The instructors for the Spring 2024 iteration of the Wicked Problem course "The Wicked Problem of Precarity: Living in an Uncertain World" have been selected. Read about our instructors, and the course that will be co-designed over the course of the Winter 2024 term.
The website for the Disability Inclusion Steering Committee (DISCo), the committee of senior University leaders who are leading UW's approach to meeting the 185 AODA recommendations, is now live. The Accessible Education project is just one example of how DISCo has identified an approach to meeting its accessibility goals. Read more about the broad work of DISCo.
The Centre for Teaching Excellence has developed a new resource identifying the existing accessibility initiatives at the University of Waterloo.
Seeking PhD candidates to teach an interdisciplinary course, The Wicked Problem of Precarity: Living in an Unpredictable World
As part of the University’s strategic plans to develop talent for a complex world and focus on interdisciplinary scholarship, a team of PhD candidates will come together in winter 2024 to design, develop and offer a course related to contemporary Wicked Problems. The course will be offered to upper-year undergraduate students from across the University to create a community of scholars, sharing different perspectives from the PhD candidate instructors and the learners in the classroom.
The pilot course, offered in spring 2024, will focus on the Wicked Problem of Precarity: Living in an Uncertain World. We know there are brilliant doctoral researchers across the University who are immersed in studying precarity from interdisciplinary perspectives, addressing research on poverty, homelessness, housing scarcity, and food insecurity, all of which are contributing to a future defined by precarity. Many of these researchers may also welcome the opportunity to be part of an interdisciplinary teaching team that will provide undergraduate students with a classroom experience where the academic content spans disciplinary boundaries. We encourage PhD candidates to apply using the online application form – details found on The Wicked Problem of Precarity: Living in an Uncertain World Teaching Innovation Incubator website. The deadline to apply is Monday, November 13.
After a month of exploring the Creator+ and Performance+ tools in LEARN, the initial phase of testing has wrapped up. Instructors and staff involved in the pilot have submitted their feedback on the tools which will be shared with the EdTech Advisory team.
Over the next few years, the Instructional Programs and Practices project team will explore how to create alternate program pathways, ensure accessible experiential learning opportunities exist, develop accessibility standards for teaching and learning, and crucially, identify a process to establish bona fide and essential academic requirements for programs and courses.
The Instructional Programs and Practices project team, led by co-leads Diana Skrzydlo (Teaching Fellow in the Faculty of Mathematics) and Donna Ellis (Director of the Centre for Teaching Excellence), will have a broad mix of representation from across the campus and is currently seeking expressions of interest from faculty members from all faculties.
The first phase of the "Evaluating LEARN Tools - Creator+ & Performance+" is set to begin this month. A team of instructors and staff who either directly work with LEARN, or support instructors who do, has been created, whose mandate will be to test these new products and determine if they are worth piloting in more extensive detail. Early results should be available in October. If you are interested in supporting this early phase of testing, or want to be included in more robust testing, please contact the TII.
The three Accessible Education project teams - Policy & Guidelines, Instructional Programs & Practices, and Learning Tools & Materials - are set to begin work this fall. Faculty, instructors, and staff from across campus have been identified and invited to serve on these project teams as either team members or collaborators.
Over the course of the fall term, work will be done to plan how each team will address the AODA recommendations that they are being tasked with addressing.
The “Accelerating integration of sustainability and climate change in campus undergraduate programs” is working to identify a flexible framework through which climate and sustainability competencies can be integrated into any program of study as they are relevant, and identify processes and tools to support program administrators, chairs, instructors, and central support units to utilize the framework.
Thus far, a cross-functional, interdisciplinary working group of faculty, staff, and students has designed a draft version of a five-step framework and accompanying toolkit to aid units in determining how sustainability education might align with existing program outcomes, and which tools or resources can be incorporated to further integration of sustainability.
Consultations with Chairs and Associate Chairs, Undergrad, will be scheduled throughout the fall term to receive input and feedback on this model. In year 2 of the project, this framework and toolkit will be piloted with partner programs to test its feasibility and generate best practices to guide future interest in integrating sustainability into the curriculum.
In advance of work being done as part of the "Adapting Student Led Individually Created Courses (SLICCs) to Encourage Self-directed Learning at University of Waterloo" project, team members will be reaching out in various venues throughout the fall term to share insights about what SLICCs are and their potential value when adapted at UW.
If you have any specific questions about SLICCs, please get in touch with either of the project leads - Katherine Lithgow (klithgow@uwaterloo.ca) or Mariam Mufti (mmufti@uwaterloo.ca) - or contact the TII directly.