British Columbia

The Jervis Inlet at dusk (near Egmont)

Politics

Post-secondary education is the responsibility of the provincial government, which accredits post-secondary institutions through its Ministry of Advanced Education, Skills and Training.

There are nearly 198 aboriginal First Nations in the province, many of which have never ceded their lands to the Crown, which is a major difference with other provinces. There are approximately 200,000 indigenous people in total in the province (out of a population of approximately 4.6 million). The Ministry has a policy framework and action plan for improving post-secondary opportunities and outcomes for First Nations, Métis and Inuit peoples. Two major First Nations post-secondary organisations in British Columbia are:

The post-secondary system

There are 11 publicly funded universities, and 14 publicly-funded colleges/institutes of technology of which seven offer undergraduate degree programs. These are: 

Universities

Colleges

British Columbia has always had a strong public regional college system. Most started as mainly two-year vocational and general education colleges, then some later became colleges offering some undergraduate programs, with students with appropriate grades transferring into the more established research universities at the end of their second year, and a few, such as the University of the Fraser Valley, later becoming full, mainly undergraduate universities. This ‘natural’ development has been helped by an extensive and well articulated system of credit recognition not only between universities, but also between universities and colleges, through the BC Council for Admissions and Transfers.

As well as the public colleges, all of which are accredited by the Province of British Columbia, there is a large number of private (commercial) colleges accredited, up to 2014 accredited by the Private Career Training Institutions Agency (PCTIA), but now directly regulated by the Private Training Institutions Branch of the Ministry. Accreditation qualifies an institution to participate in provincial and federal financial assistance programs, but does not certify that an institution’s courses are transferable to other institutions. For a list of such private colleges, see here.

Online learning and distance education

British Columbia has a long history of online and distance education in post-secondary education.

The University of British Columbia began offering correspondence-based distance degree credit courses through Extension Services (now Continuing Education) in 1936.

The first web-based learning management system, WebCT, was developed at the University of British Columbia in 1996 by Murray Goldberg, and later acquired in 2006 by Blackboard, Inc. WebCT was being used by 10 million students in 80 countries at that time.

The University of British Columbia began offering fully online courses for credit in 1995, and also offered its first fully online programs in 2003, a Master in Educational Technology, developed in collaboration with Tec de Monterrey in Mexico (offered both in English and Spanish), and a Master in Adult Education and Global Learning, in cooperation with three international partner universities. UBC is also one of five partner universities in an Asia-Pacific collaboration to create an online certificate program in sustainable forestry management. All these programs are still running 15 years later. UBC is currently implementing an institution-wide Flexible Learning strategy.

UBC also offers a province-wide MD program distributed into four geographically distinct sites across British Columbia, that includes the the University of Victoria, UNBC and local teaching hospitals. The distributed MD undergraduate program aims to increase the number of rural and Indigenous students seeking medical careers, with the goal of increasing the number of qualified medical professionals in rural and indigenous communities. It uses a mix of on-campus and distance delivery between the four provincial sites. This province-wide approach is made possible through a robust information technology system that allows instructors and students in many disparate locations to interact simultaneously.  Students receive accredited qualifications from the University of British Columbia. 

The Open Learning Agency was created in 1998 through the merger of the Open Learning Institute and Knowledge Network, an educational television channel. OLA’s component parts were the BC Open University, Open College and Open School and the Knowledge Network. Although it pioneered open education in the province, it was closed by the BC government in 2004, which then created BCcampus as a partial replacement.

Thompson Rivers University. The BC Open University function and its 16,000 students were eventually transferred to the then new Thompson Rivers University, which still operates an open learning degree program through TRU-OL. 

Knowledge Network still continues as an independent educational television channel.

The OLA’s Open School was transferred to the Ministry of Education.

BCcampus is a provincially funded organisation established in 2004 that provides collaborative leadership to provincial partners through Ministry-identified core lines of service:

  • Open Education
  • Shared Curriculum and Learning Resources
  • Technology-Enabled Teaching and Learning Shared Services

British Columbia became the first jurisdiction in North America to implement open textbooks through the BCcampus open textbook project, which is now extended into Alberta, Saskatchewan and Ontario. There are over 250 open textbooks used in 40 participating institutions (August, 2018).

Simon Fraser University’s Centre for Online and Distance Education (CODE) was established in 1975, and has grown to be one of the largest distance education online programs in Canada, with course offerings spanning a wide range of academic areas.

North Island College ran a successful distance education program for coastal and rural communities in the central and north coast region in the 1980s including the use of Samarinda II, a 160-foot ex-whaling ship. It now has small regional centres in several coastal communities.

Royal Roads University was created in 1995 as a ‘mixed-mode’ institution, with some part of each program delivered at a distance, with the rest done in residence on its Victoria campus (a former military college). It offers a Master of Arts in Learning and Technology in hybrid mode.

You can download a special sub-report on online and distance education in British Columbia from the national survey of online and distance education in Canadian universities and colleges project. This gives a comprehensive overview of the situation in 2017.

Universities and colleges: more details

I have organized text and images by different regions of a province that is geographically the size of France and Germany combined, but over half of the population live in the lower mainland around Vancouver and the south-east corner of Vancouver Island.

Vancouver Island

Vancouver Island is 460 kilometres long and 80 kilometres wide at its widest point. It has a population of 750,000, around half of which live in the greater Victoria area. Victoria is the capital of the province.

Click here for more details of universities and colleges in this area and more photos.

IMG_0465Victoria harbour

Vancouver and the Lower Mainland

About 2.5 million people, or 60% of the province, live in Vancouver and the surrounding region (known as the Lower Mainland).

Click here for more details of universities and colleges in this area and more photos.

Southern central interior

This covers the regions of the Thompson Okanagan, Caribou, Chilcotin and Central Coast. Although this covers a very large area, the main centres of population are Kamloops, Kelowna and Williams Lake.

Click here for more details of universities and colleges in this area and more photos.

Between Bella Bella and Bella Coola in the Great Bear Rain Forest

Northern British Columbia

Another very large geographical region, covering more than half the province and half a million square kilometres in size, it has a population of just 250,000, 6% of the province’s population. The main centres of population are Prince George, Prince Rupert, Kitimat, Terrace, Dawson Creek, Fort St. John and Fort St. James.

Click here for more details of universities and colleges in this area.

The Kootenays

This covers the south-east region of British Columbia stretching from the Okanagan in the west to the Rockies in the east. The main centres of population are Castlegar, Cranbrook, and Nelson.

Click here for more details of universities and colleges in this area.

[More to come: last updated 21 August, 2018]