President's Forum - October

Answered by David DeVidi

The team we've called an action team is comprised of Associate Vice Presidents and Associate Provosts. We all have pursued our individual initiatives, but have come together around a few different themes. One already hinted at is that society around us is changing. Our understanding of what students need to know and how they learn best is changing; and what society and our students will need from us 10 years from now will be different from what it is today. The action of our group is to ensure 10 years from now we're the university that we need to be.

Another organizing idea is that we're working in a university context. Like any good university, we're surrounded by immensely talented people: and the role of a centralized project shouldn’t be to ruin things from the centre, but to unlock that potential, amplify it, and coordinate efforts across the university.

Lastly, as they say, “culture eats strategy for lunch:” and so if we really want to have a prospect of advancing teaching and learning and creating innovation in teaching and learning at the University of Waterloo, we need to make sure we foster a culture on campus that values those efforts

If you look at the examples here, you'll see how they fit together with the three themes and the priorities that we've just talked about. I’ll just single out the blended learning initiative and the agile support team. We've taken a lot of the learning that instructors have done during the pandemic, when we've had to make everything available through remote instruction. There’s a way to use what we've learned to make better courses on campus and online for the future.

Answered by Sanjeev Gill

We call this out in our strategic plan, which was officially launched in November of 2019. We identified the need to support professional learners in particular and our alumni in their lifelong learning journey, and so we called it out prior to the pandemic. However it wasn't until May 2020 when our chancellor Dominic Barton pulled together about a dozen leaders from Canadian corporations and from heads of multinationals operating in Canada and asked them one single question: how can the University of Waterloo support you both through the pandemic and beyond? Almost unanimously, all of those leaders said that one of the areas that the University of Waterloo had a unique strength in and should support moving forward was in the area of upskilling and reskilling. That really was our call to action to begin moving forward in developing a unit on campus focused on this this mission. In particular, we wanted to establish an academic support unit that also served the University and our faculty members and that is really what WatSPEED is today.

The challenge existed certainly before COVID-19 where professional workers in particular were dealing with not just digital transformational challenges but societal, economic, and environmental challenges in the workplace, but the pandemic certainly exacerbated the challenge amongst the professional community. We’ve seen layoffs at mass, and we've seen folks in the workplace trying to retrain themselves fall into new areas of sustainable work for the future which requires skills of the future. So that is the challenge that WatSPEED is out to tackle is, how do we support workers as new technologies emerge, as new challenges environmental, societal, and economic occur in the workplace? And how will we respond to that moving forward? Professional workers have certainly realized the necessity for lifelong learning because the world is constantly changing. Now is the opportunity for us as an institution to respond to that demand.

Answered by Norah McRae

The World Economic Forum identified five key trends for the future of work. One is, and these are of course accelerated under COVID-19: work from anywhere, work for all, work at will, work smarter and work for the planet. It behooves us, then, to ensure that our students are able to work in those ways. We certainly did that throughout the pandemic with the tremendous work to assist students in working remotely, all the co-op work terms, the EDGE experiences, and the We Accelerator program. We helped our employers do that as well. We also employed using data analytics to understand the needs of employers, so we were learning how to work smarter and move that into program development.

I think we have to train our students and help our students be able to work successfully under those conditions for the future – that’s how. But also what- what we know is COVID showed us is that every sector, every type of career path, every kind of academic area of interest - students will need to be prepared with whatever technology and digital skills will be required within different types of organizations and sectors. We have to make sure they've got those capabilities.

To Sanjeev’s comment about upskilling - we need to make sure that our students are upskilled too. An example of that is our We Accelerate program launched this spring, where we looked at 70,000 job postings and identified: what are some of these key skills? And how can we partner with industry more intentionally to quickly get some upskilling for unemployed first work term students and get them out the door while at the same time exploring different ways of doing work integrated learning.

Another flexible way (in addition to our much beloved and extremely important co-op program) but in reflection of work for all - there are ways that we can do work integrated learning that provides flexibility without undermining quality to embrace more students, different kinds of students; more employers, and different kinds of employers. So I think that that it is not just the how and the what but also thinking about: what are the capabilities students need – whether they’re getting capabilities that they're getting in the classroom, through their co-curricular activity, through work integrated learning and co-op or experiential education- and that comes under our Future Ready talent framework with the 12 talents that we've identified. We think all students should be working on these, and gaining capability on them in order to be ready for the future of work.

The final comment I wanted to say is - it takes a village and we're all part of this village. I want to acknowledge the tremendous work from our faculties, the deans and associate deans, the units that supported our students – who hired them, engaged in our online learning assistance and various types of research that students were doing and were involved in student engagement efforts. We couldn't do what we do in our portfolio if it wasn't for the tremendous community at the University of Waterloo who's really stepped up to help all of us prepare our students.

Answered by Jeff Casello

When I think about graduate studies at Waterloo we really have three really important categories of graduate studies. The first is our course-based students. These are students who have come back to us typically from having some professional experience but not always and what they're really looking to do is sharpen their skills in the same way that we are talking about in lifelong learning. They're coming back to Waterloo because it's a place that is known to be at the cutting edge of what it means to be both productive and impactful and transformative but also employable. Our professional students and our course-based students are really moving in that direction, and I think we continue to be successful to attract, retain and develop some incredible talent through our course-based programs.

Then we move to our research programs both at the master's level and at the PhD level. We have incredibly bright students who are coming to work with us and they are perhaps becoming global experts in their disciplines. But maybe more important, what is really going to give us a possibility to be again transformative and impactful is that these students come and they tackle really important really complex problems. I always say, and I think our research students would agree: perhaps the problem definition part of their work is actually more important than the problem solution part. It's at least equally important. And this ability to take complexity and to really think about really hard problems that society is facing - whether they're economic or technical or environmental - and be able to distill them into something that is manageable and addressed through research… it's an incredibly valuable skill. After our students leave us they have a resilience and a dynamic capacity to be able to adapt to whatever economies will throw at them, because really the skill set they have is to address complexity. And that is never going to go away. It's perhaps the most important thing that we can train our students.

As I think ahead to the strategic plan – there are three things that are really important for grad studies. We're thinking a lot about work integrated learning, experiential learning - it's already an identity, it's already an important translation for our studies at Waterloo and we're doing a ton of it already in grad studies. But it's important now that we build that brand, build that identity and even make it a stronger. I think before Norah was here as our colleague, she reviewed our grad programs and said we need to do more work integrated learning in our grad program. The second thing is around interdisciplinarity. We had an entire task force through the strategic plan, and now we're working on complex problems not from a discipline perspective but from a joint and interdisciplinary perspective across the campus. The last thing I think that is really important for us is pathways for our students, so that our grad students come back to us because they have career objectives, personal objectives. We as an institution should do more to accelerate and catalyze those pathways and part of what we're thinking about when we talk about the incubator. 

Answered by David DeVidi

We all regard the incubator as a really exciting idea in a lot of ways as kind of a linchpin, something that draws together and supports all the other things that that are on the go. As part of our implementation of the developing talent part of the strategic plan, I think that the way that I like to think about the incubator is - if you have an incubator inside a company, their job is to generate the next generation of products. What's next? And what we have in the University right now to support people who have ideas for teaching and learning is a lot of things that will help you get better incrementally. You can go to the Centre for Teaching Excellence and take the instructional skills workshop – then you'll be a better instructor. If a program wants to decolonize their curriculum their support to help you think that through. And if you go to the Centre for Extended Learning you can improve your suite of offerings in your program - that's available at distance. And those are all great, those are all really important but they're all incremental. So it will have to be a fairly selective process because there's so many good ideas out there - but the ideas that are selected for incubation will be the ones that have the potential for bigger impact. They'll come in different scales, so proportionally a bigger impact you might say. But they can punch above their weight. I’m trying to avoid words like disruptive but that's the idea - something that's transformative. Not everything that has the potential to be transformative is a good idea, and not all good ideas are good ideas for Waterloo. But what you can do in the incubator is provide the supports that are needed to actually try out that idea. Develop it, test drive it, evaluate it and then the University can make a smart decision about, is this something we want to roll out more broadly? I think that's the vision. It’s easy to see how it will reinforce everything that's been talked about here. It can be anything from a new way of teaching in a classroom to a new way to use virtual reality to teaching biology classes or something to interdisciplinary courses where you capitalize on the expertise of our grad students and make a new course that will be available to students for years to come. Or it could be something structural, and ask: what's next for lifelong learning? What can complement the work that's already happening in WatSPEED? Maybe that requires some more structural changes in the way we do things and the way we make things. So all of those ideas can be fleshed out and could be evaluated so that the university can move ahead smartly.

Answered by David DeVidi

No and as we said before it's about unlocking the potential that's out there. It's not that we're going to have a team of 10 brilliant people who do all the work. 

Answered by David DeVidi

This is a true confession that I shouldn't be saying on tv here but the pitch that went to Jim for this and that and to the deans is really that we will roll out the stuff that we're confident is going to be part of any good incubator idea. And we're going to spend the next 18 months designing it so that when we firm things up it's exactly what the University of Waterloo needs. But what I think now it's primarily for good ideas to come from anywhere, but we expect most of them to come from faculty members because they're the ones who are on the front lines of teaching and learning. There will be a process by which you get the supports and then it's the academic support units, especially existing academic support units, that will marshal some of their existing resources to support this new direction. So for instance the Centre for Teaching Excellence has a lot of expertise on evaluating the quality of teaching and learning innovations - and so that's a team that can be available if every project needs to be evaluated on how successful it is. That's support that can come from that unit giving existing staff expertise to support the ideas. That doesn't rule out a good idea coming from a staff member, but my anticipation would be that primarily it's going to be you know professional teaching academics who are going to come forward with the teaching ideas.

