT Industry

The University of British Columbia is a unique incubator for ideas and possible new business opportunities that may result. As such, it needs clear and ongoing support in helping to foster the creation and success of new business ideas through tax support, initial funding, and favourable laws that can give new businesses, wherever they may arise, assistance during their early stages and help them compete in the marketplace.

UBC has created Research Information Services (RISe), a state–of–the–art business system that tracks all the research activities carried out at UBC so that one can:

• Search the system to find an expert in a particular research area
• Search the system to find out exactly what research is taking place

Overall, the creation of an open access platform and a searchable system provides a portal that enables efficient mobilization of knowledge and access to expertise. Another advantage of the RISe system is digital archiving of research proposals/submissions/records/certificates. The system also provides a secure, internet accessible and paperless platform for complex business processes, for purposes such as human ethics research protocol review/certification. The system enables tracking (electronic workflow) of each part of the complex business, which allows us to optimize process by understanding where administrative log jams occur and mitigating them.

Funding agencies in Canada, Europe and the United States have recognized the increasing value of research data. For the most part, data is not preserved for the long term and not accessible for use by other researchers. There are a few projects that demonstrate the value of capturing and sharing data such as genome databanks, and earth observation data in DataOne. Currently a few pilot projects are examining the issues with preserving and making openly accessible such data. Canada must develop a strong cyber infrastructure to facilitate curation of research data to ensure that Canadian researchers, industries and businesses will be competitive on the world stage. Universities will be the logical partners in such enterprises.

Canada's Digital Content

UBC is an active participant in the lifecycle of digital material in that it creates original digital content in the form of research as well as digitizes copyright — cleared analogue material. UBC Library has spearheaded an institutional repository in the form of cIRcle, a collection of the university's intellectual output for public use. Still in its nascent stages, cIRcle has the potential to grow into a much larger and comprehensive collection of UBC created digital content. Currently, over 25,000 items are available, including 23,000 retrospective electronic theses & dissertations to date and growing every day. It is ranked in the top 50 institutional repositories worldwide.

University libraries, along with Canada's other cultural institutions such as museums, archives, and Library and Archives Canada, can play a significant role in making accessible the memory artefacts of this country. Through digitization of documents — including government documents, archival materials, historical objects and out of copyright materials — significant knowledge can be made available to all citizens of Canada. Increased access to such materials can be leveraged to create new knowledge and contribute to an information literate society as well as information based economy. Europeana, think culture, is a similar initiative supported by the European Commission. It is a strategic goal within the European Information Society i2010 Initiative which aims to foster growth and jobs in the information society and media industries. To compete internationally, Canada must nurture and support a national digitization program. Canada's memory institutions and universities are logical allies.

The University of British Columbia intends to take a leadership role as part of a national network of trusted digital repositories, as a regional node among a select group of institutions entrusted with housing and protecting the country's digital assets. Support from the national perspective should be given to university open access institutional repositories and the development of a trusted repository network across the nation. National support also needs to be provided for the open access development of scholarly research. Without such support the Canadian digital information economy will find it will have to license or buy back its own scholarly research from third party brokers.

In addition to adequate funding needed to support teaching, research and learning, UBC also needs a fiscal environment that does not penalize its work, particularly the purchase and use of digital materials. For example, the UBC Library currently is required to pay taxes on electronic resources (databases, indexes, ejournals, ebooks, et cetera), but not on print materials which are exempt. Such a taxation provision does not support the growth of a Canadian digital economy.

The university also recommends funding and policy development to make more freely available another key piece of digital content: open educational resources (OER). UBC expends considerable resources to develop educational materials of the highest quality, yet it is often difficult to extend access to such resources beyond the students who are taking a particular course, often within a closed learning management system. By developing initiatives to support the creation and dissemination of OER, UBC has the potential to share high quality educational materials, promote dialogue concerning teaching at the uyniversity, and engender a cultural of open access to knowledge amongst its faculty, staff and students.

Additionally, Canada needs to find a way to support international digital exchange projects. For example, the Biblioteca Alexandrina in Egypt has unique resources on its website on the history of Egypt. Local K–12 teachers could embed some of these resources in appropriate school curricula. With the development of a networked national repository system, reciprocal projects, where Canadian communities link with international communities to share their local history and culture, would inspire knowledge exchange and development.

Building Digital Skills

UBC is helping to prepare students to become tomorrow's leaders through its teaching and research mandates. These students must enter the workforce with the ability to fully participate in society, and in this age that means that they must possess digital literacy skills that will allow them to engage critically with society across all sectors of the economy.

Digital literacy skills include an understanding of how to find information and use it in a world where information is no longer scarce, as well as promoting awareness of the opportunities of the digital world. Universities help develop the ability of students to discover information, evaluate and interpret information and make informed judgements on the validity of digital sources. These include numerical, textual and visual data sources in an increasingly multimodal digital environment. Equally important is the development of students' ability to remix and create new forms of content and knowledge. Since the potential to remix content is facilitated with digital media, there is a growing need to better understand intellectual property issues — not through punishing students for plagiarism — but by supporting their ability to reflect on the knowledge creation process and to provide them with tools that enable them to attribute sources, discern their own contributions, and even leverage flexible intellectual property approaches using tools like Creative Commons licensing.

Students and the public need to have a deeper understanding of the nature of the digital world — including the permanency of their digital footprints. UBC along with post–secondary provincial partners University of Victoria, Thompson Rivers University and BCcampus are contributing to student understanding through the "Digital Tattoo" project. This project supports post–secondary students' understanding of the nature of the digital world, including aspects of protecting their privacy. There is a strong need to develop these types of engaging learning experiences for students of all ages.

With some support, UBC could extend its licensing and training programs to external communities, so as to contribute to a broader effort to improve the digital skills of those communities. In addition, it would be effective to expand public library mandates and increase K–12 support to embed digital learning within the curriculum. UBC is ready to partner with the K–12 community to digitize and make available potential curricular materials, though it requires additional resources to properly support such endeavours. In addition, more broadly supporting the development of open (creative commons licensed) educational materials, including peer–reviewed content with associated learning goals, learning activities and lesson plans, will better support enhanced student learning.

Improving Canada's Digital Advantage

With these and other issues in mind, The University of British Columbia wishes to express its support for the government's initiative to create an improved digital economic environment and is prepared to be an active and involved partner.

Sincerely,

Stephen J. Toope
President and Vice–Chancellor
The University of British Columbia