Hello, my name is Adam Garcia and I’m happy to be back for another year with OUSA as Vice-President Administration and Steering Committee member. I’m really looking forward to the upcoming year and the fresh ideas my fellow Steering Committee members will bring to OUSA, and can’t wait to see what this year has it store.

I’m back in my role as VP Education at the Federation of Students, University of Waterloo. My journey with Feds started back when I first was involved in Orientation Week, and then I became the Coordinator of what is now The Glow Centre for Sexual and Gender Diversity. Representing and advocating students has always been a priority for me, and taking LGBTQQ student concerns to the provincial government was how I became in involved with OUSA. I contributed to OUSA’s Student Health policy paper, and was happy to see OUSA produce the Student Health: Bringing Healthy Change to Ontario’s Universities governmental submission during my first month as VP Education.

My experience highlights exactly what I love most about OUSA. OUSA is grassroots and student-driven, and when a student sees an issue that OUSA hasn’t tackled, they can drive that issue into research, policy, and eventually advocacy. It’s great that even though we’re a small organization, we’re able to be very responsive to the voices of the 140, 000 students we represent as well as the dialogues that are happening in Ontario’s post-secondary sector.

Some of my priorities at Feds this year are negotiating a new ancillary fee agreement with the University of Waterloo, which has not been updated since 1994, improving the administration and value of instructor and course evaluations, improving technological infrastructure including wireless Internet on campus, and improving the quality of life in the City of Waterloo for undergraduate students. The University of Waterloo recently completed a new Strategic Plan for the next five years, and teaching quality and community relations were featured in the outlined goals, as well as continuing our history of innovation, entrepreneurialism, and experiential learning. I hope to leverage this new strategic plan and put student priorities at the top of the list.

At OUSA, I look forward to continuing the conversations surrounding credit transfer and student mobility, online learning, and student employment. I think these are rising to the top of the sector’s priorities, and know that OUSA will be there to act as a leading voice of undergraduate students to ensure student interests are incorporated into decision-making.

Once again, I am very proud to be back at OUSA this year, and encourage you to contact me at adam.garcia@uwaterloo.ca to discuss anything further.

Best,

Adam Garcia
Vice-President Administration, Ontario Undergraduate Student Alliance
Vice President Education, Federation of Students, University of Waterloo

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First off, let me clarify. As a student representative, it is in many ways a relief to see others acknowledging the importance of the job outcomes discussion. The tough reality is that in the modern era, an undergraduate degree has become increasingly expensive, even as it becomes less valuable for increasing future employment and earning potentials (check out Rob Carrick and Stuart Thompson’s Who Had It Worse Time Machine on the Globe and Mail website). Judging from historical trends, this is a problem which is only going to get worse for students. But the public attention on at least one half of this problem – post-grad employment – is refreshing.

Still, it is an incomplete picture to only speak of a university degree as a stepping stone to a career. University of Ottawa President Allan Rock addressed this very issue in a recent talk titled The ‘Skills Mismatch’ and the Myth of the Irrelevant University.  He attempted to show how universities were in fact addressing skill shortages in the market, and in particular how the much-maligned liberal arts degree was actually producing positive job outcomes. In Dr. Rock’s speech, he references a student completing an assignment on Chaucer.  Students such as this one are learning and practicing all sorts of skills which will later serve them well in the job market. They are learning to dissect arguments, to sift through information, and to develop and defend a point of view. These are only some of the many transferable skills being acquired. In a world where any graduate is likely to experience many different jobs throughout her or his career, these sorts of agile skills will be necessary to succeed.

But students such as the one Dr. Rock imagines might also be gaining an appreciation of history and a corresponding insight into life today. Or learning an appreciation of the arts which will enrich their lives. Or they might be developing a greater sense of empathy and a heightened appreciation for the beliefs of others.