You see the professional librarians and expert staff from the Writing and Communication Centre for example - this student support office has staff who are involved already in the front lines of teaching and helping to develop courses. The teams won't always be people who come there because the incubator provided them - they might be part of the teams that are pitching the ideas that get incubated.

Answered by David DeVidi

In the coming months, I think we're going to see a bunch of recommendations coming forward from the anti-Racism task force. I think the University community is going to, with enthusiasm, recruit a more diverse student body, and support them when they're here with transitional programming and so on, to help people succeed and reach their potential. But specifically about curriculum - there's a variety of things that are underway already. The Centre for Teaching Excellence just hired the first leader of a team of experts in anti-Racist and Indigenous pedagogies. And these are experts that are going to be available to every program in the University. We're trying to get away from the language of reviewing because it's more formative and improving than passing a test but as part of that “review” process, we want programs to engage with these experts because for some programs, it’s going to be obvious to them what decolonization means, such as in the Social Sciences and the Arts. But there's things to be done in in every field. Two really exciting example that happened at Centre Undergrad Council yesterday. One was the product of several years’ work in the School of Architecture to transform the curriculum and take away the Eurocentric view and rethink it terms of these other values. Also yesterday we just approved the first of two new diplomas in Black Studies, including a really innovative one in anti-Racist communication strategies. So I think we're on our way of to having these changes woven right through the curriculum all across campus.

Answered by David DeVidi

Just to start with the premise of the question: I think it's important to recognize that for people with disabilities the pandemic was a mixed bag. There are people who really benefited from the move to asynchronous online learning, and there are others with different challenges who found that a real struggle, and who are anxious for us to get back to normal. At the individual instructor level, a lot of them have learned the value of some pre-packaged asynchronous materials and so we've launched the blended learning initiative on campus so that we're thinking of blended learning courses. There, you've got a really thoughtful integration of online components. On campus there’s a high-value, interactive kind of teaching that really can't be done as successfully in an online setting. And that's one approach by which you would preserve a lot of the value of being available online, or being available asynchronously for the students who found that beneficial. I mentioned that the agile support team and others are available to try to transform more of these remote courses into an increased stock of fully online courses going forward. So I think that's a few things to you know the people who really liked what was happening during the pandemic, I think they will find that the future of the University of Waterloo is even more likely.

Answered by Jeff Casello

When we had to move quickly to remote activity. Much of our research milestones for our graduate students proposals and thesis defences normally were in person, and we would struggle sometimes to get external examiners engaged. Now we're in a place where we can really celebrate meaningfully the research work and have broadened the audience. It's been really terrific for us to open this up and have a confidence that our technology is going to allow our students to do that. It allows us to connect with researchers globally in ways that maybe it would have been more difficult to if we were trying to fly them to Canada. I think our Ph.D. students, particularly with the engagement of committee members and examiners, have really benefited from the remote participation.

Answered by Norah McRae

The lesson from the pandemic and the point I was making about work from anywhere is that when we think about the war for talent, COVID has demonstrated that there are no boundaries. So we have to be preparing our students to be able to compete for whatever positions they're interested in, against talent that may be coming from anywhere. So the days where we can expect a company to come to campus and recruit all of their students or all of their graduating students from one place are over our students are going to be competing with everybody everywhere all the time. So we've got to make sure they've got that global competitive ability - which of course they do because they're brilliant - but how we do that is also going to be important.

Secondly, I’m not sure we'll see the same traffic literally of employers coming to campus. They've been able to figure out how to recruit remotely, how to onboard remotely, and so that may change and shift the way we support our employer relationships and partnerships. It also then allows us to think very differently about how we support and provide the student experience in a different way because our students, when they're on their co-op work terms or their EDGE experiences, aren't for the most part on campus. They're anywhere – coming from 62 different countries. And that opens up the door for all sorts of interesting opportunities for how we can support our students.

Answered by David DeVidi

It's something that actually grows out of a project that happened before the pandemic. There was a large committee that consulted widely on what students and instructors felt like we needed  by way of teaching and learning spaces on campus that we didn't have.  When I arrived in his portfolio in 2019, that was one of the things that I thought was really important to try to move forward. We put together a team to start making decisions about that and already the idea that we needed to transform the way that we teach was on the cards. But I think it fits together with a lot of what we're talking about today in an important way. If we're going to incubate new ideas and come up with new ways of working effectively in the classroom, it probably isn't great if the vast majority of your classrooms have tables and chairs that are bolted into the floor. That's not a great way if what you want is interaction in your students and teamwork, and engaging with technology. So maybe you can have some students in your class here and you pair it up with a class at the University of Toronto or a class in Milan. Those are all things that are coming and we don't have the spaces for them. So thatt is where that project is working right now. It's got a multi-year commitment from the provost to provide funding and every year we identify a couple of the low-hanging fruit learning spaces that were identified by the instructors and students before 2019 as the University of Waterloo's most problematic and we're redesigning those to become the kind of flexible  active learning spaces that that give instructors the option to teach in different kinds of ways. And this will also fit well with things an increasing number of blended classes.

It’s obviously partly a financially driven consideration that you only do a few classrooms per year. But that makes good sense from a strategic point of view too, because if we miraculously could try to transform all of our classrooms tomorrow we might make them all into something that's not what we need five years from now. So the gradual transformation of our classrooms is for practical and strategic reasons a good way forward.

Answered by David DeVidi

I wouldn't want to speak out of turn but I do think that programs are going to want to make their own choice. This term, we did make the capacity for so-called high flex classes that are simultaneously on campus and elsewhere. One of the things that's an ongoing challenge for our students is they'd like to pick up a class or two while they're away on co-op terms. For programs where every student's in co-op, that might be an option that they want to develop. Or international students in the future: maybe it makes sense that there would be an option to spend two years on campus so you get that kind of live on-campus University experience that our students always tell us they value and also spend two years living closer to home.

Answered by Jeff Casello

We have about 2400 international graduate students at Waterloo and from all over the world. And an incredibly deep applicant pool that we could really be purposeful about - creating global communities, which would be a fantastic outcome for our grad programs with the ability to engage both here on campus and virtually, and to create research teams or courses that are merged from around the world. We're starting to see a little bit of that effect but these are the kinds of ideas that we want to see boil up from the bottom and we can be support mechanisms for those kinds of things.

Answered by Jeff Casello

I think it's an incredibly important question and so maybe I’ll just point out a couple of the things that we feel like we're doing well now, and a couple of the places where I think that there's opportunities for us to grow a little bit.

One place where we really excel I think is an immigration consulting and helping students get to Canada be part of our community, and continue their time in Canada when they're done with their studies. This includes post-graduation work permits and those kinds of things. We really have an excellent infrastructure for that at the university. For our PhD students, we offer the International Doctoral Student Award which essentially offsets the international tuition that we're required to charge because of provincial policies. So I think from a financial perspective we're doing a really good job with our research graduate students.

I do think that there's opportunities for us to grow a little bit  the celebration of diversity and culture and heritage that we have on the campus. My own experience in grad school was that I shared an office with people from around the world and found myself in little villages and countries I may have never visited  afterwards because of the friendships and the relationships and the understanding that I gathered. So when Waterloo gets to a place, and I hope we get there soon, where we really do celebrate the heritage in the culture and there's a an intercultural dynamic and learning that takes place at the university. I think there will be a richer environment for all of our students international and domestic.

NORAH MCRAE:As we know our alumni are such a powerful community and I think that if we can find ways to tap into that wisdom that they have and reflect upon their experiences when they were Waterloo students and what that means for them now in their careers – to tap into that more intentionally would be wonderful. Also building on the comments that were made earlier about different global communities, wouldn't it be interesting to tie those ideas together? Global communities of graduate students and undergrads, students doing co-op, and the alumni in that region? And creating these nodes of mutually reinforcing activity. It's not that there aren't great things happening with alumni in all sorts of pockets but I think there's probably a bit more work we could do to bring those things together and benefit collectively from it. So I think that that is definitely an area that I'd like to see us move more intentionally towards.

SANJEEV GILL: When we started down our journey with WatSPEED we spent a lot of time doing outreach to alumni, so we actually solicited input through each of the faculties and asked them to bring forward their alumni into focus groups and two things really came out of those conversations. One was, what a great way to stay connected to the University of Waterloo throughout my career - I can go back for my constant learning. It's a connective tissue for the alumni that brings them tremendous value over the course of their career the second of course is in with Waterloo many of our alumni become business leaders, CEOs of companies, founders of companies. And they have another unique interest and that is partnering with us in developing content that matters to their industry, matters to their company, matters to their staff. And in some cases we've already started conversations around how do we build offerings that matter to one of our Waterloo start-ups. And I just want to note I am wearing my Waterloo start-up socks so I want to make sure everyone sees this so definitely I mean we're I think we've really engaged the alumni community when it comes to lifelong learning. There's a distinct desire from their part for waterloo to step up in this area.

JEFF CASELLO: One quick add just to say that our alumni are so important in terms of funding our research. So much of our research enterprise is contract-driven and so much of that is from relationships that our alumni and our employees, and this is a real opportunity I think, to build on creating a situation where when students leave us, they continue to stay connected as alumni. It creates a community and that accelerates our own well-being. It accelerates our marketing, it accelerates our recruitment, it accelerates our research engine. So I think that this is an incredibly important pathway that we need to concentrate on going forward.

