The Orientation Team within Student Success and Engagement (SSE) has been working hard to develop an innovative and responsive on-line product that will support and inform our students for the Fall term.  

We wanted to reach out to members of the Humber Community to provide important updates and information regarding Fall Orientation 2020. Below is a summary of what Fall Orientation will look like:

• Fall Orientation will be fully online. We have applied lessons from our Spring Orientation, which was our first foray into a fully on-line program (we are sure you can all relate):
• Monday, August 24 we will launch online orientation in two parts:

a) Our Orientation website: a hub/resource for students, including pre-recorded video workshops, wayfinding information on how to navigate Humber’s website, links to CTL tool kits and other key information.

b) An Orientation Blackboard module will launch which will further strengthen students’ knowledge of supports/resources that are available to help them succeed in their new journey at Humber.  

• Tuesday, September 1 – Thursday, September 3 we will host Academic Orientation which will consist of Meet Your Faculty sessions. Students will sign up online on the Orientation website and each Meet Your Faculty Session will be conducted through a Teams Meeting. The Orientation Team will provide all students and faculty with a Teams link to use for their session, an Orientation Volunteer to introduce the session and take attendance as well as some best practice/Teams guidelines for Faculty to run their session.  
  • Our opening ceremony format will be revamped to be a welcome video that highlights student voices and the strength in our equity and diversity at Humber. This will be featured on our website along with the Blackboard modules. 
• September 8 – September 30 Orientation will offer students a welcome month calendar of events through collaboration with campus partners and great interactive social media contests.  

Through our Spring Orientation and Re-Orientation experiences, we have found students value space where they can express their anxiety about the struggles they are facing personally, along with being fully or almost fully on-line, to student leaders/student staff. 

• In response, we have increased opportunities to connect to trained peers and created original blackboard modules to address these issues.  

We have also heard the desire for student facing communication and programming, along with a focus on equity in light of conditions and events occurring in our local and global communities. 

• We are responding to this need by planning all our Orientation staff training and student programming through an anti-oppressive lens.

Planning also includes digital swag for students, a welcome month of events - instead of just four days, and an opportunity to access recorded programming at any time through our website. We are continually reviewing what other institutions are planning and creating, sharing best practice and canvasing our students to ensure we are supporting them to the best of our ability. The landscape changes weekly, if not daily and we have tried to position ourselves to be both pro-active in our planning as well as responsive to new needs as they arise.   

We appreciate everyone’s continued patience and support as we continue to roll out our revamped Orientation and look forward to connecting with you all further with more details shortly. 

Best,