We commit to offering students knowledge and skills and to building their capacities to grow and adapt amid change, challenge, and opportunity.
This principle focuses our attention and resources on readying students to embrace and benefit from continual learning. It entails the ability to adapt to changing circumstances, including through new knowledge, skills, tools and technologies. It also recognizes dedication to continuous learning, and includes those already employed or credentialed and seeking professional development or a career transition.
To be 鈥渇orward-looking鈥 is also to consider the longer-term implications of our actions, including environmental sustainability and social justice. This means it is not enough to encourage the adoption of new knowledge, skills, tools and technologies. We must also cultivate students鈥 capacities for critical thinking and ethical reasoning about the responsible integration and application of knowledge.
It is the pairing of new learning with deeper capacities that will make students ready to use tools and skills and apply them carefully, ethically, creatively and intelligently.
Decisions and actions related to teaching and learning should align with our dedication to encourage continuous learning that pairs new skills and technologies with critical and creative thinking.
Objectives
Diversify curricula and pedagogy to promote active, continual and lifelong learning
Where the outcomes sought are to increase capacity (including through physical space use and in instructors鈥 skills) for active learning and advance options for flexible, modular learning for students at various life and career stages, over the life of this plan, the University commits to:
Exploring how to make flexible learning work through forward-looking modes of learning and course delivery, including space needs aligned with course delivery design (e.g., a block model of delivery for common core components of degree programs);
Augmenting and updating teaching and professional development supports for all instructors (full-time, contract, TAs) 鈥 including AI literacy 鈥 in recognition of their engagement in lifelong learning
Streamlining processes, improving systems and enhancing administrative supports (e.g., investments in digital tools) to better align administrative structures and resources with teaching and learning needs.
Prepare students for a changing and changeable world
Where the outcomes sought are to increase confidence among students in navigating rapid social and technological change and recognize 91亚色 graduates as knowledgeable, adaptable and creative contributors, over the life of this plan the University commits to enhancing students鈥 experiential education and career-readiness by:
Developing programming that addresses emerging issues and labour market needs and builds critical and professional skills, including technological fluencies, information literacies and critical thinking
Encouraging student-centred pedagogical approaches (e.g., group work, peer collaboration, flipped classroom) to differentiate students鈥 learning experiences from mere knowledge acquisition
Advancing our goal of providing every student with an experiential learning opportunity through scaling up current levels of co-operative and experiential education programming, community-based and work-integrated learning
Collaborating with students through consultation (surveys, with student associations, groups, governments, caucuses, outreach tools etc.) to bring student voices and aspirations to teaching and learning programming, decisions and supports
Offer courses and programs that maximize students鈥 exposure to and experience with new technologies, including AI, while also exercising human intelligence
Where the outcomes sought are expanded academic offerings that combine practical skills and technological proficiency with critical reflection on social, environmental and ethical implications, over the life of this plan the University commits to:
Strengthening interdisciplinarity and interdisciplinary programming by addressing structural and budgetary obstacles to cross-Faculty/cross-campus collaboration and inter-faculty cooperation on teaching and program development
Reviewing the GenAI in Teaching and Learning University resource to make available a comprehensive guide for AI use in academic and pedagogical contexts that supports students鈥 and instructors鈥 needs
Current relevant initiatives/strategies/units:
Explore the Six Principles
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