Answered by Vivek Goel

YES absolutely. We’ve had a task force on interdisciplinarity and we want to be doing more of that. In my mind what I saw yesterday at that launch event embodies everything that we want to think about in the strategic plan. It's all six faculties working together, it's a focus on students, there's a focus on technologies and innovations, but also the societal implications the kinds of issues that you were referring to Norah. The other one that I think is very interesting is continuous improvement is starting to gain recognition in an effort to empower staff to be engaged in solutions towards meeting the strategic plan. I think David spoke to the importance of continuous quality improvement - not just the cycle of reviews and then thinking about the assessments. So I absolutely agree that's the way the kind of culture we want to work towards.

DAVID DEVIDI: I think maintaining might be optimistic, but I think that it's implicit in the question that we need to tip into doing new things to make the community an even stronger future of life at Waterloo. That's one of the areas where I think our work overlaps well with the work of the “what.” Probably it'll be the third theme that you're talking about to create which is sustainable. I think the community is a goal for them and we'll hear a lot more about it but I think it's it really does it will repay efforts from all of our units.

JEFF CASELLO: I think one question we should always be asking ourselves is what is the value add of being part of the Waterloo community? What do our students and our colleagues and our staff and our faculty derive? They give so much but what is the benefits for them? If we can make a place where there is a sharing of community, where there's a sharing of ideas where you feel inclusive these are the kinds of things I think that really keeps us together. And it motivates people to want to stay connected with us even if we are not physically in the same spot, if we are connected and engaged. We see the value of being associated with the University of Waterloo. This is something I think about all the time - how do we make sure that every interaction we have with our colleagues or our students ends up adding value to their what they came here to achieve and I think that's the way I always like to think about that.

NORAH MCRAE: And just to add on that I would say that COVID has shown us that we need to think about what community mean and what does being a global university mean? We need to be considering this because it has been a challenge for co-op students. They go off they're kind of not part. And then they come back and then they feel part of it. But how do we change that so no matter where they are during their journey with us, and then when they're alumni also, they always feel part? And what does that mean about how we create community that this isn't bounded by space but rather something that occurs wherever, and they really truly feel connected? That does require a different way of thinking about how we interact.

SANJEEV GILL: Just on the topic of hybrid - certainly from the professional education perspective it scales tremendously. It allows us to mobilize knowledge like we've never been able to do before when we're not bounded so it really brought our audience a global audience.

Answered by James Rush

On a program by program basis, the mix of what courses will be being offered is on the course schedule, and academic advisors are available to support individual students in individual programs. But at a high level the approach evident in the schedule is a return to formats and courses availability being similar to what it was in previous winter terms. So that does on a normal case involve a certain not insignificant fraction of online course availability, but that doesn't mean that the courses students need to progress. So it is a real imperative to expect attending in person classes the winter term and for students to make preparations to be able to do that. We will be continuing to provide supports of various types to students both in person and virtually because of lessons we've learned from the pandemic. But in general the message has to be, please expect that you'll be returning to the normal type of winter operations.

Answered by Marilyn Thompson

Through the summer we worked with the leadership and management teams of each faculty and academic support unit to determine what the most appropriate workforce needs would be for the fall semester. We're using that same process for the winter term, recognizing that there will be more on-campus programs. Then the arrangements that we had with our employees for the fall term might not be the most appropriate for the winter term. And so, use that same process if you haven't already had a conversation with your manager about how that change of activity impacts you and your role on campus, I would encourage you to do so. In the end, each department head will approve the most appropriate workforce plan for their own unit.

Answered by Marilyn Thompson

The University of Waterloo was well ahead of some of our employers. We already had work from home guidelines pre-pandemic. We suspended those in April of 2020 because our employees mainly fell into one of two categories either their work required them to stay on campus and work from campus, or they were going to be working remotely. As we think forward to the winter term and opening up more activities, we've reinstated those guidelines so anybody who's interested in pursuing a conversation around a more formal arrangement around work from home, there is a process is in place. We are thinking past winter term and what our workforce and our workplace will look like. But until we get a better sense of our operational business academic needs, we can't at this time enter into longer-term arrangements with our employees about what that will look like. However, I fully anticipate as we look at that our work from home guidelines will evolve and change.

Answered by Marilyn Thompson

Oh absolutely I think there's a lot of opportunities for us to have considerations for our workforce just as the previous panel talked about. As mentioned in the panel, with the changing nature and what we've learned over the last 18 months, we can use some of those same principles looking at our own workforce as well.

PRESIDENT VIVEK GOEL: As David said earlier, we know while some students have been able to continue remotely for many students it's been a challenge. And so getting back to that pre-pandemic level is about ensuring as equitable access for as many people as possible.

JAMES RUSH: I think that it's important to understand that different people that are participating as students or employees have different inherent needs and feel like they're in a a different equity space to begin with. So it is a really important point in individual decision making to be able to take into account the individual circumstances.

We’ve learned a lot of lessons during the pandemic that I think help with equity including the example I used earlier that we wouldn't have had the impetus to really literally convert almost every student support service to an online or remote delivery format had it not be been for the pandemic. But we've heard good and bad things about online service development. We’ve learned that different approaches work better for different participants and we are committed to maintaining that as a way in part of recognizing that our community won't be all together all at the same time. And in part recognizing that different people are served better through different formats of delivery. So I’d say systematically that's one expression of having recognized that and committed to it institutionally

Answered by Marilyn Thompson

Right now our work from home guidelines speak to working two days a week. The possibility of working two days a week remotely - we will be having those same conversations with all of our campus community around what that might look like into the future. I think that as well, we need to look at the world of work in which our employees now are attracted to, as well as the workforce that we need to attract. So I think that there there's a huge opportunity here for us to think about you know how our workforce, how our workplace is going to evolve.

Answered by James Rush

One important point of context is we have been fortunate that the vast majority - about 95 percent of the folks that have responded - are in a fully vaccinated situation. And many more have responded that they're on the path to full vaccination by October 17, so that's an important stone on the path of this question and its implications. I think the communications have been very clear and the timeline has been long that the requirement to provide compliance with the vaccination policy  deadline is the 17^th, and that after that deadline we'll have to take action to support our position  in the policy. The most important action that will have to be taken is that on October 18 folks that are non-compliant with that policy don't have access to the campus for in-person activities. That doesn't mean that employees are terminated and it doesn't mean that students are disenrolled. It means it starts what needs to be a stepwise evaluation of those cases, some of which are very complex in terms of their effects on the individual and the effects on other members or groups of the community. But it does mean that we have to start a stepwise path that includes education, and it includes stepwise measures that could involve leaves, could involve altered work or study arrangements with support and advice. But ultimately we have a mandatory policy. It demands compliance and so consistent with our policies,  it could mean that either employment or student relationship with the University has to be terminated at the end of an arc of activity, and that's not the first step, and it's not the only step but there is a whole range of things that have to be executed post October 17th  just to respect our policy, and what it's trying to achieve, which is the health and safety of the community. That large majority of folks that are expecting to come now and in the winter to be participating under those conditions.

Answered by James Rush

That's right and just to be clear, too, I alluded to it in my general remarks from the operational update that there will be frequent and specific communication that's much more specific coming as early as the next day or so and continuing over the course of the period between now and October 17. 

Answered by James Rush

Our campus check on check-in system is one part of that and it monitors who comes onto campus. And everybody that's in the university community is required to be compliant with the policy through that check-in system to be eligible to be on campus. Those that haven't submitted will see an alert through that system that they're not  permitted to be on campus without proof. But of course that system isn't the complete or only  method we also know who is enrolled in in-person classes, and we know who is required to be on campus as an employee to do elements of their job. So they'll have to be some matching between those pieces of information that will be part of that stepwise process that will go into the enforcement of the policy.

PRESIDENT VIVEK GOEL: Hello. Thank you for joining the forum today. Before we begin I want to reflect on and acknowledge that the University of Waterloo is situated on the Haldimand Tract - lands six miles on each side of the Grand River granted to the Haudenosaunee of Six Nations by the Haldimand Treaty of 1784. The land inside and surrounding the Haldimand Tract, including our Stratford campus is the traditional territory of the Attawandaron, Anishinaabeg and Haudenosaunee. I also acknowledge and recognize this area is now home to many diverse First Nations, Inuit and Metis people. Reconciling with Indigenous communities is our shared responsibility and one I take very seriously as president. I hope many of you were able to join the events of last week in the build-up to the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation. Reconciliation can only happen when we all commit to hearing the truths of Indigenous people.

I’m here live at Federation Hall joined by several of my colleagues. I’m excited to be here today, and for the opportunity to speak to the University community. Thank you all for tuning in virtually. I hope you're having an excellent fall term. It has been a pleasure for me to continue meeting and getting to know more of you here at Waterloo. I’ve also enjoyed becoming acquainted with our campuses and seeing them come to life as more of us are able to return safely. This forum is the first of three sessions that will explore themes from the University's strategic plan.

We will also provide an update on campus operations. If you'd like to submit a question, whether it's for the panel or about campus operations, you can do so using the Q&A feature on the right-hand side of your screen. The Q&A will be open throughout the event. I’d also like to note for those of us joining virtually that you can turn on the captions for the live stream in Microsoft Teams.

For our panel discussion today, we will explore one of the themes from the University's strategic plan: developing talent for a complex future. The strategic plan was developed throughout 2019 in the context of rapid societal technological and environmental change and complex global challenges. Over the past 18 months, the pandemic has accelerated these changes and exposed or heightened many of these pre-existing challenges. Looking at the plan again today, I believe it remains extremely relevant with added urgency and nuance to the goals laid out.

