Meet the YU Experience Hub
Kathleen Winningham Lisa Endersby
Director, YU Experience Hub Educational Developer, Teaching Commons
Supporting faculty in designing, facilitating, and assessing impactful opportunities for experiential education remains an important part of our work at the Teaching Commons. Our work, however, is strongest when we collaborate with colleagues across campus. The YU Experience Hub is an important partner in experiential education at York – read on to learn more about the Hub from its Director, Kathleen Winningham:
The YU Experience Hub is positioned to further the university’s EE priority in that it not only allows for intentional design to meet the functional requirements of providing pan-university EE supports, but it also draws on the work focused expertise, infrastructure and community partnerships that each of its staff members possess.
The Hub supports Faculty activities and is responsible for:
- Providing critical input and advice to establish protocols aimed at ensuring high quality and effective delivery of EE programming;
- creating technology solutions to facilitate tracking and reporting of EE activities, sharing community partnership information and disseminating EE templates and resources;
- providing information and research to ensure broader understanding and engagement among all EE stakeholders; and;
- communicating and coordinating messaging and activities that promote and enhance the value of York’s EE programming both internally and externally.
In order to support the establishment of protocols, procedures and best practices the YU Experience Hub relies on the York University Continuum on Experiential Education or the EE Common Language document.
Whether the focus is classroom, community or work focused EE , the YU Experience Hub establishes protocols and procedures to ensure high quality and effective delivery of course focused EE programming while also ensuring instructors are aware of the supports available through the Teaching Commons such as the teaching with experiential education workshops, evaluating EE, designing assessment activities, and incorporating reflective learning activities within their courses/programs of study. In addition, every Faculty has at least one Experiential Education Coordinator to support Faculty specific EE programming. The YU Experience Hub has launched a Community of Practice for this group where members share best practices and discuss relevant and timely academic developments in experiential education.
Many types of experiential education activities involve complex risk management and logistics requirements, and this can be a deterrent to both faculty members and community partners wanting to pursue community and work focused EE. The YU Experience Hub has compiled, verified and standardized risk management and logistics processes to simplify these procedures for EE stakeholders. The Faculty toolkit found on the YU Experience Hub website is a valuable resource for Faculty launching all types of EE in their courses. It can be found here: https://yuexperience.info.yorku.ca/experiential-education-toolbox/
The YU Experience Hub has been tasked with creating a technology solution to streamline and automate experiential activities for Faculties. This software will also facilitate our understanding and awareness of EE activities at York. To that end the YU Experience Hub is currently piloting Outcome(Orbis) in several Faculties. Outcome(Orbis) is an experiential learning software that is designed to facilitate experiential learning opportunities, addressing the needs of faculty, students, and employers, and York. The system will deepen York’s ability to measure and evaluate both the quantity and quality of Work Integrated Learning (WIL) and Experiential Learning opportunities and engagements. In addition to this software the YU Experience Hub has also purchased Talent Neuron which is also being piloted in several faculties. This software can provide a source of global talent demand and supply data, predictive analytics and insights into real-time job market, location, and competitive intelligence to help York University target specific employer markets. It’s an online tool that seamlessly produces labour market trends and job postings geographically. It can also be used as a curriculum development tool as it can track skill sets requirements regionally, or even nationally.
The YU Experience Hub is actively involved in many internal and external activities to promote and enhance the value of York’s EE programming including the development of the Sector Cluster Network. In the past year the YU Experience hub has hosted three networking events to promote experiential education with our community partners and employers. During these events the YU Experience Hub has partnered with various Faculties and other York units so that community partners have a clear path to connect to EE opportunities and are actively recruiting York students. These activities clearly will help support faculty connecting with both community partners and employers.
For more information about the YU Experience Hub, visit their website at http://yuexperience.info.yorku.ca/. The YU Hub and the Teaching Commons continue to partner on workshops, events, and resources to support and celebrate experiential education across campus. Keep an eye on the Hub’s and the Teaching Commons’ websites to learn more about upcoming events.