Thursday, October 27, 2022

Register for Cementing Ontario's leadership in the global automotive mobility sector

A message from the Office of Research.

Join Raed Kadri for the next installment of Research Horizons: Dialogue with Leaders on Wednesday, November 2 (Noon to 1:00 p.m.).

As Ontario’s flagship initiative for the automotive and mobility sector, the Ontario Vehicle Innovation Network (OVIN) is driving economic development and catalyzing a future that builds safer, cleaner, and more efficient transportation.

Raed Kadri is Vice-President, Strategic Initiatives, Business Development for the Ontario Centre of Innovation and Head of OVIN, an initiative by the Government of Ontario to ensure Ontario’s leadership in the future of the automotive and mobility sector. At the helm of OVIN, Raed drives Ontario’s presence on the global stage, leading programming that supports research and development (R&D) funding, talent development, technology acceleration, business and technical supports through testing and demonstration sites. Raed also leads province-wide co-ordination of activities and resources, public education, research, analysis, and thought leadership.

Bringing together stakeholder groups and raising awareness around the opportunities for Ontario and for its partners, Raed is cementing Ontario’s leadership in the future of the automotive and mobility sector globally.

Please register for either the in-person or virtual option. The in-person session will be held in the Enterprise Theatre in East Campus 5. Light refreshments will provided but attendees are welcome to bring a lunch.

Open Access Week Series: Principles of Marketing goes textbook-free

Screen capture highlighting open resources in textbook-free course.

By RJ McArthur. This article is one of a series celebrating open scholarship during Open Access Week. It is brought to you by the Open Scholarship Committee.

When Dr. Olivia Mesta was asked to redevelop MGMT 244/ARBUS 302: Principles of Marketing for an online offering in 2021, she decided to take the opportunity to “think outside the box.”

Having taught the course before, she wanted to explore the possibility of providing her students with a new perspective, or even a few new perspectives. In order to do this, she used Open Educational Resources (OER).

In previous iterations of the course, a conventional, commercially-produced textbook had been used. However, as Mesta notes, with a conventional textbook instructors are limited to the perspective of the author or authors, and, more specifically, to the particular examples they have chosen. Using one or two chapters from multiple conventional textbooks is often not feasible because of concerns around copyright and cost. OER, which provide material to be used and/or adapted (depending on the license) free of cost, provided the possibility for introducing new perspectives and, more to the point, new examples.

Dr. Olivia Mesta.

Dispensing with a conventional textbook for the online version of MGMT 244, Mesta adapted materials from two open textbooks — Principles of Marketing, published by the University of Minnesota Libraries Publishing through the eLearning Support Initiative, and Introduction to Marketing 1 from Nova Scotia Community College (NSCC) and Lumen Learning — as well as her own lecture notes to present core concepts.

Mesta developed assessment materials herself, since these open textbooks do not have test banks like many conventional textbooks. Podcasts and other open resources were used to provide both illustrative examples and opportunities for student participation and active learning. Mesta notes that this approach is especially well-suited for the subject of marketing, as it relies less on theory and more on real-life examples.

While the online version of the course used only open or web-based materials, Mesta notes that OER can also work alongside conventional textbooks because they can supplement established concepts with different perspectives and examples, thereby adding a sense of “richness” to the concepts presented.

One of the major considerations when using OER in a course is the amount of time it can take to locate them, to vet them for accuracy, quality and currency, and to adapt them to the needs of the particular course.

For this reason, Mesta credits the course release she received from her home department as a crucial factor in her use of OER in the course, in addition to the assistance provided by the Centre for Extended Learning. Mesta states that CEL’s support was essential not only in locating and working with OER, but also in ensuring that the materials remain available and relevant for future iterations of the course.

While OER might not suit all subject areas, Mesta recommends their use, noting that there are “really good resources available.”

Research Data Management Townhall on November 21

A message from the RDM Working Group.

Save the date: The Institutional Research Data Management (RDM) Strategy town hall will take place on Monday, November 21 at 10:00am as a hybrid event in EC5 1111 (Enterprise Theatre) and via Microsoft Teams. 

