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Via Virtual Meeting room
REPORT NUMBER 44 OF THE ACADEMIC AFFAIRS COMMITTEE
February 10, 2022
To the Campus Council, University of Toronto Mississauga
Your Committee reports that it held a meeting on February 10, 2022 at 3:10 p.m. via a Virtual Meeting Room.
Present:
Laura Taylor (Chair), Sanja Hinic-Frlog (Vice-Chair), Alexandra Gillespie (Vice-President & Principal), Rhonda McEwen (Vice-Principal, Academic & Dean), Steven Short (Acting Vice- Principal, Research), Varouj Aivazian, Maelis Barre, Randy Besco, Ilia Binder, Laura Brown, Tracey Bowen, Jill Caskey, Rosa Ciantar, Ruth Childs, Laura Cocuzzi, Michael deBraga, Margarida Duarte, Marc Dryer, Ulrich Fekl, Sherry Fukuzawa, Philip Goodman, Shelley Hawrychuk, Rosa Hong, Tanjim Hossain, Shashi Kant, Helen Kula, Ashley Monks, Michael Nixon, Andrea Olive, Gerard Otiniano, Esteban Parra, Andreas Park, Christoph Richter, Jacob Gallagher Ross, Lindsay Schoenbohm, Adriano Senatore, Jumi Shin, Areesha Siddiqui, Dunia Stanojevic, Soo Min Toh, Ron Wener, Daniel White
Non-Voting Assessors:
Yen Du (Manager Academic Programs, Reviews & Quality Assurance), Michael Lettieri (Vice- Dean, Academic Experience), Heather Miller (Vice-Dean, Teaching & Learning), Lorretta Neebar (Registrar & Director of Enrolment Management), Mark Overton (Dean of Student Affairs), Bryan Stewart (Acting Vice Dean Graduate)
Regrets:
Sultan Akif, Andreas Bendlin, Brett Beston, Tamara El-Aydi, Richard Greene, Monika Havelka, Irenius Konkor, Maggie Ku, Emmanuel Nikiema, Gurpreet Rattan, Alvin Stanislaus, Andrew Sepielli, Meghan Sutherland, Mohamad Tavakoli-Targhi, Jaimal Thind, Leigh Revers, Weiguo Zhang
In Attendance:
Steven Chatfield (Department of Biology), Rena Banwait (Manager, Experiential Education), Lisa Devereaux (Manager, Academic Integrity & Affairs)
Secretariat:
Cindy Ferencz Hammond, Assistant Secretary of the Governing Council
- Chair’s Remarks
The Chair welcomed members and provided reminders about the governance elections and those encouraged eligible to vote.
- Presentation: Walk with your Professor
The Chair called on the Vice-Principal Academic & Dean, Rhonda McEwen to introduce the presentation. Professor McEwen introduced and invited Professor Steven Chatfield, from the Department of Biology, to speak to members about amazing walks he conducted on campus. Professor Chatfield’s areas of specialization included Systems biology, bioinformatics, genomics, and data visualization.
Professor Chatfield began his presentation by noting that the Walk with Your Professor activity that was a collaboration between the Department of Biology faculty and Recreation, Athletics & Wellness Centre’s Wellness Route walks. These one-hour campus walks were open to the UTM community and were led by various Biology faculty members. During these walks, each faculty member discussed their area of expertise with respect to Natural History. During his presentation, Professor Chatfield talked about the plants of interest and their characteristics that he pointed to during his walks.
- Minor Modification: Graduate Curriculum Changes: Institute for Management & Innovation (IMI), UTM
The Chair invited Professor Heather Miller, Vice-Dean, Teaching & Learning, to present. Professor Miller reported that the proposal represented several innovations in graduate curriculum. She explained that instead of having each graduate unit bring their own curriculum item forward for governance consideration, graduate curriculum proposals would be bundled together, similar to how undergraduate curriculum was handled. Professor Miller noted that this bundling also signalled a future growth in graduate programs at UTM, beyond professional master’s programs. In addition, the proposal brought forward IMI coded courses. She explained that the unit was offering IMI based courses that were attractive to students across their various professional master’s programs and meant that more than one master’s program could offer these courses as distributions or alternative offerings.
Professor Miller reported that another innovation in the proposal was that the Masters of Biotechnology Program (MBiotech) was offering their own courses. Two of the new courses proposed (BTC1855H Health Data Visualization with Tableau and BTC1878H Coding in R language) would replace existing program requirements of the Digital Health Technology (DHT) field within MBiotech. By introducing these DHT-specific courses, MBiotech would be able to better align the content and assessments with DHT program learning outcomes and shape the courses to meet the needs and interests of DHT students. Finally, Professor Miller noted that the Master of Urban Innovation (MUI) Program was introducing a special topics course (MUI2000H) which allowed for additional elective options for their second-year students. The course would also allow the Program to take advantage of visiting scholars that had expertise in urban innovation. It also allowed for faculty to gauge interest in new topic courses before proposing them as permanent offerings.