For example, in the strategic plan, we note that learners will have to apply knowledge in a context we cannot even imagine today. Indeed, as we start to come out the other side of this pandemic, Canada and the global community are looking at how we build back our economies and societies in a post-pandemic world. The learners we are educating today will play an important role in shaping this global post-pandemic recovery.

No industry or career pathway will be immune to changes. Canada and the world will need creative minds who can navigate this landscape and leverage new knowledge to create sustainable prosperous communities.

As institutions of higher learning, we have an important role to play in preparing our students not only for a complex job landscape but for their role in civil society as we build back after the pandemic. I’m joined by some of my colleagues today to explore what the next 10 years look like for the university in terms of how we develop talent for this complex future ahead. I’m very pleased to welcome our panellists today: Sanjeev Gill (Associate Vice President, innovation), Norah McRae (Associate Provost, Cooperative and Experiential Education), David DeVidi (Associate Vice President, Academic), Jeff Casello (Associate Vice President, Graduate Studies and Postdoctoral affairs).

Thank you all for being here. Dave Jeff Norah and Sanjeev are part of a strategic plan implementation team dedicated to the theme of developing talent. I’ll invite Dave to start us off by providing some context around the work of the implementation team.

DAVID DEVIDI: Thanks Vivek. So the team we're called an "action team," but if you look at the stage made up of a bunch of people who are Associate Vice Presidents and Associate Provosts who all have portfolios of their own. So what might have happened is that we might have all pursued our individual initiatives and we would have had lots to talk about, but in order to try to put some substance into the word "team" we've framed our work our projects around a few different themes to sort of organize them together. And one of them Vivek has already hinted at: society around us is changing. Our understanding of what students need to know and how they learn best is changing the problems that will confront people when they're out in the world changes, so what society and our students will need from us 10 years from now will be different from what it is today. So we need to be taking action right now so the 10 years from now we're the university that we need to be, and that's I think a good framing theme for what we're up to as a group.

The other thing that we've had as an organizing idea is we need to recognize that we're working in a university context. Like any good university, we're surrounded by immensely talented, often brilliant people, and so the role of a centralized project should be to unlock that potential. It shouldn't be to try to run things from the center but it should serve to amplify and coordinate the efforts that are coming from other parts of the university, so that's a theme that you'll see around all the projects that will get mentioned today. And finally, as they say, "culture eats strategy for lunch," and so if we actually want to have a prospect of advancing teaching and learning and creating innovation in teaching and learning at the University of Waterloo, we need to make sure we foster a a culture on campus that values those efforts. So  I don't want to talk through all the projects here, I think that everybody who's on this  call today can read faster than I can talk and so there's a few examples up there of things that are already underway, or that we're hoping to have happen soon. But  I think if you look at the examples you'll see how they fit together with the three themes and the priorities that we've just talked about. And I’ll just signal out the blended learning initiative and the agile support team where what we've done is we've taken a lot of the learning that instructors have done during the time of Covid when we've had to move everything for make everything available through remote instruction and that's a way to preserve the best of what we've learned when we've done that to make better courses on campus and online for the future. So that's it.

PRESIDENT VIVEK GOEL: Thank you, Dave, for that overview. So we'll get a round of questions for each of the panelists and please add in your questions and answers. Through the miracle of modern technology, they're going to appear on my iPad as we go along--we hope. So my first question is for Sanjeev: lifelong learning is an important priority for the university's plan, and WATSpeed has been a focus of our lifelong learning conversations. Why is it important that something like WATSpeed be launched now and how will this contribute to the post-pandemic recovery.

SANJEEV GILL: Thanks for the question, Vivek. As you mentioned,  we call this out in our strategic plan which was actually officially launched publicly in November of 2019 so well before the pandemic we identified the need to support learners--professional learners in particular, and our alumni in their lifelong learning journey. And so we called it out prior to the pandemic, but it really wasn't until about may of 2020 when  our chancellor Dominic Barton pulled together about a dozen leaders from Canadian corporations and from heads of multinationals operating in Canada and asked them one single question. And that was "how can the University of Waterloo support you both through the pandemic and beyond," and almost unanimously all of those leaders said that one of the areas that the University of Waterloo had a unique strength and should support industry moving forward was in the area of upskilling and reskilling and so that really was our call to action to begin moving forward in developing a unit on campus focused on this this mission.

In particular we wanted to establish an academic support unit that also served the university and our faculty members and that is really what WATSpeed is today. So you know the challenge existed certainly before COVID-19 where workers and professional workers in particular are dealing with not just  not just digital transformational challenges, but societal, economic, and environmental challenges in the workplace. And so while it pre-existed Covid, Covid certainly exacerbated the challenge amongst the professional community. So we've seen you know layoffs at mass we've seen folks in the workplace trying to retrain themselves into new areas of sustainable work for the future which requires skills of the future. And so that really is the challenge that WATSpeed is out to tackle. How do we support  workers as new technologies emerge, new challenges (environmental, societal, and economic) occur in the workplace, and how will we respond to that moving forward. It's without a doubt that professional workers have realized the necessity for lifelong learning because the world is constantly changing and now is the opportunity for us as an institution to respond to that demand.

PRESIDENT VIVEK GOEL: Thanks. So just to build on that, and David referred to looking 10 years down the line--Norah, I know you've been thinking a lot about this as we're developing talent and looking out ahead in this rapidly changing world. What should we be looking at now to determine what's going to be important in 10 to 20 years time, so we can be ready and have our students be ready for that when they graduate?

NORAH MCRAE: Yeah thanks for the question.  I’ve been thinking about this question and something that the World Economic Forum identified as five key trends for the future of work which I think are very handy: one is, and these are of course accelerated under Covid: work from anywhere, work for all ,work at will, work smarter and work for the planet.

So when I think of those five categories, then, is it behooves us to ensure that our students are able to work in those ways. And we certainly did that with Covid with the tremendous work from the team helping students quickly work remotely. All the co-op work terms, the edge experiences, and then our we accelerate program helped our employers do that as well. We also employed using data analytics to understand the needs of employers, so we were learning how to work smarter and really moving that into program development. So I think we have to train our students and help our students be able to work successfully under those conditions for the future. So that's how but it's also what I mean what we know, and what Covid showed us is that every sector, every type of career path, every kind of academic area of interest, students will need to be prepared with whatever the technology the digital skills that are going to be required within those types of organizations, community partners, sectors.

So we have to make sure they've got that those capabilities. And to Sanjeev’s comment about upskilling, we need to make sure that our students are upskilled, too. An example of that would have been our We Accelerate program this spring, where we identified through looking at 70,000 job postings, what are some of these key skills? How can we get them? How can we partner with industry more intentionally to quickly get some upskilling for unemployed first work-term students to help them get out the door? And at the same time explore different ways of doing work integrated learning in other flexible ways in addition to our much beloved and extremely important co-op program, but in reflection of work for all? There are ways that we can do work integrated learning without undermining quality that provides flexibility to embrace more students, different kinds of students, more employers, different kinds of employer partners. 

So I think that is not just the how and the what, but also thinking about what are the capabilities that we need to ensure our students get, whether they're getting them in the classroom through their co-curricular activity, through work-integrated learning, co-op or experiential, and that comes under our Future-Ready Talent Framework with the 12 talents that we've identified that we think all students should be working on and gaining capability on in order to be ready for the future of work and I think the final comment I wanted to say it's a it's a bit of a outlying comment, but you know it takes a village and we're all part of this village, and I did really want to acknowledge the tremendous work from our faculties: the deans and associate deans, the units that supported our students, hired them, engaged in our online learning assistance, and various types of research work that students were doing and engagement in student engagement efforts. And we couldn't do what we do in our portfolio if it wasn't for the tremendous community at the University of Waterloo who's really stepped up to help us all of us prepare our students. It's been really wonderful. I just wanted to say that too, thank you.

PRESIDENT VIVEK GOEL: Thanks Norah. We've talked about lifelong learning and undergraduates. Another key audience that we have is graduate studies. Jeff, can you talk about what preparing our talent for a complex future means for graduate education. In particular how we're going to prepare students to address complex challenges.

JEFF CASELLO: Yeah thanks Vivek. It's a real privilege to be here to talk about graduate studies. I couldn't be happier and it's great to be with our colleagues as well here. You know, when I think about graduate studies at Waterloo, we really have three really important categories of graduate studies. The first is: I think about our course-based students. So these are students who have come back to us typically from having some professional experience, but not always, and what they're really looking to do is sharpen their skills in the same way that we are talking about in lifelong learning they're coming back and they're coming back to Waterloo because it's a place that is known to be at the cutting edge of what it means to be both productive and impactful and transformative, but really employable. And you know our professional students and our course-based students are really moving in that direction and a think we continue to be successful to attract and retain and develop some incredible talent through our course-based programs and then we move to our research programs both at the master's level and at the PhD level we have incredibly bright students who are coming to work with us, and they are perhaps becoming global experts in their disciplines. But maybe more important than what is really going to give us a possibility to be again transformative and impactful at the end of the day is that these students come and they tackle really important really complex problems, and I always say, and I think our research students would agree perhaps the problem definition part of their work is actually more important than the problem solution part. It's at least equally important and this ability to take complexity and to really think about really hard problems that society is facing, whether they're economic or technical or environmental and be able to distill them into something that is manageable and addressed through research, it's an incredibly valuable skill.

