Visitors from Chile

This week I hosted two colleagues from a Polytechnic Institute in Chile. Here we are with the Dean of Seneca's Faculty of Communications, Arts & Design (on the far left) and this year's President of the Seneca Student Federation (on the far right) - she is the first elected student in that position who is with us as an international student (she is from Ukraine).

I took Carmen and Francisco to a variety of  our "learning enterprises" as well as some of our mixed classrooms (which are classroom and training laboratory at the same time). Here they take a break from all the running around in the tourism flight services training lab. This lab has a fully simulated environment to train for in-flight services.

One of the other labs we visited is one of the integrated classrooms for programs in the Center for the Built Environment (part of the civil engineering programs). Students are trained here to maintain older electric systems in buildings (which probably still can be found in 80 % of the current industrial and commercial buildings) to the most modern "smart building" systems.

We gave our two visitors a good idea of our program and teaching approach and how we build our infrastructure to facilitate the new learning methods. And I got to speak Spanish for two days again!

Apples, Stroopwafels and Aruba going green

It is the season to pick the apples in Niagara. I brought a bunch to Toronto to bring some health and freshness to the teams of the English Language Institute, the international student services and the business development & projects. Within two days each basket was empty....

Then we had this week visitors from six colleges in Holland (HBO and MBO) and they brought some of those delicious Dutch "stroopwafels".....

Finishing off the week with hosting the Minister of Education from Aruba to sign an MOU with Seneca for scholarships for students from that island State, as well as exploring the possibilities to assist them with technician training for the retro-fitted plants and buildings once Aruba reaches its "carbon-neutral" status in cooperation with Richard Branson's "Carbon War Room" project.

It was a good week with also visitors from the University of Central Asia (working with Seneca' instructional designers team), two new proposals out the door for Tanzania and Dubai, and progress made in another few proposals for work in Egypt and Vietnam....