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DC horticulture students bring classmate’s design to life at Landscape Ontario Congress

A team of Durham College (DC) Horticulture Technician students took their classmate’s vision of a tranquil outdoor garden room from design to reality for the 2019 Landscape Ontario Congress (Congress), an annual trade show and conference for Canada’s horticultural and landscape professionals.

Featured within the Congress’s Canada Blooms Campus: Student Feature Gardens exhibit, the DC installation was designed by second-year student Amanda Steinberg and featured extensive woodwork, including a wooden accent wall, and a secret waterfall.

Steinberg’s design and the students’ participation in the Congress were all part of an assignment in their second-semester course, Sustainable Garden Concepts and Design. With only two days to construct their installation, the hands-on experience challenged the students to apply their skills in a real-work situation with finite project timelines.

Held from January 8 to 10 in Toronto, the Congress also provided DC’s students the opportunity to network with industry professionals and their peers from other colleges.

2018 food drive made holiday season brighter for over 100 students in need

The co-chairs of the annual campus holiday food drive are extending their sincere thanks to everyone who helped make the 2018 initiative a resounding success.

A longstanding campus tradition, the drive provides hampers and financial assistance to Durham College (DC) and University of Ontario Institute of Technology (the university) student families in need.

“This yearly initiative is such an important one for our students,” says Lori Russell, manager of Information and Client Services – Office of the Registrar for the university and a co-chair of the drive. “When you have a student in your office who is struggling to afford the day-to-day necessities of life and is worried about providing for their children over the holidays – this type of assistance can be extremely impactful for the student and their family.”

“The success of the holiday food drive would not be possible without everyone who came together for this great cause,” says Russell’s co-chair, Kevin Griffin, a professor in DC’s School of Justice & Emergency Services. “Whether you donated non-perishable food items, packed boxes or spread the word about this great initiative – it all made a difference thanks to a strong group effort from students and employees at both institutions. I’m proud to say that we were able to pack and distribute 105 hampers.”

The campus holiday food drive is organized annually by DC, the university, the Kinsmen Club of Oshawa, UOIT Student Union and Durham College Students Inc.

DC celebrates launch of collaborative e-book publication

On January 16, Durham College (DC) celebrated the launch of the e-book, Active Learning Strategies for Higher Education.

A collaborative project through the Centre for Higher Education Research, Policy and Practice (CHERPP), the practical handbook was written by 12 post-secondary education practitioners from DC, the University of Ontario Institute of Technology and Technological University (TU) Dublin to provide educators with valuable strategies for improving classroom engagement to deliver an enriched student experience.

DC president Don Lovisa kicked off the book launch by congratulating all of those involved. Joining him in giving remarks were Dairmuid O’Callaghan, principal, TU Dublin, Blanchardstown Campus; Robert Bailey, interim provost and vice-president, Academic, University of Ontario Institute of Technology; and Cormac Doran, head, CHERPP.

Enactus DC hosts 100 high school students at entrepreneurial conference

On December 18, Durham College’s (DC) Enactus team hosted 100 local high school students from Monsignor Paul Dwyer and Monsignor John Pereyma Catholic secondary schools for the inaugural Side Hustle Summit. The one-day entrepreneurship conference designed for students in a Ministry of Education Specialist High Skills Major (SHSM) program is an Enactus DC social innovation project. The conference aims to motivate and empower young adults to pursue entrepreneurship while providing practical strategies for social media and website building.

The conference kicked off with keynote speaker Dan Cole, a DC alumnus and founder of RandomTens, a YouTube channel with over 21 million views, while workshops held throughout the day focused on entrepreneurial thinking, personal branding and development, using social media for business, and rapid website deployment.

Enactus DC will continue to support conference attendees who have expressed an interest in incubating new business ideas in 2019 by preparing them for the Summer Company program delivered by the Business Advisory Centre Durham and funded through grants by the Government of Ontario.

Durham College’s AI Hub partners with marketing services and analytics company, MobileXCo

Durham College’s (DC) Hub for Applied Research in Artificial Intelligence for Business Solutions (the AI Hub) is pleased to announce it has partnered with marketing services & analytics company MobileXCo on a project focused on using AI and machine learning (ML) to help automate Tether™, its web-based experience marketing platform.

