Good evening, Mr. Chair, committee members, fellow witnesses, and others here.
My name is Jordan Ferguson, and I am a third-year psychology student at Acadia University. I am here tonight to talk about the importance that fair dealing has for ensuring accessible and high-quality post-secondary education, and the impact it has directly on my education.
The inclusion of education as part of fair dealing in the 2012 Copyright Modernization Act has created a mechanism that allows for the exchange of small amounts of information between authors and users. In my classroom, this has meant that professors have had the ability to use a diversity of sources, providing varied perspectives for me to analyze and learn from. It has also created learning experiences in my study groups, group projects, and presentations, as we are able to access and utilize a variety of different sources. These organic learning moments have been crucial to creating a well-rounded learning environment.
I previously mentioned that I am a psychology student. Inside the classroom, as is the case with any science, what we learn in our psychology courses is almost exclusively research-based. Therefore, our access to peer-reviewed journal articles is imperative to the completion of papers, projects, and assignments. In addition, the ability to obtain these journal articles through fair dealing allows our professors to provide us with an accurate and up-to-date education in the constantly evolving psychology field.
Outside the classroom, I'm the vice-president of the Acadia student dance collective, where I volunteer teaching my peers dance. Each semester our club uses a large selection of music and videos from various sources for warm-up, choreography, and the dance show at the end of each semester. Fair dealing enables many extracurricular activities similar to the dance collective, keeps them affordable, and ultimately enriches our student experience.
Fair dealing has a large impact on my experiences as a student and on the quality of my education both inside and outside the classroom. Last year alone I spent over $1,000 on textbooks for my classes. My peers and professors are the largest purchasers and consumers of academic resources. Fair dealing has not made textbooks and content anywhere near free but rather has increased the variety of resources I am able to learn from.
Thank you.