Career and Personal Education

UBC offers a diverse range of effective and accessible programs and courses that connect academic excellence with learners, employers and community members.

We are committed to increasing the opportunities, expertise and networks that help learners transform their careers, communities and themselves at multiple stages in their life.

A snapshot of CPE

UBC Career and Personal Education (CPE) is available through UBC Extended Learning (ExL) as well as a number of Vancouver Faculties and academic units. CPE was developed across UBC and is supported through the 2013 Flexible Learning Strategy, in which CPE was identified as one of the six pillars of activity. Its goal is to enhance the reach and relevance of high-quality academic offerings. Growing CPE activities, particularly online, is a current focus for the Transformative Learning core area of UBC’s Strategic Plan.

Current CPE Priorities

In 2017, UBC Continuing Studies was restructured to provide greater central support capacity to develop continuing education, and was renewed as UBC Extended Learning (ExL). Building on the strengths of the former unit, ExL continues to provide courses and programs to support a wide variety of learners (both domestic and international), and now has an enhanced mandate to support UBC Faculties in growing and expanding UBC’s offerings related to personal, professional and career-applied education.

In April 2019, the Office of the Provost and Vice-President Academic announced an open call for project funding to support the development of cohort-based online learning opportunities. The Online Learning Advancement Fund (OLAF) is administered through Extended Learning. More information about OLAF can be found here.

RECENT CPE ACTIVITIES

1. Supporting Faculties in growing applied graduate programs

There is increasing demand for professionally-focused graduate-level degree programs. Through its Program Development Unit, ExL has supported bringing some of these programs to market including:

Program	Faculty
Master of Engineering Leadership	Applied Science
Master of Health Leadership and Policy	Applied Science
Master of Data Science	Science/Arts
Master of Data Science – Computational Linguistics Option	Science/Arts

2. Supporting UBC involvement with edX

edX is a non-profit online education consortium founded by MIT and Harvard; UBC is a contributing charter member.

UBC has launched a number of online (primarily career progression) courses on the edX continuing education platform (both free and paid). This offers UBC the opportunity to experiment with different models of CPE certification, modularity and recruitment. Online delivery is increasingly a structural imperative in CPE. Our courses on the edX platform expose UBC’s excellence to a global audience of learners, spanning broad topics from Indigenous education and climate change to systematic program design in computer science and many others.