Student investment fund holds board meeting

a message from the School of Accounting and Finance

The School of Accounting and Finance is proud to announce that the SAF Student Investment Fund held its first Advisory Board Meeting on August 1.

The students provided an overview of their stock selection and allocation process during their presentation to the Advisory Board consisting of Anish Chopra (MAcc ’94) Managing Director, TD Asset Management, John Gort (BA’93), Controller, Burgundy Asset Management, Aazar Zafar (MAcc’99), Principal, AIMCO. This first student-investment team was selected after a competitive two-stage screening process in May and went on to provide investment advisory and management services for the Fund in the Spring term.

The team consisted of three Portfolio Managers, an Investment Manager, and eight Analysts. More information on the Investment Fund is available online.

Back to top

Professor awarded for innovative online course

with material from Desire2Learn.

Professor Robert Sproule of the School of Accounting and Finance has won one of three Desire2Excel Awards. The awards, established by learning solutions provider Desire2Learn, were announced at the Fusion 2012 Desire2Learn user's conference in San Diego, California last month.

The Desire2EXCEL Awards "recognize organizations and institutions that have used Desire2Learn technology to deliver learning experiences that are innovative, collaborative, or have a significant impact on education."

Sproule won in the Innovation Award category. Finalists for the award included entries from Daytona State College, USFQ Universidad San Francisco de Quito, and the Colorado Community College System. The Desire2EXCEL Innovation Award "recognizes organizations and institutions that are changing and challenging the status quo."

Sproule's winning course entry was AFM 131: An Introduction to Business in North America, which uses the Desire2Learn platform. He is the course author and instructor, with instructional design and development support coming from the Centre for Extended Learning (CEL).

The awards committee stated that "Sproule was hailed as a "dedicated and creative teacher who is using technology in innovative ways to engage students.'" The committee added that "the course is offered in a blended model as well as a fully online format and has over 1,000 students who take the course. While high engagement in an online course is difficult to achieve, that is exactly what Sproule has achieved in AFM131."

There were two other categories - Collaboration and Impact.

Another CEL-backed entry —the collaborative ADAPT initiative (Adapting Pharmacists' Skills and Approaches to Maximize Patients' Drug Therapy Effectiveness) that included Barbara Farrell of the Elisabeth Bruyere Research Institution, the University of Ottawa's Department of Family Medicine, and the CEL — was a finallist in the Collaboration category. The Collaboration award "recognizes organizations and institutions that have used Desire2Learn technology to facilitate exemplary communication throughout the various levels of their organization."

This is the second innovation award win for Sproule and AFM 131 in recent months. In May, he won the Desire2Learn Innovation Award in Teaching and Learning, created jointly by Desire2Learn and the Society for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education (STLHE).

Back to top

Celebrating old hardware and new software

"It’s been 050 years (in octal) since the 'Bun came to campus!" writes mathematics alumni officer Katherine Jessop. "Did you use all of your 12 llinks?" That's right, with two l's.

The 'Bun she is referring to is the Honeywell 6050 mainframe, also known as the Honeybun or Watbun, that arrived on campus in August 1972.

At the time, the machine was a technical marvel that could process 6,000 jobs and handle 15 million lines of print in a single month. It also brought electronic mail to the university campus for the first time.

According to the history of computing at the University of Waterloo written by Ken McLaughlin and Harold Alkema, the machine was hooked up to Bell Canada's Datapac network in 1978, which at the time was connected to 72 cities.

The mind, it boggles.

To mark the 40th anniversary of the Honeywell 6050's arrival, and the 20th anniversary of the machine's final power-down, a reunion event is happening this weekend that includes a get-together tonight, a train outing to St. Jacob's on the Waterloo Central Railway, a tour of campus, a reception and gala dinner all on Saturday, and Sunday brunch.

As yesterday's launch of the university's new homepage demonstrates, new developments are always underway when it comes to campus computing, and the latest of these is the imminent arrival of Internet Explorer 9 to Windows 7 PCs on campus starting Monday, August 20. Version 9 of the browser will be installed remotely on those machines using the Windows Server Update Service (WSUS) offered by Information Systems & Technology (IST). This version will replace IE 8.

New capabilities include a minimalist approach to the interface with a single toolbar, a search feature in the address bar, an enlarged "back" button, the ability to pin sites to the Windows 7 taskbar, and a notification bar. The IST Helpdesk is available to take comments and questions, and to assist with problems at extension 84357. Or you could try your luck with Microsoft's Getting Started with IE9, although I have it on good authority that you can skip the video.

Photographs courtesy of reunion co-organizer Randall Howard's blog.

 

Back to top