Online integrity survey is under way

Faculty members and students across campus are answering an electronic survey about "academic integrity", conducted by an American researcher at the request of a working group chaired by associate provost Bruce Mitchell.

They have been sent details by e-mail, pointing them to web sites (one for students, both undergraduate and graduate, and one for instructors) that opened yesterday. The survey continues until October 24. Answering the questions will typically take an individual 10 to 15 minutes, the organizers say.

Answers will go directly to the American researcher involved, who is Donald McCabe, now of Rutgers University in New Jersey, but previously founder of the Center for Academic Integrity at Duke University. "The UW Academic Integrity Committee will have access only to the summary data," participants in the survey have been told. "The results will help us to enhance the culture of honesty, fairness, and trust on the campus by helping to identify possible areas of weakness that can be addressed by the committee, thereby maintaining and improving the value and distinction of a UW degree."

Participation is voluntary, the committee notes. The survey has been approved by the UW office of research ethics.

"Academic integrity" is the blanket term for behaviour that avoids plagiarism, cheating, false credentials, fudged research data and similar disgraces. Psychology professor Barbara Bulman-Fleming, who is a member of the committee, said earlier this year that “We have the official blessing of the Deans Council, every member of whom believes that AI-related issues need to be addressed more seriously and that more needs to be done in the way of educating faculty, staff and students.”

There's word this morning that some faculty users are having difficulties accessing the survey. "To resolve this problem," the experts advise, "please click the refresh button on your web browser, or delete your internet history. You may have accessed the previous website from the October 3 email." And if that doesn't work, there's a direct route to the updated site.

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More PD courses to be developed

With “professional development” courses starting this year in two more faculties, and the remaining three faculties joining the trend next year, the authors of three more courses are to be chosen soon.

An invitation has gone out from the Co-op Education Council to departments across UW, asking for proposals from staff and faculty members for courses on “Teamwork”, “Project Management” and “Problem Solving”. The deadline for proposals is November 15.

Says a guidelines memo: “Part of receiving academic credit for work terms will involve co-op students completing online professional development courses to add value to their work term experience. The Engineering Faculty has created the PDEng program which has developed online courses for its students. For the Mathematics and Arts Faculties, students admitted in the fall of 2006 will be required to complete similar online professional development courses as part of the co-op component to their degree. For the remaining three Faculties (AHS, ES and Science), the students admitted in the fall of 2007 will be required to complete the online courses.”

Among the goals of the PD courses: “To enhance the overall work-integrated learning experience of co-op students by providing engaging and relevant online courses to improve students' employability and workplace productivity. To promote the integration of what is learned at work with what is learned at school through critical reflection To enable peer learning and foster a sense of community among co-op students.”

Development is at various stages, says the memo, for the first three PD courses: Co-op Fundamentals, Critical Reflection & Report Writing, and Workplace Communication. “Consultation with Faculty representatives, employers and Co-operative Education and Career Services employees has resulted in priorities for the next three PD courses to be developed.

“We are looking for individuals or groups of people with expertise in these areas to develop course content. We will also require that the authors to commit to being the instructor for at least two course offerings.”

The teamwork course will deal with “roles and differentiation on teams, leadership and followership, barriers and solutions to effective teamwork; basics of collaboration, group decision making and problem solving; issues in managing and evaluating teams, managing meetings”. Topics in the project management course: “Planning, proposing, scheduling, budgeting, supervising, controlling, priority setting, delegation, time management, wrapping up, reporting”. And in the problem-solving course: “Types of problems, techniques for prioritizing and solving problems, group and individual problem solving, problem solving models, dealing with uncertainty and complexity, critical analysis skills.”

The courses will be taught online through UW-ACE, and will each involve “an average of 20 hours of student work in a term”.

Questions and proposals can be directed to Judene Pretti (tjpretti@uwaterloo.ca), manager of the PD program, whose office is in the Tatham Centre. The PD office is responsible to the associate provost (academic and student affairs).

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Annual Christian lecture set for tonight

"Fate, Honour and Transcendence" is the title of the 2006 Pascal Lectures on Christianity and the University, which this year involve a public lecture tonight and a seminar tomorrow.

The speaker is Margaret Visser, an international award-winning Canadian writer whose books explore history, anthropology, and the mythology of everyday life. During her campus visit she will examine "the propensity in Western society to lapse into fatalism, and the ensuing consequences". Her free lecture starts at 8:00 tonight in the Humanities Theatre, Hagey Hall of the Humanities.

Tomorrow afternoon, Visser will also present a seminar titled "Thanks", talking about the various manifestations and meaning of gratitude and ingratitude in Western culture. That event is scheduled for Thursday at 3:30 p.m. in Davis Centre room 1302.

Margaret Visser was born in South Africa, studied in Zambia and Zimbabwe and at the Sorbonne, and earned a doctorate in classics from the University of Toronto. For 18 years, she taught Greek and Latin at York University. She is the author of several books, including The Geometry of Love, finalist for the Charles Taylor Prize; Much Depends on Dinner, winner of the Glenfiddich Award for Food Book of the Year; The Rituals of Dinner, which won the International Association of Culinary Professionals' Literary Food Writing Award, and the Jane Grigson Award; and The Way We Are, a collection of essays about the way people live. She appears frequently on radio and television, and has lectured extensively in North America, Europe, and Australia. She delivered the 2002 CBC Massey Lectures, entitled Beyond Fate.

The Pascal Lectures on Christianity and the University is an annual event inaugurated in 1978 to create a forum at UW for the presentation of Christian issues in an academic environment. Each year, the Pascal Lectures Committee brings to UW "outstanding scholars who have also distinguished themselves in Christian thought or life". The lectures they present "are intended to challenge the university to a search for truth through personal faith and intellectual enquiry which focus on Jesus Christ". Previous Pascal Lecturers have included journalist Malcolm Muggeridge (1978), author Madeleine L'Engle (1985), physicist John Polkinghorne (1992), and computer scientist Donald Knuth (2000).

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Drops in the daily drizzle

With the fall term still young, it's already time for co-op students to be looking seriously at where they'll be working in the winter term. Interviews with employer representatives started a week ago today in the Tatham Centre (and some spillover locations), and continue through October 26. Job ranking happens over the October 27-30 weekend, with match results available at noon on the 30th — meaning that a couple of thousand students will know that day where they will need housing starting in January. The schedule is slightly different for architecture students and those in accounting programs, whose interviews and matches are managed separately.

James H. Cooke, a former member of UW's staff, died September 26. He was a mail carrier for central stores from October 1971 until his retirement April 1, 1985.

A couple of slight corrections: Yesterday's Daily Bulletin identified mathematician Jack Edmonds as being retired from the department of applied math, but in fact he had been a member of the department of combinatorics and optimization. And Bob Astley, active with the Kitchener Waterloo Symphony, was identified as an executive with local insurance behemoth Clarica; in fact he's a retired Clarica executive.

Rick Haldenby, director of UW's school of architecture, is a member of the six-person jury that will assess submissions in the City of Toronto's big competition to redesign Nathan Phillips Square. . . . Barbara Paleczny, director of the School Sisters of Notre Dame Shalom Network and a candidate for the presidency of St. Jerome's University, will be making a visit to St. Jerome's today. . . . Wes Koch, who pitched eight shutout innings and struck out 15 batters on Friday night, leading the baseball Warriors to a 2-0 victory over Toronto, is the Ontario University Athletics male athlete of the week. . . .

CAR

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