Learning & Teaching
- Recognize and reward the effective use of IT in teaching and learning.
- Encourage preparation of educational materials in digital format to facilitate flexible delivery for private study, tutorials, laboratories, distance education and classroom presentation.
- Strengthen our strategic role in the area of innovative education in Canada, including distance education.
- Provide adequate student computing lab resources to support teaching and learning activities.
Research
- Local academic departments/units should provide essential levels of support of hardware, software and network connectivity to general-use faculty members.
- Local academic departments/units should provide assistance with networking and limited hardware support to specialised and heavy-use faculty members.
- The university should provide financial assistance with the operation and maintenance (infrastructure) of mainly research-oriented computers, from overhead funds generated by government and industrial funding for projects that contain an High-Performance Computing (HPC) component.
- Researchers who have highly-specialized compute-intensive requirements should seek external funding for their basic hardware/software needs, wherever possible. However, as the nature of compute-intensive facilities are such that it will be unlikely that a single academic unit is able to maintain them unaided, the university itself, or through inter-faculty cooperation, should provide a measure of support for the successful operation and maintenance of such facilities.
Infrastructure
- Ensure that administrative Information System (IS) standards, approaches, and infrastructure are consistent with the university IT standards, approaches and infrastructure, and vice versa.
- Commit to principles of distributed access, IS integration, and the exploitation of generic solutions and protocols as opposed to customized approaches or development for specific areas.
- Ensure that IS projects are supported with appropriate commitment by both the user groups and IT/IS service providers, that priorities are well established through consultation, and that project feasibility, structure, methodology, and evaluation are appropriate.
- Coordinate resources at all levels to ensure that faculty, staff and students have appropriate access to workstations that will facilitate their required academic and academic-support activities in the electronic workplace.
- Consult regularly with end-users, and in particular students, to ensure their basic desktop requirements are identified and incorporated in subsequent planning decisions.
- Encourage a review of alternative work arrangements such as "telecommuting", in recognition of the changing nature of the workforce (per Recommendation 26 of Building on Accomplishment).
- Encourage departments and groups to adjust job responsibilities to establish local staff expertise and thus provide a basic level of local support for the major activities of their unit.
- Negotiate with vendors to allow the university community to obtain hardware and software at reasonable costs.
- Refine the list of standard hardware, operating systems, applications software and networks to be supported by the university. We must reduce the complexity of support caused by diversity.
- Pursue technical opportunities and licensing frameworks to enhance off-campus access to the electronic workplace, subject to secure identification and authorization of the user.