Good afternoon, everyone, it's my pleasure to join you here. Chairperson, honourable members, and witnesses, thanks for including me in this committee's activities. I especially appreciate the opportunity to appear by video conference and avoid the travel.
I'm a professor from Simon Fraser University, but my role is as a director of the Centre for Digital Media, which is a joint venture of four universities: the University of British Columbia, Simon Fraser University, Emily Carr University of Art and Design, and the British Columbia Institute of Technology. We have a professional master's program called the master of digital media program, and it's one of the main outcomes of that joint venture of four universities.
This initiative—four universities working together—originated in a gift from a company called Finning. They're a Canadian global dealer of heavy equipment. They're the people who sell you your Caterpillar bulldozer, truck, or whatever. They're based in Canada, but they operate worldwide, and from the middle of the last century, they've performed what you'd call final assembly, customization, and service for the engines of a resource-based economy.
When they left their headquarters, which is near the rail yards in southeast False Creek in Vancouver, they donated the 18 acres of land there to the four universities. Since that time, we've dedicated ourselves to the same project in a way: the final assembly, customization, and service not of physical engines but the intellectual engines of a digital economy, highly qualified people.
It's a bit of a gimmick to make that connection between Caterpillar tractors and people, but on the other hand it is very much the case that young people, technically savvy people—as a previous witness just spoke of—are the engines of this economy. As I said, the main activity at our centre for digital media is a professional master’s degree but we also have space for digital media firms, spinoffs from our school, and others who are attracted to the site, both Canadian and non-Canadian companies that come there, as well as events and non-credit offerings.
Many of our graduates go on to create their own companies, and we try to support those entrepreneurial ventures with space and support, but I'm going to try to focus my remarks on the program itself, the jobs the students get, the graduates get, and the companies they create upon their completion.
The digital media industry was the impetus for creating our school. This is not, to be fair, the brainchild of the universities. It really was the industry that got the other parties going, and Electronic Arts in particular provided a $1.25 million donation to get things started, and they pushed things through something called the Premier's Technology Council in a previous government that got provincial funding for the start-up and operation of the school—about $40 million.
There was a larger vision for this centre. It was going to be the world centre for digital media, and a lot of other funding was sought that did not materialize, but we have been quite successful with the funding we did receive—about $40 million. Because of that high initial support, good business planning, and to be honest, high tuition fees, the school operates on a break-even basis, including full accounting of all cost of facilities, operations, faculty, and staff. That's a pretty remarkable achievement for a graduate program in Canada, not to be dependent on taxpayers.
We enrol about 50 students every year in a one-year intensive program. It's course and project work, and they follow that year by a four-to-eight-month internship that takes about two semesters. In a typical year about two-thirds of our students come from outside Canada, paying about $52,000 in tuition. Canadians pay two-thirds of that, about $30,000.
They receive a graduate degree. A master of digital media, and it's accredited by all four universities, a unique thing, a parchment with four seals on it. That four-university arrangement has its advantages, but it also has its challenges, and I have to attend a lot of senate meetings and things like that. But we've simplified things a little by having one of the partners, Simon Fraser University, effectively be the managing partner, handling financial services, student services, and academic services.
I am sure you are not so much interested in the day-to-day running of the school as you are in the career outcomes. I will talk to those in a moment, but I wanted to talk a bit about the uniqueness of our program, because I think it speaks to what's different about a digital economy and why it requires a special kind of education and a special kind of support.
Ours is a graduate degree. The students arrive with a bachelor’s degree from across a broad range of fields. About a quarter of the people we recruit you would call technical. They have computer science and engineering degrees. About another quarter are in fine arts and animation, and then the remaining half of the students come from almost any area—business, finance, science, arts, or social sciences. Digital media is fundamentally a blending of art and technology, and that blending is typically done by the people who are in neither camp but are in between those camps, because you're really trying to blend content with technology.
There are three main aspects to our program. There's coursework, which anybody with a graduate degree or undergraduate degree would be familiar with. We have a big project activity, which is a little bit different from the internship with which people are probably familiar. The courses are offered in a regular classroom although there are a lot of whiteboards and room for group activities, but it would look pretty familiar to anybody familiar with university education.
We have courses in creativity and storytelling, project management, digital media theory, law, and business. Those take the entirety of the first term really and get the students ready for their second term, which is unique to our school because it is a project term. The students take on a sponsored team project with a real client, real deliverables, and a real deadline. We have a faculty supervisor, and the sponsor also provides weekly supervision. It's experiential, project-based learning at its best, and the students learn at a “gut-feel” level by actually delivering to real clients and getting the network they will need after graduation.
They take a course in interaction design concurrently, but otherwise they work four days a week on 12 credits equivalent to a master’s thesis. They're doing it in a group and they're building something. They're making a prototype, a proof of concept, or a vertical slice of a game. They're doing some sort of applied research and development.
The third term can be a reprise of the second term with another sponsored project, but they're also offered the opportunity to broaden and deepen their knowledge by taking an elective course, quite often from our partner universities. They can go to UBC, SFU, Emily Carr, or BCIT. They also have the opportunity to substitute for that second industry project what we call a “pitched project,” in which they do product development of an idea of their own. About one third of our students elect to do that. What they're really doing is starting a business at that point.
In their fourth term—so after a year of coursework when they come back in the fall—they go into an internship term. Probably two-thirds of the students go on to do what we would call a regular internship, a paid placement at a digital media company, usually in Vancouver but it can be all around the world. Almost one third of the other students elect to take that pitched project they did in the summertime and turn it into a real business. They form what we call a “venture internship” in which they form a company and effectively hire themselves as their first interns. We provide space and mentoring support with entrepreneurs and residents and so on, as well as some physical facilities that they need.
A small number of students seek further education—they maybe want to go on to do a Ph.D. We provide an opportunity for them to go and work in a lab or something. We call that an academic entrepreneurship.
What are the outcomes of this kind of an education? We have very high placement rates. This is a program that industry wanted, that industry pushed for. Industry hires almost all of our graduates either immediately upon graduation or within a couple of months. Our students have very good outcomes in terms of staying in the industry. It is a volatile industry, and there's a lot of grunt work that sometimes grinds people out, but our students move into higher positions of product design, product management, and leadership. Really the motivation for our school was a recognition that Canada produced excellent undergraduate people in digital media, but not enough people trained in management.
Our students are able to ride out the inevitable ups and downs in that industry and continue on, and to start businesses as well. We've had 11 spinoff companies since the program started in 2007.
Your focus is the entertainment software industry, and that's video games. About 40% of our graduates go into video games directly, but I think importantly, the other 60% go into a broad range of industries. I think this is indicative of the enormous impact video games are having on everything else in the world, ranging from banking, to health care, to education, to retail. Our students are in all of those sectors.
The lessons learned about engagement, about how to find and retain customers, how to keep people going, all those lessons learned in virtual worlds are playing out in the real world now with things like 3-D printing and immersive and augmented reality. Our students are part of that revolution that's changing the entire world, not just the video game world.
When our school started, that's when the iPhone launched, so there was a moment in time when everything was about the virtual and online world. Then it became all about the mobile and ubiquitous world. We've transitioned quite a bit.
I think the third wave is upon us now. It's really the things we call Internet of things and augmented reality, all the ways in which digital media is coming into our cars, into our houses, and into our built environments. It's a very exciting time, but it's also very challenging.
I look forward to answering your questions, and talking about how highly qualified people play a big role in that future.
