- KI celebrates 10 years! To mark our first decade, our Fall 2018 KI seminars featured KI alumni working and studying in a wide range of fields. You can catch videos of the talks on the Waterloo Faculty of Environment Facebook page.
- We recently updated our curriculum, and have made changes to enhance the KI experience. Investigative Sciences have been re-defined and reduced to two, to make room for a conflict management breadth elective. INTEG 420B and INTEG 321 have both increased in credit weight, recognizing the additional work students put into those courses.
- The first offering of “Making Collaboration Work” had 33 students from all 6 faculties enrolled, from Drama and Psychology to Engineering and Computer Science. It’s been a big success, sharing KI skills with students outside of KI, and we look forward to offering this course again.
- This Waterloo Magazine article about KI shares great examples of how KI shapes leaders for a complex world, and you’ll recognize some alumni in there
- The theme for KIX 2019 is the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals – please check out the exhibits in March!
Curriculum updates
This year, we made some careful changes to the KI curriculum in response to student feedback and 10 years of observations. The key changes are:
- the introduction of a mandatory conflict management breadth elective, with choice of which elective from a list like our other breadth courses;
- the renaming and reduction of the number of Science courses: students will now need to take two Natural/Physical Science courses;
- an increase in credit weight for INTEG 321 to 0.75 and INTEG 420B to 1.0, recognizing the additional work students put into those courses;
- the discontinuation of INTEG 231, with relevant components integrated back into INTEG 230 and INTEG 320; and
- the introduction as a core requirement of INTEG 340 as the research methods course.
These changes will help present a more cohesive core that better acknowledges the workload in our heavier courses, and introduce a conflict management requirement that many felt was missing from the degree.
Making Collaboration Work
INTEG 210: Making Collaboration Work had its first offering in Fall 2018. This course was (and will continue to be) open to all students outside KI and is intended to bring some of the collaborative theory and best practices that we teach and learn in KI to the rest of campus.
Katie Plaisance taught the course, which was co-designed with former KI students Georgia LaMarre, Akanksha Madan, and Shane Morganstein; in addition, about a dozen current KI students shared their input on the final design of the course before it was taught.
The course went incredibly well. Those who took it noted how much they enjoyed the opportunity to work with students from other faculties, and many students remarked that they were already seeing benefits in their other courses, and on their job interviews, as a result of taking INTEG 210 – some even noted that the course helped them in their personal lives as well! We plan to offer this course again in Fall 2019.
KIX 2019
KIX 2019 will once again feature exhibits exploring the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals. Please check out the exhibits March 11-16, hosted again in the St. Jerome’s University Siegfried Hall Residence Wellness Centre.