And when you think about professionally after our students leave us they have a resilience and a dynamic capacity to be able to adapt to whatever economies will throw at them because really the skill set they have is to address complexity and that is never going to go away. It's perhaps the most important thing that we can train our students and as I just think ahead to the strategic plan how we manifest these things there's three things. I think that are really important for grad studies and they're related to the other things I think we'll talk about for the rest of the day. So quickly we're thinking a lot about work integrated learning experiential learning--it's already an identity, it's already an important translation for our studies at Waterloo and we're doing a ton of it already in grad studies. But it's important now that we build that brand, build that identity and even make it a stronger. I think Norah was here and before she was here as our colleague, and reviewed our grad programs and said we need to do more work integrated learning in our grad program. So it continues to need to be there. The second thing is around interdisciplinarity--we had an entire task force through the strategic plan, and now we're working on complex problems not from a discipline perspective but from a joint and interdisciplinary perspective across the campus. And the last thing I think that is really important for us is pathways for our students. So our grad students come back to us because they have career objectives personal objectives and we as an institution should do more to accelerate and catalyze those pathways and part of what we're thinking about when we talk about the incubator and other things today we'll see where the grad students fit in in that picture so thanks for that.

PRESIDENT VIVEK GOEL: Since you mentioned the incubator maybe Dave you could tell us a little bit about what the vision is there.

DAVID DEVIDI: Yeah, that's I think we all regard the incubator as a really exciting idea in a lot of ways as kind of a linchpin, something that draws together and supports all the other things that are on the go. As part of our implementation of the developing talent part of the plan the strategic plan, I think that the way that I like to think about the incubator is--I mean I guess it's a cliche to talk about incubators as inside of a company. If you have an incubator, their job is to generate the next generation of products what's next and what we have in the university right now. To support people who have ideas for teaching and learning is a lot of things that will help you get better incrementally. You can go to the Center for Teaching Excellence, and take the instructional skills workshop, you'll be a better instructor. If a program wants to improve their curriculum, decolonize their curriculum, their support, and cd to help you think that through, and if you go to the Center for Extended Learning you can improve your suite of offerings in your program that's available at distance and those are all great--those are all really important, but they're all kind of incremental and so what the idea of the incubator is that it will be I mean a fairly selective process. I suppose it'll have to be because there's so many good ideas out there, but the ideas that are selected for incubation will be the ones that have the potential to have a bigger impact--you know I mean they'll come in different scales. So proportionally a bigger impact you might say, but they can punch above their weight, they can be--I’m trying to avoid words like disruptive, but that's the idea something that's transformative and not everything that has the potential to be transformative is a good idea, and not all good ideas are good ideas for waterloo. But what you can do in the incubator is you can provide the supports that are needed to actually try out that idea; develop it, test drive it, evaluate it and then the university can make a smart decision about is this something we want to roll out more broadly? So I think that's the vision and I think it's kind of easy to see how it will really reinforce everything that's been talked about here. It can be anything from a new way of teaching in a classroom, a new way to use virtual reality, to you know in teaching biology classes, or something to interdisciplinary courses where you capitalize on the expertise of our grad students, and make a new course that will be available to students for years to come. Or it could be something structural--you might say okay well what's next for lifelong learning once we have--you know what can complement the work that's already happening in WATSpeed maybe that requires some more structural changes in the way we do things and the way we make things happen inside of the university. So all of those ideas can be in and can be fleshed out and could be evaluated so that the university can move ahead smartly.

PRESIDENT VIVEK GOEL: So it's almost a mindset of how we're going to approach this not necessarily we shouldn't just think of it as a physical there's going to be an incubator space and you go there with your ideas and development.

DAVID DEVIDI: No, and as we said before it's about unlocking the potential that I was that's out there it's not we're going to have a team of 10 brilliant people who do all you know the yeah.

PRESIDENT VIVEK GOEL: Thank you already! Lots of that yeah great maybe. Dave just to continue on there's also obviously a lot of intersection between the developing talent theme, and other priorities in the strategic plan, and you know one of the things we reflected on at the start is our indigenous land acknowledgement, and the institution's commitment to equity, diversity, inclusion, anti-racism is a very significant part of the plan How do you see bringing that into the curriculum and to the way in which we prepare our students?

DAVID DEVIDI: So I think that there's a bunch of things that are going to come together, as you say from different parts of the implementation team and also from the anti-racism task force. I think we're going to see a bunch of recommendations coming forward in the coming months that I think the university community is going to adopt with enthusiasm about recruiting a more diverse student body, and supporting them when they're here with transitional programming and so on to help people succeed and live up to their potential reach. But specifically about curriculum, there's a variety of things that are underway already. One of them is hiring the Center for Teaching Excellence is just hired the first of a team the leader of a team of experts in anti-racist and indigenous pedagogies and these are people experts that are going to be available to every program in the university, and as part, as we review our sort of quality improvement mechanisms for programs our cyclical reviews. We're trying to get away from the language of reviewing because it's more formative and improving than passing a test, but as part of that process, we want programs to engage with these experts because it's there are some programs where it's going to be obvious to them what decolonization means in the social sciences and the arts but there are things to be done in every field.

And a really exciting example that happened at Center Undergrad Council--two really exciting things happened at Center Undergrad Council yesterday. One was the product of several years’ work in the school of architecture to really transform your curriculum, and take away the sort of Eurocentric vent that it's always had as a very fairly traditional and very successful architecture program and rethink it in terms of these other values. Also yesterday we just approved the first two new diplomas in black studies including a really innovative one in anti-racist communication strategies, and so I think we're on our way to having these changes woven right through the curriculum all across campus.

PRESIDENT VIVEK GOEL: And those are two great examples because one is taking our existing curricula and bringing them up to modernize them, and the other is creating specific new programs that address these very important challenges related is that. During the pandemic, it's certainly the case that many people with disabilities have actually found that the move to remote education has facilitated their access. How do we as we start to think about returning to quote-unquote normal and more on-campus activities preserve what we have learned about the way in which some students have been able to successfully or more successfully access their learning?

DAVID: Yeah that's an important thing. I think just to start with the premise of the question, I think it's important to recognize that for people with disabilities the pandemic was a mixed bag. There are people who really benefited from the move to asynchronous online learning, and there are others with different challenges who found that as a real struggle, and who are anxious for us to get back to normal. And so some of the things that we're doing--like I think that at the individual instructor level, a lot of them have learned the value of some pre-packaged asynchronous materials for them and for their students, and so we've launched the blended learning initiative on campus so that we're thinking of blended learning courses: one where you've got a really thoughtful integration of online components--you know asynchronous packaged things, and on-campus--the high-value interactive kind of teaching that really can't be done as successfully in an online setting, and that's one approach by which you would preserve a lot of the value of being available online or being available asynchronously for the students who found that beneficial. We're also going as I think I mentioned--the agile support team and others are available to try to transform more of these remote courses into an increased stock of fully online courses. Going forward, so I think that's a few things to you know--the people who really liked what was happening during the pandemic, I think they will find that the future of the University of Waterloo is even more likely.

PRESIDENT VIVEK GOEL: So maybe just to build on that Jeff any other pandemic lessons that you're going to carry on with.

JEFF CASELLO: Yes! When we had to move quickly to remote activity, so much of our research milestones for our graduate students' proposals and thesis defences, and so on they were all normally completely in person. And you know we would struggle sometimes to get external examiners engaged, and now really--we're in a place where we can really celebrate meaningfully, the research work, and really broadened the audience through these research milestones. It's been really terrific for us to open this up and have confidence that our technology is going to allow our students to do that and you know, it again allows us to connect with researchers globally in ways that maybe it would have been more difficult if we were trying to fly them to Canada in order for them to participate in these events. So I think our Ph.D. students, particularly with the engagement of committee members and examiners, have really benefited from the remote participation.

PRESIDENT VIVEK GOEL: Norah--any lessons from the co-op perspective?

NORAH MCRAE: Yeah Thanks! I think definitely the lesson from the pandemic and this is the point I was making about work from anywhere is that really when we think about the war for talent, Covid has demonstrated that there are no boundaries. So we have to be preparing our students to be able to compete for whatever positions they're interested in against talent that may be coming from anywhere. So the days where we can expect a company to come to campus, and recruit all of their students, or all of their graduating students from one place I think those days are over.

Our students are going to be competing with everybody everywhere all the time, so we've got to really make sure that they've got that global competitive ability which of course they do; because they're brilliant. But how we do that is also going to be important. Secondly, I’m not sure we'll see the same traffic literally of employers coming to campus. They've been able to figure out how to recruit remotely, and how to onboard remotely do all of that kind of thing and so that may change and shift the way we support our employer relationships and partnerships. And I think it also then allows us to think very differently about how we support and provide the student with the experience in a different way because of course our students when they're on their co-op work terms or their edge experiences aren't for the most part on campus, they're anywhere there are 62 different countries and they're coming from all over and that does change how we look at how and how we could it opens up the door for all sorts of interesting opportunities I think for how we can support our students. Thanks.

PRESIDENT VIVEK GOEL: David--one of the things that were on your slide was teaching and learning spaces.

Can you talk a little bit about what's planned there and how that's been informed by the pandemic experiences?