Co-chairs Alison Hitchens (associate university librarian, collections, technology and scholarly communication) and Ian Milligan (associate vice-president, research oversight and analysis) will be presenting the university’s draft RDM institutional strategy on behalf of the RDM Working group.  

This is responding to the Tri-Agency Research Data Management Policy, which mandates that all institutions must have an institutional RDM strategy by March 2023. The “agencies believe that research data collected through the use of public funds should be responsibly and securely managed and be, where ethical, legal and commercial obligations allow, available for reuse by others”. Here at Waterloo, we see an opportunity to help foster research excellence by developing an RDM strategy that meets the diverse needs of Waterloo researchers. 

This is your chance to be heard. At the town hall, the co-chairs will present the draft strategy, followed by a question-and-answer period. All University of Waterloo community members will have an opportunity to provide feedback and share their thoughts and ideas about the future of RDM on campus.  

Please save the date, as registration details coming soon. The event will conclude with a complimentary light lunch for those attending in-person. Should you have any questions in the interim, please contact nichola.harrilall@uwaterloo.ca.  

The art of teaching art online

Crewdson, Gregory. Untitled (Boy with Hand in Drain). 2001–02. Fine Arts Image Library, MDID, artsfinemdid3.uwaterloo.ca/data/record/51263/crewdson-g_07-02-1147_1000/.

By Stephanie Boragina, Centre for Extended Learning.

Can a studio course that supports creative exploration in the arts be taught well online? Natalie Hunter, Fine Arts sessional instructor and winner of the 2018 Excellence in Online Teaching Award, thinks so. Her goal is for students in her online course to engage with art at a deep and personal level and to explore images creatively through their own artwork. She says: “I want to make students more aware of the image world and how they contribute to it.” Over the last year, she has been realizing this objective through revisions to the fully online course FINE 130: Introduction to Digital Imaging, with help from the Centre for Extended Learning (CEL).

Originally developed by Fine Arts professor Lois Andison in 2011, this Fine Arts studio course supports students in the development of original creative critical thought and invites students to consider concepts from multiple perspectives. Students use Photoshop, a graphics editing tool, to create seven artistic works. They write accompanying artist statements that explain the ideas and intention behind their works of art, the choices they made, and the processes they undertook to make them.

Natalie says, “for me, this course is an entry point into the Visual Arts for people who don't necessarily have a background in the Visual Arts. It gives students an opportunity to express themselves through coursework, and I find that students, especially from disciplines other than Fine Arts, really appreciate that.”

An introductory module students complete in the first week of the course anticipates the challenges they will encounter as they create works of art. It ensures students can access and use a variety of digital tools:

• Photoshop, an industry-leading, subscription-based graphics editing software;
• LinkedIn Learning, for up-to-date video tutorials (curated by Natalie) on using Photoshop; and
• Padlet, an easy-to-use discussion tool well-suited for sharing and discussing images.

This introductory module also addresses plagiarism and copyright in the context of visual arts. Students learn where to find and how to recognize online images that they are free to use in their own artistic creations and how to cite these images appropriately. They are invited to collaboratively build an image gallery that they may draw from for future assignments while also practising skills in selecting and citing images.

The course uses the metaphor of an art gallery to share works of art and artistic ways of thinking with students. To create a studio atmosphere in a digital space, each module features a gallery of student works and students are encouraged to contribute their own work to these galleries as they complete the course assignments. Midway through the course, students create visual paradoxes inspired by artists such as Gregory Crewdson (shown above) and critique each other’s work in smaller gallery groups of approximately 20 students each.

Hunter, Natalie. Edge of Sky. 2022.

Natalie encourages students to express themselves and their experiences through the art they create, focusing on helping students use artwork to express their struggles, their identity, and their place in the world. She says, “it brings me joy that they are able to express themselves through a course like this. I sit in a very privileged position because I get to see the wide breadth of diversity that is UWaterloo's student body. And often their responses to projects are quite personal.”

