Friday, May 27, 2016

Future students explore You@Waterloo Day

The University of Waterloo's campus will be abuzz with future students and their families this weekend as the annual You@Waterloo Day celebration kicks off.

Each year, students who have received an offer of admission to Waterloo and their families are invited to this special visit day, which gives them the opportunity to meet professors, staff, and students who can answer their last-minute questions about Waterloo.

They can take a walking tour of campus and speak with student ambassadors about their personal Waterloo experience.

Future students also get a chance to visit their residence of choice and get answers to their questions about living at Waterloo.

The schedule of activities includes tours of campus, faculty-specific tours, tours of athletics facilities and residences, tours of the federated and affiliated institutions, and satellite campus tours in Cambridge and Stratford.

Information booths will be set up during the event showcasing the various services offered to students on campus.

You@Waterloo Day takes place between 10:00 a.m. and 2:00 p.m. on Saturday, May 28.

Keystone Campaign thanks Paul McKone

After six years of service, Paul McKone has completed his tenure as the Keystone Co-Chair representing staff. Thank you, Paul, for giving so generously of your time and talent. We’re grateful for everything you’ve done for our campus community.

As we say goodbye to Paul, we also welcome Tony Munro as our new Keystone Co-Chair. Recently, Paul introduced Tony to the job — watch this great video of him passing the torch:

We hope the video gets you excited for the Keystone Picnic on Friday, June 3. We’re looking forward to seeing all of our faculty, staff and retirees in the DC Quad between 11:30 a.m. and 1:30 p.m.

Special thanks to Gord Cooledge, Executive Chef, Food Services, and Ray Darling, our Registrar, for volunteering for the dunk tank!

For event details, visit the Keystone Picnic page.

Waterloo leads the drive towards online learning excellence

This is the latest in a series of #UWStratPlan stories that profile some of the initiatives that are part of the robust efforts to implement the Strategic Plan. 

Audio tapes, paper and mail — those were the tools of distant education fifty years ago. Distant, and somewhat disconnected.

It’s a different story today. 

Extended learning is the preferred term, and the classroom exists as a lively online space where students and faculty connect by email, instant messaging and news posts. The University of Waterloo has placed itself on the front edge of a provincial movement to broaden the range of online opportunities, and ease access to them.

It fits Waterloo’s Strategic Plan commitment to excellence in academic programming.

"Waterloo has a lot of great experience to bring to the table as we talk about a province-wide e-campus,” says Cathy Newell Kelly, one of two interim executive directors leading the Ontario Online Learning Consortium. "The idea is to elevate online learning in Ontario and make it better known. We'd like to Ontario to be a leader in online learning nationally and even internationally.”

Newell Kelly was seconded to the role in August 2015 from her job as director of Waterloo’s Centre for Extended Learning (CEL). The consortium of the province’s 45 publicly assisted universities and colleges has the responsibility of building eCampus Ontario, a provincial-government initiative to create and expand a one-stop portal launched in October 2015 for students exploring online learning.

Newell Kelly represents the universities; Linda Rees, the colleges.

Besides expanding online options, they have to smooth out the complexities of enrolling among different institutions. The province wants the user experience on eCampus Ontario to be uncomplicated.

"The focus is always the student,” Newell Kelly says. "How can we provide more of those opportunities — not just courses, but full programs — online?”

Waterloo offers more than 500 online undergraduate and graduate courses annually. Nineteen programs are fully online. On-campus students make up three-quarters of Waterloo’s online enrolment.

The approach taken by CEL tends to avoid live content in favour of material that students can interact with when they choose.

"This is particularly important for our fully-online programs, where we have a lot of working professionals and non-traditional learners enrolled," says Aldo Caputo, interim director of CEL. "But undergrads taking online courses may be on co-op work term, or they may have athletics, extracurriculars, work commitments,  scheduling conflicts, etc. Online allows them all to learn when and where they prefer."

Read the rest of the story on the Strategic Plan website.

Changes in public access routes to St. Paul's

A message from St. Paul's University College.

You may have noticed that fencing has gone up around St. Paul’s – that’s because our campus expansion has begun. While we’re excited that this expansion is taking place, it does mean that we need to adjust our public entry points for the duration of the work.

For example, the east side of the St. Paul’s building is closed. The main pathway from the Waterloo campus to St. Paul’s will be down the path between the St. Paul’s Graduate Apartments and St. Jerome’s University (see the map) and through the north doors by Student and Guest Services.

It is also worth pointing out that this walkway is not wheelchair accessible. If you need to access St. Paul’s from main campus and require accessible transport, please contact AccessAbility Services (519-888-4567 x35082) to arrange a shuttle to the main front door, which remains open and accessible from our two parking lots.

The St. Paul’s expansion is an important contribution to UWaterloo’s strategic mandate. It will allow for the development of the St. Paul’s GreenHouse social incubator by providing a new topnotch workspace and live-in student accommodations with private bathrooms and kitchen hubs on each floor. There will also be a large multipurpose community space for all students to use, and the facilities at Watson’s Eatery will be expanded. The new building is scheduled to open in Fall 2017.

Friday's notes

The Waterloo Electric Vehicle (EV) Challenge is taking place on Saturday, May 28. The event, hosted by Waterloo Engineering, has students design and test their own electric car in an annual endurance competition.

More than a dozen teams from around Ontario will attend this year's event.

There are two races for cars in different voltage classes—12 and 24 volts—and the winner of the 24 Volt race will receive the TADA Cup. Other awards include:

• the Dennis Weishar Engineering Design Award for excellence in Engineering design;
• the Toyota Fabrication & Manufacturing Award for excellence in vehicle construction; and
• the Interstate Batteries Rookie Team Award for the top-ranked first-year team.

The race is open to the public and is free of charge. The event will be taking place in the East Campus parking lot areas, so employee parking on Saturday will be limited to take the race into account.

University community members are being invited to a public lecture at Wilfrid Laurier University featuring Holocaust survivor and former spy Marthe Cohn. Cohn was a teen when Hitler rose to power, and her family, who lived across the German border in Alsace-Lorraine, began taking in Jews who were fleeing the Nazis. Soon, her homeland was under Nazi rule, and as the occupation intensified, her sister was arrested and sent to Auschwitz, and she and the rest of her family fled to the south of France, where she joined the French army's intelligence service and soon found herself working behind enemy lines.

The free public lecture takes place Sunday, May 29 at 7:00 p.m. in the Arts 1E1 lecture hall.