Plugged in to the future

When Concordia announced its set of nine Strategic Directions in 2015, the goal to “Teach for tomorrow” might have sounded like a jargon.

Instead, it’s really a mantra for a digital overhaul that’s changing both the physical and mental space of the university, from classrooms to libraries to the way students and professors communicate. “It’s been interesting to see the Strategic Directions evolve in a way that takes into account both our history and strengths on the one hand, but also the fast-changing nature of the educational and social landscape on the other,” says Benoit Bacon, BA 95, Concordia’s outgoing provost and vice-president of Academic Affairs. “I think we have evolved a roadmap that will guide Concordia’s continued evolution further on its distinctive path as an innovative, forward-thinking and socially engaged, next-generation institution.”

Graham Carr, Concordia’s vice-president of Research and Graduate Studies, says that the university is simply following the steady rush toward digitization that’s taking place in all of our personal, home and work lives. For him, the notion of a digital university is one in which all aspects of student and faculty life are channelled through digital media in order to maximize content quality, network opportunities and prospects for learning and discovery. How, he wonders, could the university not mirror the essential nature of a society that is now so incredibly plugged in?

“I see it as a huge opportunity that’s already here — we’re already living it,” Carr says. “To me, it goes beyond the classic questions about online education or bringing digitization increasingly into classroom activities. The reality is that it’s a sine qua non of 21st-century research activity, of collaboration and partnership. It’s almost unimaginable what the transformative power of digitization will be, in terms of our capacity not just to access and generate information, but reconceptualize how we do things and with whom we can now begin to do things.”

So the process of Teaching for Tomorrow isn’t so much attempting to imagine the university of the future but keeping up with technological progress as it occurs, being willing to try out new ideas and thinking as much as possible about how to bring cutting-edge technologies into the service of student-faculty relationships.

This instinct is part of the university’s DNA, going back to its roots. Sir George Williams University, one of Concordia’s founding institutions, began life in the 1920s through night courses — providing access to advanced learning to those who otherwise may not have had it. Online courses are another next step in that process of knowledge delivery.

Library leadership

As was the case at many universities, the digital revolution at Concordia began in the library — a long time ago. After beginning to use computers for cataloguing and acquisitions in the 1960s, reports university librarian Guylaine Beaudry, university libraries began to see a boom in online publications as of the mid-1990s.

“2004 was the year when Canadian university libraries, collectively, first spent more money on digital journals compared to print,” Beaudry says. “And now most of us are spending between 85 per cent and 95 per cent of our multimillion-dollar budgets for our collections on digital resources. At Concordia, it’s 85 per cent of our $6-million budget.”

The vast majority of that 85 per cent chunk is spent on e-journals, she notes, though every year more and more of the digital budget goes toward e-books as well.

“The reason is that the scholarly journal as a genre made this transition from print to digital much earlier than books,” Beaudry says. However, she adds that the physical collection still plays an important role, as materials for some subjects — such as art history and other humanities and social sciences — are significantly less heavily digitized than others. As well, an expert committee of the Royal Society of Canada on the future of libraries and archives recently estimated that only between 3 per cent and 5 per cent of what has been published on paper in Canada has been digitized to date — making the library both an irreplaceable storehouse of traditional information and a means for cutting-edge knowledge delivery.

Indeed, while they still have the stacks of glue-and-paper books synonymous with centuries of study, Concordia’s Libraries are increasingly home to some of the most dramatic changes in information technology and relations — offering students large-scale computer visualization studios, multi-function rooms with projection and videoconferencing capacities and group-study rooms designed to serve students with a variety of technological needs.

“We really believe that since Alexandria [in ancient Egypt], the library is a centre of shared resources, and we simply continue that tradition,” says Beaudry. “We’ve been doing that with manuscripts, with print, with the digital collection and also with resources, equipment and infrastructure.”

That’s why Concordia has begun to transform the R. Howard Webster Library on Concordia’s Sir George Williams Campus, adding 88 per cent more student study space, 27 per cent more public space, doubling the number of study seats and bringing it to the highest technological standards.

Beaudry says this increase breaks down into two individual surges in use and interest. On the one hand, a recent redesign of the Webster Library returned the space to the early 20thcentury style of the reading room and continues to attract waves of students daily. Yet the library also exists in a virtual realm that accordingly attracts an enormous virtual presence.

“We have brick-and-mortar libraries that are like hives, it’s very animated,” she says. “One day we can have 12,000 visits in a 24-hour cycle at Webster. But in parallel to this physical universe, we have a digital library that we make available and that’s where most of our users are going. When we’re doing our jobs properly as librarians, we’ve created a very good interface and we’re helping our users to find what they need without our intervention. In the digital space, our intervention took place before they use this system — so they can find what they need when they need it.”

Importantly, Beaudry and her team aspire to making the full array of library offerings not just available but also attractive to students from many different disciplines. “Just because you’re a business student, you don’t have to confine yourself to reading only publications related to your field of study,” she says. “We want to do exactly the opposite, because it’s how we contribute to the development of good citizens.”

For specialists, though, Carr says there’s never been a better time to be working in the library, thanks to the aggregation of Big Data — extremely large data sets that can be analyzed to reveal patterns, trends and associations — which is enormously useful in the study of subjects like genomics.

This widening of access to information, Carr says, “has created resources people can access today that they could never previously have imagined accessing beforehand. The capacity is both to gather the information and to archive, curate and store the information, and also to make that information accessible through open access sources.”

Teaching for tomorrow