The new semester is underway! And as that summer wind comes blowing in, we invite you to linger here a moment for these Friday Arts updates.

Grant Etudes: These pandemic times are deeply challenging but also deeply revealing – and therefore fertile ground for research. As noted in this morning’s Today@kwantlen, not only has SSHRC extended the deadline for Insight Grant applications to October 15, but it has announced an exciting Partnership Engage Grants Covid-19 Special Initiative supporting “social sciences and humanities research, including Indigenous research, both in disciplinary and multidisciplinary approaches, can help shed light on the nature of [pandemic] impacts.”

I’ve Seen the Future, Brother: An exciting new e-book on imagining a post-Covid future has a significant connection to KPU’s Criminology department. Mike Ma, as one of the members of the Between the Lines Editorial Collective, had a hand in its creation. The text features a chapter by three incarcerated persons, and these contributions were facilitated by Kristi Wijnsma and Alana Abramson from Criminology.

Blog Driver’s Waltz: Have you been following the Teaching and Learning Commons Blog, “Friday Morning Coffee?” It offers a bounty of useful discussion and tips: https://wordpress.kpu.ca/tlcommons/

In a Sentimental Moodle: Speaking of the heroes at Teaching and Learning, they’ve just rolled out the Moodle Mobile app (available for both iOS and Android devices), which allows students to enjoy a Moodle experience on tablets or smartphones analogous to what they’d get from a laptop. You can download the Moodle App for free from Apple’s App Store or from Google Play. T & L is also adding a Moodle scheduling tool for booking office hours or other activities, and is developing documentation to support your use of this tool.

Con-vocation time, come on! The in-person Convocation is another regrettable casualty of the Covid-19 era, but we still want to mark and celebrate this landmark moment with our students. KPU will be sharing a Convocation video, including messages from the Chancellor, President, Deans, Outstanding Graduate, and so on, with our new graduates. Beyond that, we strongly encourage departments to hold “virtual” celebrations for their graduating cohorts! These could include a party held on MS Teams, or texts or videos containing messages from faculty members. If you’d like help with this, please contact Samantha at samantha.duttonjones@kpu.ca

I Want to Raise Your Hand: MS Teams, KPU’s preferred platform for online meetings, has been upgraded. It now includes a “raised hand” icon which you can click on and off, and – more importantly – a “Hollywood Squares/Brady Bunch” mode showing up to nine different screens at once. This makes for much more dynamic virtual meetings!

Here Comes that Asynchronous Feeling: President Alan Davis announced yesterday that KPU’s plan for the Fall 2020 semester is for online, primarily asynchronous delivery, with a few exceptions for limited on-campus learning opportunities where in-person instruction is absolutely necessary to meet learning outcomes. Of course, “asynchronous” does not imply an absence of structure or deadlines, nor does it preclude incorporating optional synchronous elements in courses. (This statement from the University of Waterloo helps to clarify this). There is a much wider conversation unfolding about the implications of this shift to asynchronicity, which, we’re sure, will yield fascinating insights and creative solutions.

Everybody’s Going Surfing:  For those of you who haven’t yet had a chance to read the Teaching and Learning Commons’ May newsletter, we’d like to give a big shout out to Philosophy instructor Wayne Fenske.  The newsletter features Wayne’s ingenuity in creating his own YouTube channel to guide KPU students through the intricacies of logic problems.  Bravo, Wayne! 

And, since everybody’s working for the weekend…we wish you a joyful long one!

All our best,

Diane, Shelley, Wade, and Greg