These benefits which are outside of traditional job-ready skills are not purely abstract, but benefits with positive outcomes for both the student and for society. And they should not be so easily ignored when discussing the true value of an undergraduate degree. Deferring again to Dr. Rock’s speech,

A university education also offers rewards that can’t be monetized: it produces citizens able to play a greater part in our democracy; individuals with a discipline of mind, an openness of spirit, and most of all, the ability to learn in a world that is constantly changing…when it comes to our students and their future, our concern is as much for the person they will become as it is with the work that they will do.

When carving a future path for PSE, we should be careful not to become too obsessed with the job outcomes of a particular degree. The success of graduates in the market is always an important indicator of success. But often these jobs are not the end goal, but only one symptom of a successful education.

David Campbell
President, McMaster Students Union (MSU)
OUSA Presidents’ Council

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Last Friday myself and OUSA Executive Director Rylan Kinnon made a presentation to the Standing Committee on Finance and Economic Affairs regarding Bill-65, the 2013 Ontario Budget. Although the majority of our presentation was concerned with the Youth Jobs Strategy included in the Budget, I’d like to take this opportunity to highlight three other issues we addressed for the Committee that rarely get the attention I believe they truly deserve.

The first of these issues concerns the process of flat-fee tuition billing currently in place at nine universities in the province, including Brock, Carleton, Guelph, Lakehead, Ottawa, UofT, Trent, Western and Windsor. Under a flat-fee tuition billing model, students are charged for a full course load once they’ve enrolled above a certain threshold of courses, regardless of whether or not they take a full course load. This threshold varies from 80% at Brock and Windsor to as low as 60% at UofT.

Flat-fee tuition is at its very core unfair – students at flat-fee institutions are paying for education they do not receive. Flat-fees are particularly damaging for those students who traditionally experience the highest need and are most likely to not enroll in a full course load to begin with. Low-income students, aboriginal students, mature students, students with disabilities, and students with dependents often face barriers that make enrolling in a full course load particularly challenging for them.

The problem of flat-fees is particularly salient for OSAP students enrolled at UofT as OSAP requires recipients to be enrolled in at least a 60% course load. OSAP recipients at UofT are therefore placed in between a rock and a hard place – they must choose between receiving financial assistance or paying full tuition fees.

OUSA believes strongly that students should only have to pay for education they receive, and as such we recommended to the Committee to require all PSE institutions to move to a per-credit tuition billing model.

Accompanying our concerns with flat-fees are the issues surrounding deferral fees. Of Ontario’s 20 publically funded universities, 10 require that the year’s full tuition be paid prior to the beginning of the term, with another 5 requiring a significant portion of tuition to be paid before September. Those students unable to meet these payment deadlines have the option of deferring payment to a later date for a fee. These deferral fees average approximately $50 plus interest on outstanding tuition fees.

Compounding this problem is the fact that many of these tuition payment deadlines are earlier than the yearly September OSAP release date, meaning that those students with the highest need of assistance are the most likely to need to defer tuition payments. These early tuition payment deadlines are particularly harmful for low-income students, underemployed students, students with dependents and aboriginal students as they are more likely to rely on OSAP or in-student employment to finance their studies.

We asked the Committee to commit the government to more flexible tuition payment deadlines and the removal of deferral fees for those students unable to make these early payment dates. Accompanying this, we also recommended that universities stop the practice of charging full-year tuition upfront, and instead charge students on a per semester basis.

In our presentation we were critical of the Budget’s omission of any commitments to improve the state of credit transfer in the Province, as we believe a robust credit transfer system is an important step towards improving student mobility in Ontario.

Students choose to transfer between universities for a number of reasons: they may wish to transfer for financial reasons, to be closer to family or loved ones or even a desire to switch to an institution or field of study that will better suit their personal and academic needs.

Despite this certainly non-exhaustive list of reasons for why students choose to transfer between institutions, the process of transferring university credits within Ontario is sorely underdeveloped. The mechanisms through which institutions determine whether or not a student’s courses will be accepted for transfer are outdated and complex. Because this process isn’t uniform across institutions, a student may be granted a course equivalency at one institution and be denied a credit at another. This uncertainly often leads students to apply to multiple institutions and thereby incur additional and otherwise avoidable financial costs.

