BREB Application Guide: A SoTL-Specific Resource

BREB: Behavioural Research Ethics Board

PI: Principal Investigator. This is the UBC faculty member who takes responsibility for the research project (note: Lecturers cannot be PIs on ethics applications without Department head approval).

QA/QI: Quality assurance/improvement. Projects that are defined by Canada’s Tri‐council Policy Statement (TCPS2) as  “… exclusively for assessment, evaluation, management or improvement purposes”, within our context, for teaching practices, courses and programs. QA/QI teaching and learning inquiries typically do not require BREB review.

Research: Defined by Canada’s Tri‐council Policy Statement (TCPS2) as “an undertaking intended to extend knowledge through a disciplined inquiry or systematic investigation”. Teaching and learning inquiries deemed as research require BREB review.

Before you begin your BREB application process, determine if it is even required. One key criterion is your primary intent for conducting the project in question: BREB approval is required if the project’s primary intent is research. To help you discern whether your project needs BREB review, see the table below:

Other points to keep in mind:

• Don’t present your project as research if you did not get institutional ethics approval.
• There may be no research intent to begin with, but as soon as a research intent develops, you must submit an application for future work to be approved as research.
• There is no such thing as retroactive BREB approval. The only thing you can apply for is the use of secondary data after it has already been collected. However, it can be challenging to obtain consent from students to use their data for research purposes after the data is collected, and you will need to justify why you did not do so in advance.

rise.ubc.ca is your main portal for the entire BREB application process. By logging into RISe (Research Information Systems) with your CWL you will be automatically set up with your CWL credentials. You can learn more about the process at https://www.rise.ubc.ca/access-rise.

All PIs, co-PIs and anyone who will interact with participants or participant data need to complete the online TCPS 2 tutorial, which takes approximately two hours. Once you complete the tutorial, add your completion date to your RISe profile. This step must be completed before your BREB application can be submitted. If you have completed the CITI Tutorial on either clinical or behavioural ethics, this also meets this requirement (the CITI is common for those who have worked at US institutions).

To complete the BREB application, you will need to have a clear understanding of your project plan, including: research questions, process and methods, risk level, recruitment of participants, and tools you’ll use to collect data (e.g., interview protocols, survey questions, etc.). For more detailed information, checklists and guidelines from the BREB, visit https://researchethics.ubc.ca/behavioural-research-ethics/navigating-ethics-review. Additional topics include receiving review when conducting Indigenous Research. BREB staff are also available for consultations.  If you encounter challenges, contact ISoTL for assistance.*It is important that you do not begin to collect data or recruit participants until BREB has approved your study.

Anonymous data: no identifying information is collected. For example, students complete a survey where no name, ID or identifying information is entered. If the researcher knows who has participated (e.g., with focus group participants), their data can never be anonymous, but their participation can be kept confidential.

Anonymized data: information is stripped of direct identifiers, and no code is kept to allow future re-linkage. For example, you collect student names with a survey but remove the names from the dataset after collection and do not store the name information. Note that neither this format method, nor anonymous data, allow you to re-identify participants after the study, so there is no way to remove data if a participant would later like to withdraw – you must make this clear to participants in advance.

De-identified data: identifiers are replaced with anonymous IDs (e.g., “1” or “Participant A”) and identifiers are kept in a separate document to allow for future re-linkage. This can be important in cases where participants may want to withdraw from the study after data is collected, and allows the research team to pull out their data at any given point during the life of a project.

SoTL Specialists, GRAs, or GTAs (or anyone without a connection to the students involved) should usually be the only one with access to student identities. Data must be anonymized, de-identified and/or aggregated before a course instructor has access.

Any identifying data pertaining to research participants must be stored in secure locations (e.g., on a password-protected computer or One Drive, and not Google Drive).

Once the BREB office has reviewed your application (typically takes 3-4 weeks), you may need to complete provisos. Provisos are edits required before your application is accepted. This may include wording that is not precise enough, inconsistencies in details between the application and the supporting documents, or omissions (e.g., missing recruitment or consent documents). For each item listed, update the application and describe how you have responded under the “Provisos” tab on the RISe website. If changes are made to the supporting documents, remember to update the version number in the footer and remove the unused versions. Once your provisos are submitted, the BREB office is usually able to approve it within a week. After your study is approved, you can make minor amendments to your project (for example, changing some survey items or extending the project to an additional course). Any modifications to the study design or tool modification will require a PAA (post-activity approval) amendment.

Quality assurance & improvement studies, program evaluation & performance reviews, or testing within normal educational requirements when used exclusively for assessment, management or improvement purposes (TCPS2, 2.5). The BREB office has put together a PDF checklist to further help you establish whether your work is considered as quality assurance or research.

Many journals ask for details of ethical approval or a statement that approval was not required. If you wish to publish the results of a genuine QA/QI study, you would simply explain that under Article 2.5 of the Tri Council Policy Statement: “Quality assurance and quality improvement studies, program evaluation activities, and performance reviews, or testing within normal educational requirements when used exclusively for assessment, management or improvement purposes, do not constitute research for the purposes of this Policy, and do not fall within the scope of REB review.” Guidance from the BREB is also available, in relation to intent to publish. Article 2.5 refers to assessments of the performance of an organization or its employees or students, within the mandate of the organization, or according to the terms and conditions of employment or training. Those activities are normally administered in the ordinary course of the operation of an organization where participation is required, for example, an evaluation in the course of academic or professional training. Other examples include student course evaluations, or data collection for internal or external organizational reports. If data are collected for the purposes of such activities but later proposed for research purposes, it would be considered secondary use of information not originally intended for research, and at that time require BREB review.

Sharing results of an inquiry does not require BREB approval, so long as the project outcomes of a QA/QI project are not being presented as research. Regardless of whether you have BREB approval or not, ensure that responses shared will not identify any participant based on their comments and that participants have provided consent to have their responses made public. You are always welcome to present on general themes and topics without using the direct quotes from students. Sample consent forms for inquiries requiring and not requiring BREB review can be found in our How-to section under “Recruiting Participants”.

We always recommend that you look to the literature to see what has been done, and how it can inform your own inquiry. If you are predominantly using existing theory and literature to guide your inquiry, and hoping to establish your work as fill a gap in the literature, or in response to a specific theoretical claim, this would be considered research, and so BREB approval would be required. If on the other hand, your inquiry emerged out of something happening in your classroom (students falling asleep partway, very little engagement during lectures, etc.), you might still use some theory to support your inquiry, but the initial question came out of your classroom practice. In this way, your work would be considered more “QA/QI”, and not “research”, because you are focused on changes within your own practice and not generalizing beyond your specific context to support a wider research lens.

If there is a research intent, you must apply for BREB before beginning the project. You must also consider issues with data being collected by course instructors, such as power relationships that should be dealt with before collecting any data. Creating a consent form helps to address how some of these issues will be handled. A BREB application for secondary use of data can be submitted, however if you cannot obtain participant consent, you will need to justify a request for waiver of consent within your application. We strongly encourage you to connect with the BREB office to discuss your particular situation.

If you have questions about research ethics or the BREB application process, or would like to consult with the Office of Research Ethics (ORE), visit their “Contact Us” page. If you have specific questions about the ethics application relating to a SoTL inquiry, please connect with us via email: ctlt.isotl@ubc.ca