About the Teaching Innovation Incubator

The incubator will serve as a hub, catalyst, and launch pad for bold and unconventional ideas that will shape the next generation of teaching and learning at Waterloo.

It will also serve as a space for designing and launching smaller ideas with transformative potential that are inhibited by current ways of doing things.

The vision for this teaching innovation incubator is squarely focused on the student learning experience, but the University’s systems and processes also significantly shape those experiences. 

As the Incubator is still in its development phase, there are currently a number of "Beta" projects that are being supported. These projects are being supported both for their important potential as an innovation for Waterloo and because their progress can help envision the most effective structure for the Incubator in the longer term so that it can be of most benefit to the University, its students, and its faculty and professional staff. 

Do you have questions? Connect with us via email at: tii@uwaterloo.ca

The Incubator will play four different roles as Waterloo creates new ways of teaching and learning for the future:

The concept of the Teaching Innovation Incubator (TII) has been a part of campus planning conversations since 2017 and was refined through the campus-wide consultative planning process that led to the University’s 2020-2025 strategic plan: Connecting Imagination with Impact. The incubator specifically fits with the following two objectives connected to the first goal of the Developing Talent theme:

• Promote quality and innovation in teaching and learning and support infrastructure, policy, and practice that remove systemic barriers.
• Find new ways to work together and remove barriers to collaboration, interdisciplinarity, and the integration of knowledge.

After approval of the strategic plan, the university set up three action teams to lead its implementation. The incubator was selected by the Developing Talent Action team as a priority project that directly addressed several goals and that would indirectly help achieve several others. The idea was discussed in various forums (Undergraduate Operations, Senate Undergraduate Committee, Executive Committee) in Fall 2021. Late in 2021, the incubator idea was discussed and received the go-ahead from Deans’ Council. In January 2022, the idea was presented to and endorsed by the President and Vice-Presidents group and was presented to and discussed at Senate. In March 2022, the terms of reference for a two-pronged approach to developing and launching the incubator was approved by the Provost. As a first prong, the TII Planning Project was launched in earnest.

In 2022, various consultations occurred to inform the development of the incubator:

• Environmental scan – An environmental scan was conducted using web searches and email listserv requests to find other teaching-focused incubators or labs.
• Campus consultations – Project team members took turns facilitating 25 consultations with groups of senior leaders in each Faculty (associate deans, chairs, and teaching fellows), in centres and institutes, and from ASUs as well as groups of undergraduate and graduate students.
• Campus survey – Concurrent with the consultations, an open-ended campus-wide survey was available for two weeks in November. More than 200 faculty, staff, and students provided responses via the survey.

As a second prong, the beta version of the TII was also launched in 2022 as a means of developing and testing possible processes that the future TII could adapt and use. 

The consultation input and survey results have since been summarized and a report has been written to generate initial recommendations and possible implementation considerations.