Bill Muirhead, UOIT: Budget Cutbacks-Friend or Foe?

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Revision as of 12:51, 14 August 2009

Bill Muirhead, UOIT – “Budget Cutbacks – Friend or Foe”

-Currently it is difficult in respect to budget, but historically when there were economic problems, education was more important -E-learning – there is an opportunity to think differently -We can think about e-learning as efficiency model -Majority of institutions have already invested in some infrastructure -How we might make e-learning more efficient? -We can centralize services – to use as a group resources hosted by one of the institutions instead to invest in the same service at our own institution -The idea is that different institutions host different applications, which then can be used by the entire group -This will be a series of organizations that are loosely affiliated but funded from the central source (the Government) -We need to get over the issue of territoriality -We can invest in cloud computing -We can share course content and place content in repository -we need to find a mechanism to collaborate and share; for examples we can look into Campus BS, Alberta and a little bit U of Manitoba -This group needs to ask: what are 3 things that we can do together, things that need to be accomplished despite budget cuts -We need to see where are those areas that we want to collaborate -Part of solution should be what we can do together, can we put such structure in place -Aldo Caputo: One example of collaboration – co-developing a distance education course for the Department of Slavonic languages between U of Waterloo and U of BC, which will be taught by 2 professors at 2 institutions -Brian Campbell: We can present some ideas to the government, but should we become more formalized group; this group is unique because more widely can seek solutions for economic and generational changes -Wendy Hardman: Another example of collaboration – UOIT built a learning object for community help; now other institutions are interested and can share this learning object -Linda Murphy-Boyer: Intellectual property concerns can be barrier for sharing content -Bill Muirhead: What we as a group can do to involve our provosts, VPs, etc.? We can start a discussion on different issues, including the idea that the content developed by public money should be publicly shared -We can also offer money for developing content, but oblige a content developer to license it through Creative commons so it is available to other people -Can we use digital economy, which is strategy of the government as a leverage point to make Campus Ontario? -Because sometimes content is very specific to a particular course and it is difficult to re-use it, one of the criteria for content developers can be that content is general enough, + the requirement that at least 2 institutions collaborate in developing it; -Our role is not to fill the infrastructure but to start a dialogue and lobbying

-University of Western Ontario event on October 22, 2009 – there will be presentation on e-learning as industrial model; this may be of interest to members of our group