Sunday was sunny but cold, we’re only a couple of days into Spring 2020 — and here we are… in what is really a strange new world of “work from home,” “social distancing,” and trying to adjust to a new online reality.
Thought I would pen a few thoughts after a week of quick transitions, seemingly endless conference calls, oodles of Zoom, BB Collaborate, and Teams sessions, and pushing the limits of my home Internet and cell phone plans.
- Everyone in @UofTEngineering, from students to staff to faculty, has been truly amazing in their resilience, flexibility, and dedication to their peers, friends, colleagues, and the community. It has been remarkable to see how everyone stepped up to answer the #COVID-19 call: from ECF spinning up more remote access capacity to staff quickly helping everyone adapt to the new 100% on-line experience — from the admissions and Registrar’s Office to your own departmental advisors.
- I saw how @UofTEngineering faculty moved to ensure everyone will be able to complete this semester successfully — from pivoting lectures from “chalk & talks” to online (literally in 48 hrs), to coming up with ways to interact with students who moved back home and are now on the other side of the world.
- I saw students came together to develop ideas to combat #COVID-19 and inform the public health effort.
- I heard from so many of you about how important it was to keep you up to date on what was going @UofT and @UofTEngineering. We’re working on it and we’re doing our best in what really is an ever-changing situation.
I know that this is really a crazy and unprecedented time — we are all feeling anxious because this is such a new and unknown situation. But this is a challenge that we @Skule are so well-positioned for — we are all problem solvers, we are all used to dealing with unknowns, and we are all about optimizing designs and developing creative and innovative solutions … whether we’re in @civmin, @chemeng_uoft, @eceuoft, @uoftmse, @bme_uoft, @utias, @uoftmie, @uoftistep… this is what we do as engineers.
So stay tuned, stay in touch, always happy to do a “Coffee with Chris” even if it’s a virtual one and take care of yourselves — there will still be some bumps ahead on this road but we’re going to get through this all together.
Chris
Christopher Yip
Dean
Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering
University of Toronto
To our U of T Engineering undergraduate students
The Faculty’s primary aim is to support our students to complete this term by providing you with the best possible learning and assessment experience that we can at this point. To do this, we are asking instructors to develop alternatives to final exams, now called final assessments, that let students best reflect their learning in each course, using guidelines that include:
- In the development of these plans the Faculty expects that all course instructors will consult with students in their courses in appropriate ways.
- Instructors will then put the proposed option to a student vote. With the approval by a simple majority of those who vote, the course can move forward with the proposed plan.
- For consistency, the Faculty suggests that courses use one or a combination of the following approaches for the final assessment:
- Take-home exam,
- Final report, essay, project, lab and/or
- Quercus online quizzes
- In designing their plans, instructors will consider solutions that support Academic Accommodations and Academic Integrity.
As I shared with you earlier this week, for this Winter 2020 semester only, students enrolled in undergraduate programs will have the option of choosing how their grade is recorded on their transcript, which could include a percent (%) grade as normal, or opt for a Credit or No Credit (CR/NCR) option after they see their final grades. Students would also have the choice to drop a course with no academic penalty at that time. We have also created an undergraduate student FAQ page to answer many of the questions that will come up, and we will continue to update it as we hear your feedback.
Graduate students: We are working with the School of Graduate Studies on options for final assessments in your courses and will be following up with you directly in the coming days with more info.
Chris
Christopher Yip
Dean
Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering
University of Toronto
To our U of T Engineering undergraduate students
With the adaptations and alterations to courses this semester, we are making some changes to give our students every possible opportunity to succeed and have agency over their own studies.
For this Winter 2020 semester only, students enrolled in undergraduate programs will have the option of choosing how their grade is recorded on their transcript, which could include a percent (%) grade as normal, or opt for a Credit or No Credit (CR/NCR) option after they see their final grades.
- These choices can be made by individual students and indicated in ACORN — they will not be applied on a course-wide basis.
- For this Winter 2020 semester, there will be no limit on the total number of courses to which students can choose to apply the CR/NCR option.
- The CR/NCR option will be available for both core and non-core courses.
- We will extend the drop deadline for all undergraduate courses to one week after the Exam Committee has approved the final grades and they are available to students.
We came to this decision after extensive consultation with your Chairs and Directors, the Vice-Deans Undergraduate and First-Year, as well as the Exam Committee, which included representation from the Engineering Society.
To our graduate students: more specific information is coming soon for graduate courses. Currently the School of Graduate Studies has extended the deadline to drop graduate courses without penalty to 25 April 2020 — with the intent that this gives students the opportunity to fully consider any proposed amendments to course delivery before they make the decision to continue or drop.
Regarding final assessments for both undergraduate and graduate students, we’re working nonstop on putting together solutions that will give instructors the ability to deliver meaningful and productive evaluations or assignments, and that give students the best chance to succeed. We’ll be coming back to both faculty and students with more details on that shortly.
Chris
Christopher Yip
Dean
Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering
University of Toronto