Monthly Archives: August 2021

Message from Maria Rivera, Managing Director and Scott Liao, Academic Director

Posted on by

As you wrap up your Program Kick Off this week, we trust that you are excited about next week’s launch of Term 1. We hope that the skills you’ve been learning in LDT are setting each of you up to be an effective team member in the courses ahead.

As you heard from Scott earlier last week, three of your four Term 1 courses (Economics, Models & Data, and Accounting) will be in-person, dual-delivery. The fourth course, Leading People in Organizations, will be delivered fully online. For those of you in Toronto, you’ll be expected to attend Economics, Models & Data, and Accounting in-person. For those of you not yet in country, you’ll be able to attend these Term 1 courses online.

By the end of this week, you will receive instructions from the Registrar’s Office as to how to access your Term 1 course schedules. The Registrar’s Office is working on getting as many students as can be in the classroom into the classroom for our in-person, dual-delivery courses within the social distancing and capacity limits under the current provincial guidance.

Currently, the University is operating under the Step 3 of the reopening roadmap of the Province. This means that there are physical distancing requirements that limit the number of seats available in our classrooms and that for a couple of your courses (Models & Data and Accounting) there will not be enough space for all students who are enrolled in class to attend simultaneously. In these courses, the Registrar’s Office will assign students to subgroups and rotate which subgroups attend any given course meeting. The list of subgroup membership will be placed on the course Quercus page. As the provincial guidance on social distancing and room capacities changes, we will adjust the rotation as quickly as we can.

We are happy to report that many international students are joining us each week in Toronto! We encourage all students with study permits to arrive in Toronto as soon as they can safely. For those of you still awaiting study permits, please make sure you are working closely with your Section AD so that they can support you in achieving a successful Term 1 experience.

Finally, this September, all members of the University community coming to campus—including students, staff, faculty, and librarians—will be required to provide proof of full vaccination or register in the University’s rapid screening program, where results will need to be uploaded regularly. You can read more about UCheck (the university’s self-assessment tool) here.

We look forward to seeing you on campus soon!
Maria and Scott

Leveraging Diverse Teams Academic Course

Posted on by

Dear students –

We are excited that you will be joining us for Leveraging Diverse Teams. We’re Marlys Christianson and Jia Lin Xie, the two OBHRM professors who are teaching this course.
We wanted to share some information with you about the Leveraging Diverse Teams class that starts on Tuesday August 17th. We’ve designed a fun and interactive class, with lots of in-class exercises, computer simulations, and a case analysis.

For our first class, we will be engaging in a discussion of the “2010 Chilean Mining Rescue (A)” case, which is posted in the Session 1: Teaming module. On August 17, when our class begins, we will provide a brief introduction of the course, and then we will dive into the case analysis.

It is expected that you will have read the assigned case and prepare the following case discussion questions prior to class so that you can be actively and constructively involved in class discussions.

Case Discussion Questions:

  1. What factors allowed the miners to survive, physically and psychologically, until they were found?
  2. How would you characterize the actions taken by the government’s senior executives in the rescue?
  3. What factors contributed to the technical (engineers and geologists) team’s successful rescue efforts?
  4. What can we learn about “team of teams” from this case?
    Please keep in mind that your classmates expect you to be fully prepared for each class. Therefore, your preparation is not only for your own study, but also for facilitating the quality of our collective learning in class.

Note: please join the classroom 5-10 minutes before the start of the class to ensure that we can work out any technology issues and start on time.

Thank you in advance for your preparation. We are very much looking forward to working with you.

Best,
Marlys and Jia Lin