2021 Annual Review

A MESSAGE FROM DEAN RUI WANG

In 2021, with the pandemic continuing into its second year — creating challenges for our work and personal lives — the Faculty of Science rose above these challenges and excelled. This Annual Review is all about celebrating that.

Our researchers opened up their labs and welcomed back their teams for the first time since the pandemic began. They forged ahead with their ongoing contributions to Canada’s fight against COVID, publishing many papers to further our understanding of the virus, vaccines, and immunity. Our faculty members continued their work on COVID task forces, held seminars, and undertook important media commentary helping to educate the public.

Our staff, departments, and units made a partial transition back to on-campus and in-person services in the fall, while our instructors pivoted to teach some of their courses and labs in person.

We launched our new Strategic Plan, Science for the Future, after extensive consultation with our community. We also established our inaugural Dean’s Special Advisory Board – comprised of industry leaders in science and innovation – to provide advice and feedback to our Faculty, and help drive its success. And, we established our Faculty’s first Pedagogical Innovation Chair in Science Education to promote pedagogical excellence and innovation and improve the effectiveness of teaching for our students.

The Faculty made crucial strides in enhancing Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) in our Faculty with diversity-focussed hires and a new EDI Committee. We created a Dean’s Scholarship for Women in Science. And we forged new international partnerships that will create exchange and study abroad opportunities, among many other benefits, for our students, and enhance our global engagement.

You can read all about these initiatives, and much more, in this report.

Last but not least, I applaud every member of our Faculty of Science community – faculty, researchers, staff, students, and our supporters – for their efforts over this past year and for remaining flexible and resilient. I am so proud of what we have achieved, together.

This Annual Review demonstrates our commitment to our students, and our vision to foster discovery, engage community and inspire a better future for us all. I hope you enjoy reading it. On behalf of the Faculty of Science at York University, thank you for your friendship and support as we push the boundaries of discovery, innovation, learning, engagement, and impact.

Rui Wang
Dean, Faculty of Science

TEACHING & LEARNING

Reimagining Online Course Delivery

Professor Mary Helen Armour (Division of Natural Science) has always had an interest in trying new things, which led her to explore online teaching long before remote course delivery became a pandemic necessity. Her dissatisfaction with the way it was being done led her to Will Gage, York University’s associate vice-president of teaching and learning, and the opportunity to test an innovative online course model.

“Regular classes have benefits, but online teaching always interested me because of accessibility issues,” Armour said. “As technology gets better, you can create online courses that offer an equally effective learning experience, but delivered differently, as compared to in-person classes.”

Armour, Gage and other educational experts are part of a team that for several years has been developing, testing and refining the “perpetual course model.” The model aims to provide students with skills in knowledge acquisition, knowledge agility, autonomy and professionalism, and interaction and collaboration, while inspiring creativity. Each course’s curriculum determines the knowledge they’ll need to acquire, but the model offers alternatives in how that information is delivered and assessed to promote the student’s mastery of both the subject matter and the aforementioned skills.

Armour was the first faculty member to test this model and it required her to rethink the full-year course “Earth and Its Atmosphere,” changing the structure and order of the content. She made it modular and incorporated videos, breaking the four course themes into subtopics. 2021 was her fourth year participating in the perpetual co-model experiment and she has refined her approach and content each year, learning from her experience and student feedback.

“The first year, I made everything due at the end of the course, which was open to students from all years, and the procrastination was horrible,” she said. “I realized that they aren’t that disciplined, so I reinstated due dates within the themes, but the material was open to students to work on weeks before it was due to allow them scheduling flexibility.”

The team now has five courses being taught using the perpetual course model and they meet monthly to discuss and troubleshoot. They are also considering how technology and artificial intelligence can assist the instructors, such as in making the course model responsive to students’ learning styles.

The perpetual course model is working towards making high-quality learning opportunities available online in a way that is most beneficial to everyone involved, pandemic or not.

Adapted from story written by Elaine Smith for York U Innovatus.

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Teaching the Skills to Succeed at University

Having taught high school earlier in his career, Professor Andrew Skelton (Mathematics & Statistics) saw firsthand the gaps between a graduating student’s experience and the demands of a university education and set out to bridge them.

“There are big changes in study skills, life skills and learning skills and students need to acquire the ability to reflect and adjust,” said Skelton.

In the United States, it is quite common to find First-Year Seminar courses, taken for credit by first-semester undergraduates. These courses have a small faculty-student ratio and focus on assisting students to develop practical and intellectual skills that will enhance their university experience. Such courses aren’t prevalent in Canada, so Skelton began pondering how a Canadian model might look.

His solution was to develop standalone modules that could easily fit into a first-year course. The models address three types of student needs: mathematical skills (e.g., learning from homework problems), study skills (e.g., avoiding procrastination), and life skills (e.g., managing academic stress).

The project has been three years in the making. The first year was funded by the Junior Faculty Fund in the Faculty of Science. Skelton had three summer students work with him to develop proof of concept. Feedback from the first group of students led Skelton to modify the offerings. The second year was funded by an Academic Innovation Fund grant and was focused on balancing the cost and benefit to the students to create a product they would find valuable.

“I wanted them to be of benefit to students in terms of time and emotional energy and wanted to determine how to advertise them to students and how they would figure into a student’s grade,” Skelton said. “In doing so, I realized they were built for me and my teaching style and weren’t transferable to other professors.”

Therefore, the third year of his project (2021), funded by a grant from eCampus Ontario (and the York Science Scholars Award program), Skelton focused on making the modules suitable for use by any faculty member.

“If you, as a faculty member, have an interest in helping the students in your course with these learning skills, I have a product that you can adapt to your teaching style,” Skelton said.

Skelton used the modules with 1,200 first-year students in the fall 2021 semester and is currently evaluating the impact they had in the classroom. In early 2022, the modules will be posted online to the eCampus Ontario website, so that they are available to faculty anywhere.

Adapted from story written by Elaine Smith for York U Innovatus.