Natalie’s dedication to both teaching this course and making significant revisions through CEL’s scheduled projects approach has been impressive. Natalie began her work with CEL by preparing a proposal for course revisions in June 2021 and then planned course content adjustments from the time of the proposal approval until she began intensive collaborative work with CEL from January to September 2022. Supporting Natalie in this project were Mishale Ravimoorthy (Assistant) and staff from the Centre for Extended Learning, including Stephanie Boragina (Online Learning Consultant), Francisco Moreno (Instructional Digital Media Developer), Lake Dyer (Learning Technologies Analyst, Production), Dana Francoeur (Copyeditor) and RJ McArthur (Copyeditor).

Natalie is finding that changes made with CEL’s support to restructure the lecture material, clarify the assignment requirements, and investigate new digital tools like Padlet are paying off. Student responses to the assignments seem stronger, supported by the more streamlined content delivery and rich visual components of the course. Adjusting the critique assignment to allow students to upload their own artwork has given Natalie more time to respond to students and provide feedback, a key component of studio work.

Most rewarding of all is seeing students’ deep engagement with art and the process of making their own artworks. Natalie says, “After all, it is my goal that students treat my course as an outlet for their creative potential while learning valuable skills they can apply to other aspects of their lives and education.”

Open Access Week Series: Fossil-Free UW

By Nicholas Frank Palmieri for Fossil Free UW. This article is one of a series celebrating open scholarship during Open Access Week. It is brought to you by the Open Scholarship Committee.

Openly available information has been central to the success of Fossil Free UW’s campaign to see the University of Waterloo divest its fossil fuel investments held by the pension and student endowment funds.

Making the University of Waterloo community aware of its financial support of fossil fuels required us and our friends in faculties across the university to examine the details. Our mission to uncover and address how much financial support the university provided to actors in the fossil fuel industry succeeded, thanks to years of inquiry and cooperation with individuals committed to the ethics of transparency.

The University administration shared investments with us in 2017, which revealed $68M of fossil fuel holdings in the top 200 fossil fuel companies. Math student Vincent Macri’s 2019 freedom of information (FOI) request revealed UWaterloo still held $61M. This information was essential in pushing forward the conversation about fossil fuel divestment at the University of Waterloo. This collected information also allowed then-Environment Ph.D. student, Truzaar Dordi, to compile evidence that investments the university made in fossil fuel companies had lost them a total of at least $20M between 2011 and 2015. This information informed the May 2021 report from the Responsible Investing Advisory Group and the June 2021 decision of the Board of Governors to commit to 100 per cent carbon neutrality in both its pension and endowment fund by 2040 and to rid itself of all positions in fossil fuel exploration and extraction companies by 2025.

The community action to convince the University of Waterloo to divest was made possible by our ability to access investment information in 2017. Without Vincent Macri’s FOI request that updated data in 2019, we wouldn’t have been able to demonstrate that policy change was needed to help the University align with Paris Climate Commitments. Access to this information, which showed us how much UWaterloo money was being invested in companies like BP and Shell, shaped our campaign to motivate UWaterloo to divest. This data focused the divestment conversation.

Access to information made our mission possible. Through the Principles of Responsible Investment, UWaterloo has committed to a standard of open access that continues to ensure that information is made public without delay to ensure it is meeting its climate goals.

Fossil Free uWaterloo facilitates learning, discussion, decision-making, and action to make our campus a climate justice leader. For further information about the commitments that the University of Waterloo has made towards a fossil free campus see below:

https://uwaterloo.ca/finance/responsible-investing

Thursday's notes

Plant Operations – Environmental Services and the Sustainability Office are hosting a Zero-Waste Fair from 10:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. today in the DC fishbowl. "The first 150 people get free coffee so make sure to bring your reusable mugs," says a note from the fair organizers. "Check out the fair to learn about waste reduction and diversion initiatives offered here on campus."

Learn more about Zero Waste Month.

Here's today's Keeping Well at Work Daily Inspiration:

What would 30 minutes for yourself mean to you today? 

What would you do if you had the gift of a free, unencumbered half hour today?

Would you finally go for that walk? Would you take care of a task that's been holding you back? Would you call someone you've been thinking about? Would you nap?  

Give yourself permission to take 30 minutes of time to do just what you need today. You will be amazed at the energy, positivity and relief it can give you.