About RISE

Our strategy

As Canada’s only digital learning university, created by Alberta innovators, Athabasca University’s classrooms, collaboration spaces, and student hubs are not bricks and mortar, but Cloud & Code. Our 5-year strategy is to provide complete flexibility and accessibility to our online students in our province, across Canada and the world. We will create a cloud-based digital learning environment that encourages learning for a lifetime and provides a collaborative engagement space for students, professors and researchers to continuously innovate in digital pedagogy, applied augmented intelligence, and online learning experiences. Further, as we learn and improve on our digital transformation, we will invite universities and colleges across Alberta to be a welcome part of Canada’s digital learning environment of the future.

Our focus

Simply, our focus is to provide the highest quality Canadian digital learning experiences to learners of all ages, regardless of their location anywhere in the world. To provide this focus, we will ensure that all of our digital systems are stable, financially sustainable, highly flexible in upgrading and evolving, and provide innovation opportunities for our students, staff, faculty and researchers. In order to focus on our new strategy, we will stop previous habits that have prevented Athabasca University’s digital environment from moving forward and keeping pace with the demands of our digital learners.

• We will encourage innovative code configuration ideas by focusing on system interoperability over custom coding.
• We will free up our talented team to work on modern university-wide systems and approaches by retiring obsolete systems.
• We will ensure security and stability of our global learning environment and its supportive administrative software solutions in a cloud-based approach across our digital ecosystem.
• We will expand and enrich lean governance and management practices in a commitment to openness, transparency and clarity.

Our people

Our 5-year IT Strategy rests wholly in the passion and dedication of our diverse technical talent. We reside across Alberta; working in Athabasca, north Edmonton on the St. Albert border, and in the downtown Edmonton core. Over the 5-year plan, we, as a semi-virtual IT organization, are committed to embody the movement of our Athabasca University Strategic Plan’s Four Strategic Directions by our plan title, RISE: an acronym that defines how we will show up, support each other, and realize our university-wide Imagine plan.

Finally, we will RISE in awareness across Alberta and Canada by attracting and retaining diverse talent who share our passion for empowering learners everywhere by creatively integrating the best of mobile and accessible learning tools and platforms.

Strategy + focus + people = vision

As Team RISE, our vision is a re-imagined Athabasca University digital learning environment where learners of all ages and stages can seamlessly interact with learning experiences asynchronously or synchronously, online or offline, mobile and in-place. Our vision is a Cloud & Code campus where the very best of open and proprietary tools ensure better learning outcomes for our students and better learning creation capabilities for our professors.

Our role as the facilities management of our Cloud & Code campus is to retire code when it is obsolete and no longer offering value to our students. In a continuous improvement mindset, we will research and suggest technical tool solutions to meet the desired learner experiences defined by the academy: best-of-breed learning management systems (LMS), massive open online courses (MOOC), blockchain identity management, ePortfolio, social engagement, gamification/badging, mobile, learning analytics, OER creation, virtual reality, augmented reality, artificial intelligence and others as they emerge over the next 5 years. We will professionally integrate all parts of the learning experience ecosystem of the future, ensuring learner data is secure, governed and follows best practices in data integrity. Finally, we will ensure a digital learning environment that allows students to learn about their personal education journey over their lifetime and allows our professors to understand and continuously improve digital learning at scale across all learning experiences in the environment.