In a time when consumers are driven by experiences, brands are looking to engage them in interactive and memorable ways. However, it can be difficult to measure which parts of a company’s marketing initiatives are delivering true value. Enter MobileXCo and Tether™, which helps companies close the gap between their promotion-type marketing activities and understanding how they contribute to sales by linking campaign participation and activity to transactions at retail.

By taking a transaction-centric approach to consumer participation in contests and gift-with-purchase reward programs, MobileXCo directly links specific consumer activity to a purchase. In the process they collect valuable data related to the participants and their transactions and analyze it to surface valuable insights.

In partnership with DC, the objective is to automate as much of the receipt data extraction, organization and analysis as possible. The end result will be a more streamlined and less labour intensive solution that inherently delivers incremental value based on data.

Over the course of four phases, DC faculty and student-research assistants from the college’s Computer Programmer Analyst and Data Analytics for Business Decision Making programs are working directly with MobileXCo, providing them with an opportunity to not only learn about advanced AI technologies but also hands-on industry experience developing a real, functional solution for a client.

Work with MobileXCo is scheduled to be completed early in January 2019. The project is one of several research initiatives being undertaken by the AI Hub, which will be further enhancing its capacity following the approval of $2 million in funding from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC), through the council’s College and Community Innovation Program.

DC hosts elementary students as they build and battle robots in the name of STEM education

Durham College (DC) was proud to host more than 400 of Ontario’s brightest young minds, along with their teachers, families and friends, on January 12 as they competed in the annual FIRST® LEGO® League Ontario East Provincial Championship.

Known by its acronym that means For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology, FIRST is a U.S.-based, not-for-profit public charity that inspires young people to be science and technology leaders. Leadership and innovation was on full display at this year’s competition, held in DC’s Campus Recreation and Wellness Centre at the college’s Oshawa campus, as teams of students, ages nine to 14, showcased their hard work and skills.

Teams first presented research projects to judging panels before unleashing their robots, which the students designed, built and programmed using LEGO MINDSTORMS® technology, on to table-top playing fields.

This year’s challenge theme INTO ORBIT was all about space.  Teams were tasked with the challenge of solving physical and social problems faced by humans during long-term space travel.

While students were on campus, DC’s Dr. Elaine Popp, vice-president, Academic also encouraged them to think about the broader connections between what they do each year at these competitions and how it might lead them to future STEM opportunities.

“As a leading post-secondary institution, we know that the skills you learn today are the building blocks of further learning and exploration in science, technology, mathematics, engineering and the trades,” she shared with the young students. “By participating in the FIRST LEGO League, you are stepping into the unknown – a journey that could take you anywhere.”

At the end of a day filled with fierce and fun competition, team CTRL-Z from Bayview Glen School in Toronto was crowned the winner and awarded an opportunity to compete at the FIRST® LEGO® League World Championship held in Detroit, Michigan from April 24 to 27.

As a gold-level sponsor and host of FIRST LEGO League, DC offers students what is often their first experience in a college environment and helps them to envision where their passion for robotics, technology and engineering can take them to pursue a post-secondary education.

For more information about FIRST LEGO League, please visit www.firstroboticscanada.org.

New international students welcomed to campus for Orientation

On January 4, Durham College’s (DC) International office welcomed more than 400 new international students to campus for an International Orientation, preparing them for the year ahead.

DC president Don Lovisa kicked off the event by delivering welcome remarks on behalf of the entire college to the diverse group of new students.

Designed to provide new international students with helpful information about living and studying in Canada and at DC, the full-day session covered topics including adapting to the Canadian classroom, immigration matters, health insurance, working part-time, and support services on campus.

The college is now home to more than 1,800 international students, representing over 60 countries from around the world. DC prides itself on offering international students quality Canadian education, a safe and vibrant campus environment and a fun and rewarding student life – with everything from clubs and cultural activities to sports and recreation – to balance studies with activities outside the classroom.

For more information, please visit the college’s International website.

