Hi Everyone!
After a busy month of June with our team at OUSA, Steering Committee has had some time this month to reconnect with their home institutions. Even still, we’ve been working away at a few things during the month of July.
We started the month by meeting in Toronto as a Steering Committee, where we focused on developing a working group that will tackle our next 3-year strategic plan for OUSA.
We’ve also been preparing our twelfth edition of Educated Solutions, where authors across the province highlight some of their thoughts around topics surrounding post-secondary education. This year, Educated Solutions is about Tuition, Ancillary Fees, and University Funding. This topic is fitting as next year, the Ontario government will be implementing a new tuition fee framework, which will determine the regulations surrounding tuition and ancillary fees for the upcoming academic years. You can expect to see Educated Solutions available early September, just in time to hand out at our annual campus visits.
Next month, we’ll be kicking off our think-tanks for the policy papers we’ll be working on this fall: Technology-Enabled Learning, Teaching & Assessment, and Tuition. Think-tanks are an opportunity for student leaders to brainstorm ideas for each policy paper, while also sharing information to ensure that our policy writers work with the most up to date information. These sessions are a great opportunity to clarify the approach that students want to take prior to writing each policy.
We’ll also be hosting our first ever Policy Symposium with stakeholder across the province! The Policy Symposium will bring together policy experts, stakeholders, and students to discuss how we can work together to improve post-secondary education in Ontario. This year, students chose to focus on three important priorities: experiential learning, technology-enabled learning, and student health and wellness. With an understanding that these topics are critical components of post-secondary education and have a significant role in shaping the future of Ontario, the Symposium provides an opportunity to share best practices and professional insight on how we can best move post-secondary public policy forward together. Interested in attending? The last day to purchase tickets is August 5, and you can purchase them here.
Danny Chang