DAVID: Yeah! I mean it's something that actually grows out of a project that happened before the pandemic. There was a large committee that consulted widely on what students and instructors felt like we needed. By way of "teaching and learning spaces" on campus that we didn't have, and so when I arrived in his portfolio in 2019, that was one of the things that I thought was really important to try to move forward, and so we put together a team to start making decisions about that and so already the idea that we needed to transform the way that we teach was on the cards. But I think it fits together with a lot of what we're talking about today in an important way, if we're going to incubate new ideas and come up with new ways of teaching and learning, new strategies for working effectively in the classroom, it probably isn't great if the vast majority of your classrooms have tables and chairs that are bolted into the floor. Right, that's not a great way if what you want is interaction with your students and teamwork and engaging with technology. So maybe you can have some students in your class here and you pair it up with a class at the University of Toronto or a class in Milan. Right those are all things that are coming and we don't have the spaces for them, so the way that that thing is where that project is working right now, it's got a multi-year commitment from the provost to provide funding and every year we identify a couple of the low-hanging fruit learning spaces that were identified by the instructors and students before 2019 as among you the University of Waterloo's most problematic and we're redesigning those and making them into the kind of flexible active learning spaces that give instructors the option to teach in different kinds of ways. And this will also fit well with things like increasingly blended you know numbers of blended classes and I think it's--I mean it's obviously financially, partly a financially driven consideration that you only do a few classrooms per year, but that makes good sense from a strategic point of view too because if we miraculously could try to transform all of our classrooms tomorrow we might make them all into something that's not what five years from now. We will figure out that we need five years later, so the gradual transformation of our classrooms is I think--it's for practical and strategic reasons a good way forward so that's kind of what that project is about.

PRESIDENT VIVEK GOEL: So just to build on this and perhaps both of you might think about this. Do we think we're close to starting to think about a model where we might be hybrid across the board and we have some students that will become big with us for some period of time and remote and be able to move back and forth much more flexibly or do we imagine a world where you're going to choose one option or the other?

DAVID DEVIDI: That's something where I wouldn't want to speak out of turn. I do think that you know programs are going to want to make their own choice on that, but I mean this term we did make the capacity for so-called high flex classes that are simultaneously on campus and elsewhere, and you know one of the things that's an ongoing challenge for our students is they'd like to pick up a class or two while they're away on co-op terms and so you know four programs--that are you know all co-op every student's in co-op that might be an option that they want to develop or you know international students in the future maybe--they maybe it makes sense that there would be an option to spend two years on campus so you get that kind of live on-campus university experience that our students always tell us they value if they can get it and also spend two years living closer to home

PRESIDENT VIVEK GOEL: And Jeff you mentioned the way in which international collaborations are changing obviously impacts.

JEFF CASELLO: We have about 2400 international graduate students at Waterloo and you know really from all over the world, and an incredibly deep applicant pool that we could really be purposeful about creating global communities which would be a fantastic outcome for our grad programs. And the ability to engage both here on campus and virtually, and to create research teams or courses that are merged from around the world and around the campus would be an incredibly valuable thing and I think we're starting to see a little bit of that effect but again I think Dave’s right these are the kinds of ideas that we want to see boil up from the bottom and we can be support mechanisms for those kinds of things.

PRESIDENT VIVEK GOEL: And Jeff we have a question around policy for support of international graduate students and what's our aspiration how do we want to improve the quality and the experiences for our international students?

JEFF CASELLO: Yeah thanks for that today! I think it's an incredibly important question, and so maybe I’ll just point out a couple of the things that we feel like we're doing well now and a couple of the places where I think that there are opportunities for us to grow a little bit. So in terms of our support for our international students, one place where we really excel I think is immigration consulting and helping students get to Canada. Be part of our community and continue their time in Canada when they're done with their studies so post-graduation work permits and those kinds of things we really have an excellent infrastructure for that at the university. For our Ph.D. students, we offer the international doctoral student award which essentially offsets the international tuition that we're required to charge because of provincial policies, so I think from a financial perspective we're doing a really good job with our research graduate students. So I think those are places where we're excelling I do think that there are opportunities for us to grow a little bit, the celebration of diversity, culture, and heritage that we have on the campus. My own experience in grad school was that I shared an office with people from around the world and found myself in little villages and countries I may have never visited afterwards because of the friendships and the relationships and the understanding that I gathered through my graduate studies. So when Waterloo gets to a place and I hope we get there soon where we really do celebrate the heritage in the culture and there's an intercultural dynamic and learning that takes place at the university. I think we're going to be well, there'll be a richer environment for all of our students--international and domestic.

PRESIDENT VIVEK GOEL:  David you've obviously got some interest in the incubator here! So questions about who is it going to be for and will it support academic activities or also work with academic support units?

DAVID DEVIDI: So, I think you know what one maybe this is a true confession that I shouldn't be saying on TV here, but I mean the pitch that went to Jim for this and to the deans is really that we will roll out the stuff that we're confident is going to be part of any good incubator idea and we're going to spend the next 18 months designing it. So that when we sort of firm things up, it's exactly what the University of Waterloo needs, but what I think now, it's for what it's for, is primarily for good ideas to come from anywhere, but we expect most of them to come from faculty members. You know because they're the ones who are on the front lines of teaching and learning. There will be a process by which you get the supports, and then it's the academic support units, especially existing academic support units that will marshal some of their existing resources to support this new direction so for instance, the Center for Teaching Excellence has a lot of expertise on evaluating the quality of teaching and learning innovations, and so that's a team that can be available in every project needs to be evaluated on how successful it is. That's the support that can come from that unit giving existing staff expertise to support the ideas so that doesn't rule out a good idea coming from a staff member, but my anticipation would be that primarily it's going to be--you know Professional Teaching Academics who are going to come forward with the teaching ideas.

PRESIDENT VIVEK GOEL: But I think as you said, our new models of teaching really require collaboration across teams, and bring many different perspectives and disciplines together.

DAVID DEVIDI: And you know you see the professional librarians and expert staff from the writing and communication center, and elsewhere on campus. You know this student support office has staff who are involved already in the front lines of teaching, and helping to develop courses. So yeah, I think you're right, the teams will often you know may not the professional staff who come onto a team won't always be people who come there because the incubator provided them. They might be part of the teams that are pitching the ideas that get incubated.

PRESIDENT VIVEK GOEL: So, another interesting question perhaps for Norah and Sanjiv to start with is what we see is the role of alumni as we move into these new models of learning and how we can bring that professional practice experience back in? And I think it applies perhaps in both areas.

Do you want to start Norah?

NORAH MCRAE: Sure! Well you know as we know--our alumni are such a powerful community, and I think that if we can find ways to tap into that wisdom that they have and the reflection upon their experiences when they were waterloo students, and what that means for them now in their careers and tap into that more intentionally would be wonderful. I think also building on the comments that were made earlier about different global communities, wouldn't it be interesting to tie those ideas together--you know global communities of graduate students and undergrads and students doing co-op, the alumni in that region, and creating these nodes of reinforcing, mutually reinforcing, activity and it's not that there aren't great things happening with alumni in all sorts of pockets. I’m not I think there's probably a bit more work we could do to bring those things together and benefit collectively from it, so I think that that is definitely an area that I'd like to see us move more intentionally towards. Thank you!

SANJEEV GILL: Yeah Vivek! Actually, when we started down our journey with WATSpeed we spent a lot of time doing outreach to alumni, so we actually solicited input through each of the faculties and ask them to bring forward their alumni and focus groups, and two things really came out of those conversations with our alumni: One was what a great way to stay connected to the University of Waterloo throughout my career I can go back for my constant learning, it's a connective tissue for the alumni that brings them tremendous value over the course of their career, the Second, of course, is in with Waterloo many of our alumni become business leaders, CEOs of companies, founders of companies, and they have another unique interest and that is partnering with us in developing content that matters to their industry, matters to their company, matters to their staff and in so some cases we've already started conversations and how do we build offerings that matter to one of our waterloo start-ups. And I just want to note I am wearing my waterloo start-up socks, so I want to make sure everyone sees this. So definitely I mean--we're I think we've really engaged the alumni community when it comes to lifelong learning there's a distinct desire from their part for Waterloo to step up in this area.

JEFF CASELLO: Vivek--Can I just one quick add just to say that our alumni are so important in terms of funding our research. So much of our research enterprise is contract-driven, and so much of that of relationships that our alumni, and our employees and this is a real opportunity. I think to build on creating a situation that when students leave us and they continue to stay connected with us as alumni, it creates a community and that accelerates our own well-being, it accelerates our marketing, it accelerates our recruitment, it accelerates our research engine. So I think that this is an incredibly important pathway that we need to concentrate on going forward.

PRESIDENT VIVEK GOEL: Thanks for that! There's a couple of questions here that I’m going to comment on very quickly and then I’ll pose one final question for us to consider.

One is around, Are there future plans for more cross-faculty interdisciplinary programs likewise of the waterloo institute for sustainable aeronautics which was launched yesterday, and I’ll simply say yes absolutely! And you know we've had a task force on interdisciplinarity, we want to be doing more of that and in my mind what I saw yesterday at that launch event embodies everything that we want to think about in the strategic plan. It's all six faculties working together, it's a focus on students, there's a focus on technologies and innovations but also the societal implications the kinds of issues that you were referring to Norah. The other one that I think is very interesting is a continuous improvement is starting to gain recognition in an effort to empower staff to be engaged in solutions towards meeting the strategic plan, and I think David spoke to the importance of continuous quality improvement not just the cycle of reviews and then thinking about the assessments. So I absolutely agree that's the way, the kind of culture we want to work towards the final question. I just want to pose what I think is a really important one it goes to the earlier conversations as we move towards a hybrid path and I think those are all really exciting models that we talked about. How do we ensure maintaining that sense of community which you also said was really important to students and which our questioner notes has often been a challenge from co-op education with students not always feeling that sense of community any thoughts about how we're going to maintain that balance? David or Jeff?

