News

The Teaching Innovation Incubator has announced its inaugural open call for project submissions.

The Incubator is seeking diverse project teams with teaching and learning ideas that are complex, necessitate change, require interdisciplinary and cross-functional partnerships, and have the potential to be a transformative part of the future of education at the University of Waterloo. Selected projects will gain access to funding, project coordination, and a suite of resources.

Check out the Open Call Innovation Incubator website for specifics! 

Please help us recognize the great work Waterloo’s instructors are doing in the digital classroom.

The Office of the Associate Vice-President, Academic and the Centre for Extended Learning would like your help to identify these remarkable people by nominating an instructor or an online course author.

The Office of the Associate Vice-President, Academic (AVPA) is seeking to fill the position of Chair of the Undergraduate Communications Requirement Group (UCRG), starting May 1, 2024 for a three-year term (with the possibility of renewal). 

The Instructional Programs and Practices project team, led by co-leads Diana Skrzydlo (Teaching Fellow in the Faculty of Mathematics) and Donna Ellis (Director of the Centre for Teaching Excellence), will have a broad mix of representation from across the campus and is currently seeking expressions of interest from faculty members from all faculties.

Turnitin released an artificial intelligence detection tool on April 4, and it went live at Waterloo on April 6. The tool has been trained on GPT 3 and GPT 3.5 (which includes ChatGPT) and Turnitin claims that it has impressive accuracy.

Instructors who use Turnitin will start receiving an AI detection score (entirely independently generated from Originality score) as part of its Similarity report. The report on artificial intelligence will only be visible to instructors and administrators, and only from within the Originality report. Of course, if you do not have a statement in your course outline notifying students that you will be using Turnitin you will not have access to these reports (because Turnitin is not activated for your course).

Dear Colleagues, 

I write today because there are a substantial number of important religions holidays that will occur during the exam period in Winter 2023. The University’s regulations on providing accommodations with respect to assignments, tests, and final examinations note that “ the University acknowledges that, due to the pluralistic nature of the University community, some students may seek accommodations on religious grounds,” and imply that these requests should be accommodated.  

The Office of the Associate Vice-President, Academic is pleased to announce the creation of the new role of Assistant Vice-President, Academic – Leadership and Strategic Initiatives. The first to hold the role will be Martin Cooke, who will move from his current role as Associate Dean, Undergraduate Students in the Faculty of Arts.

Dear Colleagues,

I write today to provide what I hope will be useful information. There has recently been considerable attention in traditional and social media and in academic circles about “homework help” platforms like Chegg and Photomath, and artificial intelligence tools like ChatGPT. There has especially been a flurry of conversation since the release of ChatGPT in November 2022 because of its perceived implications for academic integrity as well as the design of assignments used to assess student learning, pedagogy, and curriculum. This memo provides direction for interacting with Chat GPT (and other AI software tools) in the context of teaching at the University of Waterloo.

The following updates highlight initiatives currently underway that impact the work of Waterloo instructors, including opportunities to provide input and more.