In 2011-2012, when applying to transfer to another university, only nine institutions provide a transfer student with information regarding the number of their credits that would be recognized. The remaining eleven only inform a student of what credits will transfer after a student has accepted their offer of admission. A student whose credits are not recognized must then repeat learning they had previously completed at a personal cost to them and at a cost to the government.

Minimum grade requirements for transfer credits also vary widely across institutions and are often inconsistent with minimum grade requirements for students local to the receiving institution. A university may require a grade of 60%-65% for a student to be accepted in the second year of a degree program, but may require a student who has transferred from another university to have grades a full 10% higher to be accepted into the program. Students are concerned with this practice, as once a student has been accepted as a transfer student at an institution, they should not be held to a higher grade standard than other students

OUSA recommended that universities be required to accept all first and second year credits with similar course equivalencies to ensure that students and the government aren’t paying for learning that has already been completed. Moving forward, the government and institutions must develop more transparent and consistent credit transfer systems that increase the ease with which students are able to transfer between universities.

I would like to thank the Committee for taking the time to listen to our students’ recommendations and concerns with the Bill-65. In particular, I am particularly grateful for MPPs Flynn and Damerla for their insightful comments and questions posed to us following our presentation. It is my hope that students will see greater progress in the months to come on these issues, and on youth unemployment, as the Province further develops the commitments it outlined in the 2013 Ontario Budget.

Amir Eftekarpour
OUSA President
VP External of the University Students’ Council of Western University

The post Presentation to the the Standing Committee on Finance: A Recap appeared first on OUSA.ca.

Commentators like the Canadian Association of Research Librarians were quite perplexed by the developments stating that: “We do not believe Access Copyright should ever be able to force an individual or institution to be a customer for the copyright holders’ rights which it represents. The Supreme Court has said to individuals and institutions “fair dealing is always available.” We see no requirement under the Copyright Act that anyone pay for uses that they are not making: requiring an institution, like York University or any of CLA’s members, to participate in a tariff process even though it is confining its uses of materials and information to uses that are not represented by the tariff applicant (in this case, Access Copyright) seems absurd and not contemplated by the Copyright Act.”

Before we get further into this rather convoluted topic, it is worth taking a step back and painting the context for all of this.

Background

Access Copyright is a private licensing agency that works with creators and publishers of copyrighted materials to ensure they receive compensation from the users of their works, such as businesses and educational institutions.

In the past for universities, signing an Access Copyright license meant they didn’t have to establish individual rights to the works published or created by the 36 groups Access Copyright represents. For the publishers and creators, joining Access Copyright meant they didn’t have to figure out how to license all their own work, and they gained the bargaining power of an entire industry. Access Copyright, in this sense, provided a valuable service for universities, publishers and creators.

But this relationship began to break down as more and more copyrighted learning materials moved online. It was quite simple to track usage of the material with photocopiers, but with the advent of online journals there was a higher volume of difficult to track file sharing. The old AC agreement included a fee of $3.80 per full-time equivalent (FTE) plus $0.10 per course pack page, expired on December 31, 2010. Access Copyright arguably overplayed its hand with proposed a new agreement with an exorbitant fee of $45.00 per FTE for a publicly unknown list of holdings, which many educational institutions turned down. In response, AC submitted a petition for an imposed tariff by the Copyright Board which was granted for a one year basis. Eventually in 2012, Access Copyright has worked with the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada (AUCC) to create a Model License that would provide the same services. This license was at rate of $26.00 per FTE (full-time equivalent, aka the number of students enrolled full-time), moving to a model where students could be theoretically charged even if they didn’t have to purchase course wares.

The new proposal was controversial due to its expansion of financial and logistical burdens on institutions, including worrying clauses stating that AC would require the ability to access usage data for academic material at Universities, which arguably went against ideals of academic freedom. There was also a feeling that Universities were already doing their fair share to reward creators and publishers as Canadian Research Knowledge Network alone spent over $96 million in content licenses that offer access to millions of articles to 900,000 students and researchers at 75 universities across the country, with each institution also purchasing further journals independently or through provincial consortiums.
Moreover, the open access licensing movement, where research publications are freely available online, constitutes a growing percentage of published research (some estimate it at 30 per cent of all scholarly research), with thousands of open access journals and hundreds of thousands of articles posted directly by the researchers themselves.