DAVID DEVIDI: Well, I think maintaining might be optimistic, but I think that it's implicit in the question that we need to tip into doing new things to make the community an even stronger future of life at Waterloo. And you know that's one of the areas where I think our work overlaps well with the work of you know--the what probably it'll be the third theme that you're talking about to create which is you know sustainable, and I forget the exact term, but you know I think the community is a goal for them and we'll hear a lot more about it. But I think it's it really does it will repay efforts from all of our units.

JEFF CASELLO: I think one question we should always be asking ourselves is--you know what is the value add of being part of the waterloo community? You know what do our students, and our colleagues, and our staff, and our faculty--what do they derive you know they give so much but what is the benefits for them and if we can make a place where there is a sharing of community, where there's a sharing of ideas, where you feel inclusive, these are the kinds of things I think that really keeps us together and it motivates people to want to stay connected with us even if we are not physically in the same spot! If we are connected, and engaged, and you know we see the value of being associated with the University of Waterloo, this is something I think about all the time is how do we make sure that every interaction we have with our colleagues or our students ends up adding value to their goal, what they came here to achieve and I think that's the way I always like to think about that.

NORAH MCRAE: And just to add on that I would say that Covid has shown us that we need to think about what does it mean to community and what does being a global university mean, and I think that we need to be considering because it has been a challenge for co-op students because they go off. They're kind of like, I’m not part, and then they come back and then they feel part but how do we change that? So no matter where they are during their journey with us and then when they're alumni, they always feel part and what does that mean about how we create a community that isn't bounded by space, but rather is something that occurs wherever, and they really truly feel connected and that does require a different way of thinking about how we interact!

PRESIDENT VIVEK GOEL: Great any final points?

SANJEEV GILL: Just on the topic of hybrid, certainly from the professional education perspective it scales tremendously. It allows us to mobilize knowledge like we've never been able to do before. We're not bounded so it really brought our audience a global audience.

PRESIDENT VIVEK GOEL: So that's a great point to end on! I think we cannot see that as a trade-off, but really work on how can we use our experiences and our technologies to enhance our community regardless of the way in which students engage with us. I think this last point also highlights that even though we're going through theme by theme and the strategic plan, they all intersect interdisciplinary research, sustainable, diverse communities. So I want to thank all of our panellists for all the work that they've been doing, their teams have been doing with all of our colleagues right across the institution on the implementation of the plan. There's lots more to come, and I really appreciate you taking the time today. Thank you, thanks for having me!

So we're now going to move to the operational update segment of the program, and we'll have an update from our provost James Rush (Vice President Academic) on-campus operations. Over to you James.

JAMES RUSH: Thanks Vivek and thanks to all the panellists for and all the questioners for such an exciting strategic discussion!

To launch this phase of the president's forum, I have the pleasure of being able to provide an operational update which I guess in its own way can be just as exciting. I wanted to give a little bit of an overview of fall term where it's headed, some items that are very important now, and a little bit of a prelude to the developments over the remainder of the fall term and transitioning to the winter term.

So first of all, with thanks to all of the community members who pulled together to be in a position to offer our fall term we have been able to of course create an expanded in-person experience for the fall, and we've taken a lot of measures that have needed to be taken over the course of the months preceding the fall term to be able to offer that and so not the least of which has been the implementation of our mandatory proof of vaccination policy and a number of other measures we've taken around screening testing and service provision to facilitate that that policy.

We planned in March around a maximum capacity of 50 percent if we were able to engage in on-campus operations in the fall, and when events developed over the course of the summer that would have allowed that to go much higher we decided to stay with the 50 percent cap in general with a few very small exceptions to take a cautious and progressive approach to return to on-campus teaching and learning activity that will roll out over the course of the term. And ultimately culminating with a plan to return to a normal level of in-person operations in the winter, and so we're on that path.

Now I’ll show you a little bit of data that that supports that, but I do want to emphasize that it was not without the considerable effort that has gone into the health and safety measures and the efforts of the whole community to respect those and implement those and to plan around those and there they are numerous in support of our academic and research operations. Just to give you a sense of the level of on-campus activity at least from a specific to student's perspective it might be interesting for folks tuning into the forum to know that the total number of students is not all at the same time but in different ways that are expected to be on campus over the course of the Fall, term is approaching about 17000 which is about half of the normal student number that we have enrolled in attending full-time in a normal term. That doesn't mean that all those students as I said are on campus all the time it means they have at least one learning or other planned activity that requires them to be on campus for part of that time we have in together with our a few partners over 5000 students that are currently in campus housing that includes about 800 international students living in campus housing. And there's a continuous influx of international students coming to Waterloo that are being supported in numerous ways including our university-sponsored quarantine package, and there are ongoing consultations with international students on their plans in logistics to be in waterloo over the course of this term and just one other index of the use of this engagement of students not only in academic, but in non-academic opportunities that are provided by the campus environment.

One index of that is this fairly impressive statistic that in the in the first week of term, almost 10000 check-ins were at the two major athletic facilities, and I had some updated data today that shows that over the course of September, there were fifty thousand individual participations in activities in those non-academic but on-campus opportunities. Looking at the way that the academic program delivery is operating in the fall of course this was driven by that plan that I mentioned that was set essentially in broad strokes in March, and refined slightly over the course of the summer. That at the undergraduate and graduate level if you look at the row at the top, you have the class sections that were scheduled in three different categories: 'in person' is in 'black'; 'blended' is in 'yellow'; 'online' is in 'gray' and you can see that whether it's graduate or undergraduate--somewhere between 55 and 60 percent of the class sections scheduled have some in-person component either fully in person or in a blended format.

And then if you look at the bottom row it expresses the data in terms of actual enrollments, and there the numbers are lower--they're closer to about 30 percent of all of the individual student course enrollments are being offered in a format that has completely in-person or partly in-person format.

And of course, that differential in the numbers comes from the fact that that we part of our gradual approach back is that many of the classes that are occurring in person are small classes lab seminars and other experiences. So it's pretty much rolling out according to the scheduled classes that led into the fall if you flip to yeah to just a few comments on the mandatory proof of 'vaccination policy' we have continued to try to clarify on an ongoing basis. The vaccination requirement and including information on the consequences of non-compliance there is, of course, ongoing and more specific in information and detail coming in the coming day and days as we approach the deadline that was set for compliance with the mandatory policy that deadline, of course, is October 17th and we have taken the position that individuals that are non-compliant with the mandatory policy will face some remedial consequences that are consistent with our policies, the most important of which is that when that date comes and passes.

So as of 'October 18th', that there will be a requirement that nobody in non-compliance with the mandatory policy will be permitted to be on campus. So that is what has alluded to in the third point about limited access, and that will trigger a number of processes that will in a stepwise fashion deal with individual cases and express the university's approach to a stepwise process application for accommodations for medical and code-based grounds of are identified in all the messaging that is going out around the 'vaccination policy' and can be made through the campus check-in system.

If you're on campus you'll have been aware of another layer of requirement which has to do with the provincial guidance that's been given on needing to show proof of vaccination in certain environments along with a Photo-ID to prove identity. So this is being applied currently in the athletic facilities and in the indoor dining spaces that are public such as in the Student Life Center, so there is that additional level of requirement that comes from the provincial guidelines there. Recently have been communications on university travel and travel restrictions and on the domestic side of things; the communication has been that domestic travel is now permitted where it's judged to be essential and safe at the local level so approvals for domestic travel are returning to the pre-pandemic approval arrangements typically that happens as a department head or a chair of an academic department and on the international side of travel most university-approved international travel still remains in general suspended which is in line with the government of Canada travel advice, but we have shared details of procedures through which exemptions in certain research-related travel cases can be made. The international visiting graduate student program is resuming, however currently travel for outbound student exchange programs has been restricted until 'April 30th', or the end of the winter term will be reassessed in the midterm. That's the result of the logistics and planning considerations that mean that the decision has to be made long before the date of the actual travel on the return to campus front.

Just a quick update that's of course an ongoing process that has already been going on for months and much has been completed including that all departments and faculties have completed their workforce plans for fall operations, that return to campus technology guidelines is in place, and that various tools are in place to support that there is ongoing check-in between the units, supporting the return to work on-campus process and the employing units about support and inquiries regarding a number of issues associated with return to work including accommodations and consequences of non-compliance with the vaccination policy as well as discussions about workforce planning for January 2022. And obviously those net the next steps of the return to work on campus process involve the continuous development of that gradual return that means that campus planning for the winter semester in involves a larger fraction of folks working at least in part on-campus and of course developing flexible work principles and guidelines that are consistent with that and looking to the future about post-pandemic operations as well from a planning perspective in terms of winter 2022.

Just in terms of a high-level general outlook as we have stated already Winter term 2022 will return to pre-pandemic levels of in-person instruction. And this has been institutionalized in the scheduling and enrollment procedures that are already in place and in fact already have been activated for the winter term. So it's very clear to students registering the courses that are on offer for the winter in the format that they're being offered in, so most students already should be aware that they're preparing for their learning to happen mainly in person in the winter and that will be consistent with the migration of larger numbers of employees to be back on campus in various levels of mix.

So, I think the only concluding remark on that forward-looking to Winter 2022 would be that--we would be expecting that all of that activity would be occurring in the context of full compliance of all on-campus participants with the vaccination policy that's in place now. 

I think I’ll just restrict my comments to that and turn to the discussion.

PRESIDENT VIVEK GOEL: Well, thank you Jim for that overview! I’d like to welcome Marilyn Thompson (Associate Provost, Human Resources) who's also joined us for the Q&A, and I know we have a number of colleagues in different areas available if we have questions that are very specific. I also want to thank all of the people that have submitted questions in advance, we got a significant volume of questions so we'll go through some of the major themes. Jim has already touched on several of the themes in the overview presentation and as always we will constantly be updating the questions and answers on the Covid information website with the questions that have come in before we turn to the comments.

