Sample Campus Intellectual Property Policies

Distance education can be defined very generally as “a form of education in which students are separated from their instructors by time and/or space”.6 This broad definition incorporates a variety of delivery approaches, variously described by terms such as alternate delivery, distributed learning, self-directed learning and online learning. With Canada’s vast expanse and its relatively small population, the development of a system to deliver education to students in remote and sparsely populated regions was an important undertaking. Over time, distance education has also become important in meeting the needs of students with disabilities and special needs, students outside of Canada, adults returning to school, workers undertaking professional development, and graduate researchers needing to draw on the scholarly resources within different institutions.

There are no comprehensive data on distance education in Canada. At the k-12 level, distance education consortia linking elementary and secondary institutions have been established in a number of jurisdictions. Major responsibilities for delivery of distance education courses has in some cases been given to independent organizations, such as British Columbia’s Open Learning Agency and Ontario’s Independent Learning Centre, which recently became part of TVOntario. The Council of Ministers of Education, Canada (CMEC) indicated that, in 1994, correspondence enrollments totaled 225,321 for 953 elementary and secondary courses.7 If growth occurred at the same pace as overall enrollment in primary and secondary schools, correspondence enrollment would be up to around 226,200 by 2001.

At the post-secondary level, the Canadian University Distance Education Directory provides a list of distance education courses Canadian universities offer in some 40 subject areas. All but 3 of the 56 universities covered in the 2001/2002 directory offered distance education courses, with some institutions (most notably, Athabasca University, but also Acadia, Waterloo and the University of Manitoba) providing instruction in most of the listed subject areas. Universities do not provide enrolment data for distance education, but the Council of Ontario Universities (2000) estimates that in 1998/99 there were well over 26,000 full course equivalent registrations in “distributed learning courses” in the province, with many of these from on-campus students. This suggests that participants in distributed learning account for about one of every 9 university students - a ratio that if applied at the national level leads to an estimate of almost 65,000 full course equivalent registrations for 1998/99.

Community colleges are also active in providing distance education. Through OntarioLearn.com, for example, a consortium of 22 Ontario Community colleges offers 400 on-line courses. To estimate the provision of distance education, it is necessary, as well, to take account of the offerings of some open universities, such as Télé-université du Québec and the Open Learning Agency of British Columbia, that are not included in the university directory, and of various collaborative arrangements to facilitate the delivery of courses to distance learners. The latter include Contact North, which serves residents in Northern Ontario, the Franco-Ontarian Distance Education Network and Inter-Universities North, a co-operative arrangement to deliver courses to communities in Northern Manitoba. In addition, the statistics cited above exclude the large number of non-credit personal and professional development courses provided by universities.

Although distance education serves a broad range of students, one of the main markets consists of older learners who value the flexibility and convenience of distance learning. Statistics Canada sheds light on this segment through its Adult Education and Training Survey, which measures all the education and training activities of people 17 and over who do not attend regular school and university.8 The survey indicates that, in 1997, more than 6 million people aged 17 or over, or nearly 28% of adults participated in education and training activities. Participation was higher for the employed than the unemployed population and was sharply higher for adults under 55 than those 55 and over. While public schools, colleges and universities accounted for three-quarters of all programs and one-quarter of all courses taken in 1997, the survey indicates that commercial schools and employers are also important providers of adult education

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