Author: christinabondi (page 2)

By Shirin Gerami, Design Research Team Lead (Family Care Office)

The Family Care research project is born out of a partnership between the Innovation Hub and the Family Care Office at the University of Toronto. The overall aim of this project is to answer the question “what are the experiences of students with family responsibilities, and particularly student parents, at the University of Toronto?”

By Joey Youssef (Team Lead) & the Multi-Faith Centre Research Team

In this blog post series, we introduce you to each of the Innovation Hub’s research teams this year, as well as provide some project details. To learn more about the research questions, see here. Below, you will find a brief statement from the Multi-Faith Centre’s research team, regarding why they decided to join the I-Hub and this particular project.

By Nick Feinig, Senior Research Assistant (for the ACE-Transforming the Instructional Landscape project)

What do instructors and students have to say about instructional space at UofT? Quite a lot, it seems! Beginning in the fall of 2017, the Innovation Hub undertook an initial ethnographic study combining long form empathy interviews, participant observation in classrooms around campus, and data lifted from a social media campaign as part of ACE’s Transforming the Instructional Landscape (TIL) project. Instructor feedback was also solicited through a dedicated portion of the TIL website.  Analysing this data, our research team determined that both students and instructors recognize the importance of thoughtfully managed space to the learning process, while the former in particular have powerful memories associated with certain campus spaces.

By Julia Smeed, Innovation Projects Officer

A world-class institution deserves world-class spaces for learning and instruction. That’s why we think that Academic and Campus Events (ACE) landmark renovation project – Transforming the Instructional Landscape (TIL) – will be such an exciting and impactful project at U of T. The instructional space on campus plays an essential role in fulfilling the university’s mandate to provide an unparalleled learning experience and impacts every student here. As the steward of these important facilities, ACE is committed to developing accessible, innovative, and purpose-built classrooms that address the needs of instructors and students. We can’t help but be inspired by their ambitious new vision for U of T.

By Suzie Kim, Communications Team

On October 11th, 2018, the Innovation Hub partnered with the SLP network to host a research event entitled SLP Presents: The Future of SLP.  SLP is a network of staff who  work directly with students across at the University of Toronto’s three campuses.  The partnership between SLP and the Innovation Hub commenced last year to explore two questions: What should the future of the SLP Network look like? and how should this community of practice be redesigned to better serve the needs and wants of all its members?  After conducting a number of empathy interviews with staff in a variety of positions and career stages, insights were generated.  These insights reveled that supporting staff to develop institutional knowledge, mentorship and networking, senior management involvement and career development support are areas where there are opportunities for SLP to provide support.  This event sought to gather additional data to inform next steps of the process.