On motion duly made, seconded and carried, YOUR COMMITTEE RESOLVED,
THAT the graduate curriculum changes in the Institute for Management and Innovation (IMI), as described in the appended proposals and as recommended by the Vice-Principal Academic & Dean, Professor Rhonda McEwen, be approved, with the effective dates as noted in the documentation.
- Reports of the Presidential Assessors
The Chair invited Professor Rhonda McEwen, Vice-Principal Academic & Dean to provide a report.
Professor McEwen began by extending her heartfelt thanks to all faculty, librarians and staff who have been supporting students as they returned to increased in-person activity at the start of the week.
Moving to her presentation, Professor McEwen discussed new faculty searches and hires from 2020-21. She reported that there had been 37 faculty that had joined UTM and showed their home units and a breakdown of these hires by department. Professor McEwen noted that next complement cycle would begin in the next few weeks in the context of a budget constraint. UTM would be looking to focus on increasing diversity in all possible ways and based on the needs of each unit. She then showed data on the rank and stream of new hires noting that UTM had a balance of tenure and teaching stream, and a smaller proportion of Contractually Limited Term Appointments (CLTAs). Showing a slide on distribution by gender for the new hires, she noted that there had been 24 female and 13 male hires, across Humanities, Sciences and Social Sciences, adding that data showed that an increasing number of hires were neither of these binary categories. Professor McEwen noted that she would be reporting on this in more detail soon.
In response to a member’s question about the expected timeline for reopening such facilities as the Faculty Club and the Blind Duck Pub, Professor McEwen reported that reopening these facilities were slowed down, not so much by Provincial guidelines, but by staffing shortages affecting all Southern Ontario. She explained that UTM had been ready for a January 10, 2022, return to increased on-campus presence, but because that had been delayed, staff that had been released at that time now have to be re-onboarded. Hospitality & Retail Services staff were working to address this issue and community members will be able to see more and more activities re-opening soon.
The Vice-President & Principal added her thanks to teams under the Office of the CAO, including the Facilities Management & Planning office, Hospitality & Retail Services, and ancillary services. She reminded members that UTM now had an application, which they could use to find unused spaces to study and eat on campus.
In response to a member’s question about when in-person student events could resume, Professor Gillespie explained that these spaces were still under Provincial restrictions for non-instructional spaces but noted that she expected these restrictions to lift in the next six weeks or so. She reported that the Provost was creating a new group, called the Pandemic Resilience Group as the University was looking ahead to entering a new phase of the pandemic.
Moving on to the next report from a Presidential Assessor, the Chair invited Professor Michael Lettieri, Vice-Dean Academic Experience to provide his report.
Professor Lettieri made the following points during his report:
- Similar to other institutions, intake of suspected academic integrity offences more than doubled after UTM’s switch to remote learning in the spring of 2020.
- In response, UTM hired more staff and Dean’s Designates.
- The Academic Integrity Unit’s approach to academic integrity continues to be pre- emptive, educational, positive, and supportive.
- The Office appreciated the efforts made by all faculty and staff in helping it improve the University’s efforts to educate students about academic integrity, and proactively promote student integrity and success from multiple perspectives.
- There would be a more detailed presentation on academic integrity at an upcoming Committee meeting.
- Experiential learning (EL) opportunities continued to be offered during the Pandemic.
- In the 2021-22 academic year, experiential learning opportunities were being offered in 52 courses, involving more than 1200 students, a significant increase from just a few years ago.
- The EL Unit is presently assisting almost every academic unit at UTM.
- In the current year, the Research Opportunity Program (ROP) was offering over 260 projects, involving close to 400 students.
- It was the third year of the Student Ambassador Program, which provided second- to fourth-year students with the opportunity to share their experiential learning experiences with their peers through various engagement and outreach activities.
- This year, the Scholars in Residence Program (SiR) received more proposals from UTM- affiliated faculty than ever before. Nine UTM-affiliated faculty members had been selected to work with SiR-sponsored research teams (May 2-27, 2022).
- Faculty participating in the SiR were from various departments, such as Sociology, Anthropology, Economics, Language Studies, and Geography.
- This year, the program was offering five UTM in-person projects and three UTM online- only projects as part of the program’s first ever online international session.
- The deadline for students to apply to this program was February 28, 2022.
CONSENT AGENDA
On motion duly moved, seconded, and carried
YOUR COMMITTEE APPROVED
THAT the consent agenda be adopted and that Item 5, the Report of the Previous Meeting, be approved.
- Report of the Previous Meeting
Report number 43, dated January 13, 2022, was approved.
- Business Arising from the Report of the Previous Meeting
- Date of Next Meeting – March 24, 2022 at 3:10 p.m.
The Chair reminded members that the next meeting of the Committee was scheduled for Thursday, March 24, 2022.
- Other Business
There was no other business.
The meeting adjourned at 4:00 p.m.
February 15, 2022