Enabling Access to Educational Resources in Clinical Sites
UBC’s instance of the eduroam solution was developed in partnership with Health Authorities (HAs) to meet Faculty of Medicine (FoM) needs for educational internet access in clinical sites. It provides UBC internet access over HA wireless infrastructure.
Overview
New medical education accreditation standards require the UBC FoM to provide access to educational material at all sites of instruction, including clinical sites. With the majority of educational resources available online, the best way to achieve this is enabling educational wireless internet access in clinical sites. Wireless access for UBC FoM affiliates in clinical sites is currently inconsistent across BC, which not only needs to be resolved for accreditation purposes, but is also increasingly inconvenient for students, residents, faculty, and staff.
Enabling wireless access to educational resources in clinical sites is vital to meeting accreditation standards and is a top priority for the Faculty.
Health Authority Partnership
HAs are vital partners in provisioning space and infrastructure that enable the education and training of BC’s physicians. The FoM appreciates the cooperation and support of HAs in this. Also, the FoM acknowledges its reliance on HAs to provision wireless internet infrastructure in clinical sites and seeks to support this by providing clear documentation of needs and collaborating in solution definition and testing.
The eduroam Solution
The eduroam solution was selected as best able to meet FoM needs from both the FoM and HA perspectives. The solution allows UBC-affiliated users access to the internet and UBC resources with their campus-wide login account as though they were on UBC campus. Users from other educational institutions that participate in the international eduroam community will have access to commodity internet provisioned by UBC.
The solution has been tested in clinical sites with positive results. In addition, security and privacy assessments were completed and are available upon request. The results were positive and minor risk mitigation recommendations resulting from assessments have been taken into consideration.
Technical Information
The eduroam solution leverages the international eduroam service for the SSID, Cisco’s Auto-Anchor Mobility functionality to tunnel traffic back to UBC, and back-end dynamic VLAN assignment to place users on the correct network depending on their login credentials. For more technical information about the solution, please see the Eduroam Solution Briefing Note – Technical (PDF).
Further Implementation
The UBC FoM is interested in implementing the eduroam solution in all clinical sites of instruction. A suite of implementation tools is available to support the process, including:
- Solution implementation process overview
- Guide to identifying and prioritizing opportunities to implement eduroam
- General and technical briefing notes
- Technical solution definition document
- Security and privacy assessments
- Support escalation procedure
- Technical implementation checklists and process map
- Post-implementation resource access confirmation checklist
- HA and UBC IT service desk communication material
- End user communication templates
UBC IT and UBC MedIT resources can be made available to support implementation at clinical sites of instruction.
For a printer-friendly version of this page, please see the Eduroam Solution Briefing Note – General (PDF).