Durham College receives $1 million donation from The W. Garfield Weston Foundation to support farming operations

Durham College (DC) is pleased to share that The W. Garfield Weston Foundation (the Foundation) has donated $1 million to fund the expansion of farming operations at the W. Galen Weston Centre for Food (CFF) to support experiential learning opportunities for DC students.

The success of the Horticulture Technician and Horticulture – Food and Farming programs over the last two years has resulted in a doubling of enrolment and a greater demand for fresh foods from the field. This donation will support the construction of a post-harvest and storage facility, greenhouse expansion and the implementation of container farming, all of which will increase and better process the CFF’s food production, allow for experimentation of newer agriculture practices, and provide students with new experiential learning opportunities.

“The Foundation is pleased to support Durham College and its students once again as they continue to pave the way for a new-generation approach to local food and sustainability,” said Eliza Mitchell, director, the Foundation. “This grant will allow for more food production, new opportunities to teach non-traditional farming and, most importantly, more chances for students to gain critical skills that will put them in demand upon graduation.”

The first half of the Foundation’s donation will go towards building the post-harvest conditioning and storage facility in the spring of 2019. This will improve the CFF’s process operations and farm work flows and provide for long-term storage of produce, while also minimizing food waste. Once completed, the grant will further support greenhouse expansion to increase space and allow for more students, plants and projects, and introduce innovative container farming to allow for small-scale agriculture and year-round growing. The additions will also increase the supply of fresh food coming directly to the CFF’s culinary programs and its business operations, Bistro ’67, Pantry and special events.

“On behalf of Durham College and the CFF, we are tremendously grateful for the generosity and the ongoing support from The W. Garfield Weston Foundation through this thoughtful donation,” said Don Lovisa, president, DC. “These projects will continue to enhance all of the CFF’s post-secondary programming and provide significant experiential learning benefits to our current students while further positioning us as best in class with our unique field-to-fork model of education and service delivery.”

Automotive students unveil 500 horsepower MK4 Roadster

On December 14, Durham College (DC) students in their final semester of the Automotive Technician – Service and Management program proudly unveiled a project that has been two years in the making – a road-ready, Factory Five Racing MK4 Roadster, built entirely by them.

Assembled piece-by-piece throughout four semesters, this unique shop project allowed the students to get their hands dirty while putting into practice the same mechanical theory they were learning in the classroom. Their first class started with taking a complete inventory of every component, a skill that will come in handy for students wishing to pursue a career as a parts and service advisor. They soon moved on to more complicated projects, like building a transmission or braking system, as their classes advanced.

What began as 25 boxes full of automotive components on day one of their first year has become an example of the exciting experiential learning opportunities that await students at DC. With the roadster complete, students will now have a strong foundation in the automotive industry, having gained hands-on experience in parts management, mechanical troubleshooting, exterior body work and more.

The Automotive Technician – Service and Management program offers students a mix of theory in mechanical procedures and essential business skills so that they are prepared for a large selection of jobs in the automotive sector – from a technician to parts advisor, and everything in between.

DC implements new software to enhance experiential learning for students

Durham College (DC) students have a new avenue for receiving experiential learning opportunities thanks to the college’s recent implementation of Riipen, a software platform that connects educators, industry partners and students together for course-based micro-experiences.

Driven by DC’s Career Ready Fund initiative funded by the Ministry of Training, Colleges and Universities (MTCU), Riipen gives instructors the opportunity to search for or submit desired real-world work-integrated experiences with industry partners that they can embed into curriculum as in-class assignments, competitions or longer duration projects.

The three sided nature of the software, with educators, industry partners and students all having the ability to initiate projects, allows for better experience-matching and increased efficiency, aligning DC and industry in a way that scales quickly.

With the world’s largest library of proven experiential learning project templates available through Riipen for instructors and industry partners, faculty can select dynamic business challenges for students to solve in real-time that will enhance learning and better prepare them for the workforce.

Riipen was recently piloted successfully by classes in the School of Business, IT & Management, and several other academic schools have already identified opportunities for implementing the software in the new year to take experiential learning opportunities for faculty, staff and students to the next level.