Most student unions, librarian associations and faculty associations came out against the principle of the deal. The universities that did sign on did so unenthusiastically, suggesting either publicly or privately that they didn’t have much of a choice on the matter and that forgoing the deal meant exposing oneself to legal suits. From a student perspective, the biggest concern was that in the past and with the new per FTE proposal the costs would be passed on almost entirely to the students. Some student unions like McMaster’s MSU continued charging the old courseware prices (with an additional $0.10 a page to pay for AC fees) to recoup costs while others like Wilfred Laurier slashed courseware prices but agreed on a cost sharing model with students covering a bulk of the cost via an ancillary fee with the university covering the smaller portion.

From a legal perspective within that time frame the Supreme Court of Canada’s CCH decision came out, speaking of the need for a “large and liberal” interpretation to fair dealing categories such as research “to ensure that users’ rights are not unduly constrained,” that and a few other rulings stated that personal use for educational purposes, such as photocopying a chapter in a library book, had long been accepted as fair dealing and did not require the user to obtain rights to the work. The Supreme Court determined that teachers making copies of a chapter and distributing them to students was also protected under fair dealing provisions. Similarly, the Federal Government released Bill C-11, which after lobbying efforts from stakeholder groups like the Canadian Alliance of Student Associations (CASA) allowed a liberal exemption for educational usage. Therefore the AC offering seemed redundant, especially considering the considerable latitude for copying at Canadian universities and would be the first line of defence against a claim of infringement. A case at Georgia State University in the United States demonstrated how user rights/copyright exceptions can be used as an effective defense against many claims of infringement (prominent commentator Ariel Katz argued that Canadian defences would be even stronger than those in the U.S.).

Here is an incomplete list Universities opted out and signed on:

Universities that have opted out:

• Athabasca University
• Carleton University
• Memorial University
• Mount Royal University
• Queen’s University
• University of British Columbia
• University of Calgary
• University of New Brunswick
• University of Northern British Columbia
• University of Toronto
• University of Victoria
• University of Waterloo
• University of Windsor
• University of Winnipeg
• York University

Universities that have signed on:

• Brock University
• McMaster University
• University of Manitoba
• University of Western Ontario
• Wilfred Laurier University

The Future

For the universities that opted out, they setup a system of relying on fair dealing provisions as well as creating in-house copyright offices that advised faculty and staff on the limitations and negotiated individual agreements with publishers. However, as stated earlier these moves were a clear threat to the business model of AC and, as such, the York University lawsuit has become the litmus test where the outcome will demonstrate the leeway other universities have on the matter. If the result is heavily favourable towards York, it could start a chain reaction of other universities also choosing to not renew their existing copyright agreements. In fact, just last week the University of Toronto cancelled its agreement with Access Copyright and is awaiting a response from the organization to determine whether or not they will be entering into negotiations.

From a student perspective, the entire affair puts us as the lowest common denominator where either we are forcibly paying exorbitant non tuition “taxation” fees to a private organization or the universities are caught up in expensive lawsuits which dig into the operating fund. The hope is that:

• Copyright Board or the Supreme Court decisively ends this debacle in the near future by ruling in favour of Universities and fair dealing as previously established;
• More universities take a stand against Access Copyright and opt out of the deal, possibly establishing their own in-house copyright offices;
• Access Copyright realizes it’s need to adapt to the 21^st century realities; instead of insisting on seeking the help of the Copyright Board to impose itself on educational institutions, and instead of forcing them into buying an over-priced product that they don’t really need, it should offer its services as an industry stakeholder, while taking advantage of its economies of scale and existing holdings to make procurement cost effective for universities.

All of these changes can eventually result in dramatically cheaper courseware costs and lower burden on library budgets across Ontario.

Huzaifa Saeed
OUSA Summer Research Intern

The post Access Copyright: The Saga Continues appeared first on OUSA.ca.