The Humber College Council (HCC) held its fifth meeting of the 2020-2021 academic year on Thursday, January 21, 2021 online using Microsoft Teams. To ensure the Humber community is informed of upcoming events, new initiatives, and important issues, the College Council reports the highlights of its meetings. For more information or to provide feedback on these highlights, please contact risha.toney@humber.ca.
Roundtable
Karen Stefou [Faculty of Health Sciences and Wellness] shared that $2,065 was raised in support of Ernestine’s House. And she would like to thank anyone who was able to contribute to the success of this fundraising campaign.
Risha Toney [Office of the Registrar] promoted a new pathways portal for students and alumni that launched at Humber’s Virtual Pathways Fair. This portal provides an avenue for students to use interactive searches to find diploma to degree pathways and graduate certificate and master's degree options.
Rose Anthony [Student Success and Engagement] shared information about Counselling Services’ Healthy Minds for Stressful Times student support group. This nine-week drop-in group session takes place on-line Thursday from 1:30 p.m. to 3 p.m., beginning February 11. The objective is to help students with feelings of overwhelm, stress, and anxiety. Students can email Rose at rose.anthony@humber.ca to register. A poster will be provided in the Communiqué if faculty would like to promote this initiative to their students.
Humber Recruitment update
Joy Borman [Manager, New Student Recruitment and Advising] and Yanni Thepanya [Recruitment Advisor] provided council with an update of the initiatives that Humber Student Recruitment have undertaken and how they’ve pivoted to the online environment due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Pre-COVID, the recruitment team engaged in on and off-campus activities, which were predominantly in-person and included Fall and Spring Open Houses, March Break presentations and tours, year-round general campus tours, pathways events, the Ontario College Fair, and much more.
Shortly after the campus closed, they quickly switched to engaging students virtually starting with the first-ever Spring 2020 Virtual Open House. Since then, they’ve conducted over 130 virtual presentations with over 4,000 guests in attendance, 10+ Fall Ask Humber sessions with over 3,300 guests, created virtual campus tours of the North and Lakeshore campuses, and a long list of other events.
They have also been engaging in virtual pre-enrollment advising. Advising sessions are conducted using Cisco Jabber and Microsoft Teams Meetings. From April to December 2020 over 550 advising appointments were booked with 60% of visits booked by non-high school students.
Winter 2021: Academic Update
Gina Antonacci [Associate Vice president, Academic] outlined the legislative changes which have had an impact on the Winter 2021 academic delivery of programs. These legislative policies included in-person capacity limits and stay at home orders. As a result, some courses were reconfigured and rescheduled to address in-person capacity regulations and an additional 44 sections and 3,434 lab hours were added. Labs are now booked for 8 a.m. to 10 p.m., seven days per week.
Overview of Programming in the winter semester
- 50 % of programs are entirely online
- 50 % of programs have both online and face-to-face components
- 84 % of all our courses are delivered online
- 16 % of all our courses are delivered on campus
Enrollment Update
Barb Riach [Associate Vice President, Enrollment Management & Registrar] provided the enrollment update. As of the first day of the winter semester, we had a total of 25, 971 students registered. This is higher than the revised target of 23,681 students but lower than our original target of 28,703.
The largest decline for the winter semester was seen in the international student enrollment numbers, however, to date, there were already 3,500 international applications for the Fall 2021 semester intake.
Our newest campus, the International Graduate School opened virtually this semester to 109 students. Four graduate certificates are being offered in Winter 2021, an additional five programs in spring/summer, and an additional two programs in Fall 2021.
Summer 2021 planning will be completed by March 1 while planning for Fall 2021 will be completed by June 1.
The next meeting of the College Council will be held on Thursday, February 18, 2021. For meeting highlights, supporting materials, and opportunities to provide feedback, please visit the College Council website.