Maybe I just want to also add to Jim’s observations, that we have had so far a very good return to campus experience, and I want to thank everyone that's been working to make the experience as positive as possible. Jim showed the numbers and that doesn't happen without an incredible amount of work from staff, from faculty, from everyone in the community, and as I walk around and see how well people are following the guidance--wearing their masks in open spaces, and complying with our vaccination requirement, it has enabled us to give our students this experience that they really do need and deserve in being able to return to campus. And you know based on the latest projections, I think we are in a very good place here in the Waterloo Region in the province of Ontario. We can see what happens when we let our guard down, we have to look to some of the provinces to the west of us to see what could happen. As long as we in our community and the people around us continue to maintain the vigilance, I think we can continue to achieve what Jim has outlined.

The first question that picks up Jim on the Winter Term point is, I think your message to students is very clear, what will happen for students who are not vaccinated and have not been granted an accommodation. Are we going to have supports for them virtually?

JAMES RUSH: Yeah! So you know on a program-by-program basis, of course, the mix of what courses will be being offered on the term is known.

It's on the course schedule and academic advisors are available to support individual students in individual programs but at a high level the approach and it's evident in the schedule that's available for enrollment right now is a return to formats and courses availability being similar to what it was in previous winter terms. So there will--I mean it's important to note that does on a normal case involve a certain not insignificant fraction of online course availability but that doesn't mean that they'll be the courses students need to progress so it is a real imperative that to be expecting to be attending in person for classes in the curriculum in the Winter term, and making preparations to be able to do that we will be continuing to provide supports of various types to students both in-person, and virtually because of lessons we've learned from the pandemic--about what is what can be provided efficiently in service provision online. But in general, the message has to be please expect that you'll be returning to the normal type of winter operations.

PRESIDENT VIVEK GOEL: Thanks Jim! So maybe turning to the employee side, Marilyn again. Jim went over some of the return to work that's underway. Can you talk a little bit about what the planning is for long-term options and review of policies?

MARILYN THOMPSON: Yes yes! Through the summer we worked with the leadership and management teams of each faculty and academic support unit to determine what the most appropriate workforce needs would be for the fall semester. We're using that same process for the winter term recognizing that there will be more on-campus programs in the winter term, then the arrangements that we had with our employees for the fall term might not be the most appropriate for the winter term. And so using that same process, if you haven't already had a conversation with your manager about how that change of activity impacts you and your role on campus, I would encourage you as we did for the fall semester. Have a conversation with your manager, in the end, each department head will approve the most appropriate workforce plan for their own unit okay.

PRESIDENT VIVEK GOEL: Thanks and in terms of reviewing the overall work from home policy timelines?

MARILYN THOMPSON: The University of Waterloo was actually well ahead of, some of our employers we already had work from home guidelines pre-pandemic. We suspended those in April of 2020 because our employees mainly fell into one of two categories, either their work required them to stay on campus and work from campus, or they were going to be working remotely. As we think forward to the winter term, and opening up more activities--we've reinstated those guidelines so anybody who's interested in pursuing a conversation around a more formal arrangement around work from home they are there and that process is in place. We are thinking past winter term, and what our workforce, and our workplace will look like in the future until we get a better sense of our operational business, academic needs. We can't at this time enter into longer-term arrangements with our employees about what that will look like, however I fully anticipate as we look at that our work from home guidelines will evolve and change.

PRESIDENT VIVEK GOEL: Thank you for that, and there's another comment that's coming that I think is very relevant that "Is this planning taking into consideration the impact on sustainability and climate and someone noticing how few cars there are right now?", and I think I would agree that that is going to be a very important consideration for that working group.

MARILYN: Oh absolutely! I think there's a lot of opportunities for us to have considerations for our workforce!

Just as the previous panel talked about you know the changing nature and what we've learned over the last 18 months, we can use some of those same principles looking at our own workforce as well.

PRESIDENT VIVEK GOEL: Absolutely and another question that relates to the return to campus decision is around how was equity factored in, and maybe I’ll start this and then Jimmy can add in. From my perspective it is an equity consideration that is driving us, as David said earlier we know while some students have been able to continue remotely, for many students it's been a challenge and so getting back to that pre-pandemic level is about ensuring as equitable access for as many people as possible--yeah.

JAMES RUSH: I mean--I think that is an important principle, and it's important to understand that different people that are participating as students or employees have different inherent needs, and feel like they're in a you know--a different equity space to begin with. So it is a really important  point in individual decision making to be able to take into account, the individual circumstances which I hope are part of all of the conversations, but the we've learned a lot of lessons during the pandemic that I think help with equity including the example I used earlier that we wouldn't have had the impetus to really literally convert almost every student support service to an online or remote delivery format.

Had it not be been for the pandemic but we've heard good and bad things about online service development, and part of meeting whether it's accessibility challenges or other components related to the equity question in general we've learned that 'different approaches work better for different participants', and we are committed to maintaining that as a way in part of recognizing that our community won't be all together all at the same time and in part recognizing that different people are served better through different formats of delivery. So I’d say systematically that's one expression of having recognized that and committed to it institutionally.

PRESIDENT VIVEK GOEL: And Marilyn, another question is around criteria for the work from home policy what constitutes a role that needs to be fully on-campus versus one where there can be flexibility?

MARILYN THOMPSON: Right now, our 'Work from Home' guidelines speak to working two days a week--the possibility of working two days a week remotely. We will be having those same conversations with all of our campus community around what that might look like into the future, I think that you know we as well need to look at the world of work in which our employees now are both attractive as well as the workforce that we need to attract. So I think that there's a huge opportunity here for us to think about you know how our workforce, how our workplace is going to evolve.

PRESIDENT VIVEK GOEL: Okay so I’d like to turn because there were a number of questions around vaccinations, and I know Jim you've already touched on this in your overview but very specifically we're about 11 days from October 18th.

What's going to happen to people that have not been compliant--their employees and students?

JAMES RUSH: Yeah! I mean I guess one important point of context is just to point out as part of the answer that really we have been fortunate that the vast majority, and that's about 95 percent of the folks that have responded are in a fully vaccinated situation. And many more have responded that they're on the path to full vaccination by the "17th of October". So that's an important I think stone on the path of this question, and its implications. I think the communications have been very clear, and the timeline has been long that the requirement to provide compliance with the vaccination policy deadline is the "18th" and that after that deadline we'll have to take action to support our position. 

In the policy the most important action that will have to be taken is that on the "18th of October" that folks that are non-compliant with that policy don't have access to the campus for in-person activities--that doesn't mean that employees are terminated on the 18th of October, and it doesn't mean that students are disenrolled on the 18th October. It means it starts what needs to be the process of stepwise evaluation of those cases, some of which are very complex in terms of their effects on the individual, and the effects on other members or groups of the community. But it does mean that we have to start a stepwise path that includes education, and it includes stepwise measures that could involve leaves, could involve altered work or study arrangements with support, and advice. But ultimately we have a mandatory policy it demands compliance and so consistent with our policies it could mean that the relationship either employment, or student relationship with the university has to be terminated at the end of an arc of activity and hopefully and that's not the first step and it's not the only step but there is a whole range of things that have to be executed post "October 17th" just to respect our policy and what it's trying to achieve which is the health and safety of the community. And that's all of us, that large majority of folks that are here and more that are expecting to come now and in the winter to be participating under those conditions yeah.

PRESIDENT VIVEK GOEL: So Jim, just to build on that very clear cut date on "October 18th" that access to campus will end for people that are not compliant. There's no option to do rapid testing then we have the process that will go and it has to be individualized for students and for employees in their circumstances, but there is ultimately a consequence down the line it's going to depend on the individual circumstances.

JAMES RUSH: That's right yeah and just to be clear too that I alluded to it in my general remarks from the operational update that there will be   frequent and specific communication on that's much more specific coming as early as the next day or so and continuing over the course of the period between now and the "17th of October".

PRESIDENT VIVEK GOEL: And related to that is a question about, How are we tracking who comes onto campus and how we ensure that starting October 18th people who haven't complied have are not coming onto campus?

JAMES RUSH: Yeah our campus check in--check-in system is one part of that and it monitors who comes onto campus and everybody that's in the university community is required to have submitted their be compliant with the policy through that check-in system to be eligible to be on campus. Those that haven't submitted will have received continued communication through that system to do so and they'll see an alert through that system that they're not  permitted to be on campus without proof. But of course, that system isn't the complete or only method. We also, you know, who is enrolled in 'in-person classes' and we know who is required to be on campus to as an employee to do elements of their job, so they'll have to be some matching between those pieces of information that will be part of that stepwise process that will go into the enforcement of the policy, yeah.

PRESIDENT VIVEK GOEL: So the key point that I would just emphasize is that there's a multi-faceted approach to ensuring that which certainly I would very much like to start with the alternative is we have guards at every entrance to campus trying to check on people. I would hope that with our community we can work with the kinds of tools that you've described.

Jim, I know we're out of time but I just want to cover one last point which I think is important and this is about if elementary schools close due to Covid and kids must return to online learning, what are we going to be doing and I think if we get into that situation where elementary schools are being ordered to close, we're probably going to be having very serious questions about the circumstance public health circumstances around us.

And so obviously we'll be looking to support people and I would imagine if that was the situation, the university is also going to be in a context where we've been looking at what we are doing as well

So I want to thank everyone again for their contributions to this all of you for taking part in the questions I know we didn't get to all the ones that were submitted we will be following up and posting answers as we go forward.

Thank you very much!