During GRIT Week, MBA students gain practical experience.

Generating Resilient Integrative Thinkers Week, or GRIT Week, is a week-long immersive experience for first-year MBA students to apply their skills and knowledge to tackle complex real-world problems across multiple business disciplines. 

GRIT Week empowers students to explore new ideas and take risks, allowing them to learn from both successes and failures as they develop resilience and adaptability. This experience equips them with essential skills to face future challenges in their professional and personal lives. 

Fall 2024, GRIT Week centred on shifting community perceptions around nuclear energy to tackle climate change targets. Winter 2025 GRIT Week paired MBA students with local non-profits to solve organizational challenges. 

The TLS team worked in collaboration with the Academic Experiential Learning team and the Student Experience Office to design and implement this innovative, hands-on learning initiative. 

Tags: experiential learning, MBA, community partnership, program development 

Helping Undergraduates choose an area of focus

In collaboration with the Student Experience Team, the TLS created a series of Area of Focus videos to assist potential and current undergraduate students in their decision-making about which area of focus to pursue. These videos feature insights from industry partners, students, alumni, professors, and area chairs. By selecting specific focus areas, students can specialize in particular business disciplines through electives that align with their interests and career goals.

Tags: Area of Focus, Career goals, Business disciplines, Specialization

Career Launch Course: Asynchronous learning to help MBA students get career-ready

The TLS team partnered with the Career and Professional Development (CPD) team for the MBA program to help prepare incoming students for their co-op, internship, and post-graduate job search. Throughout this process, the TLS team worked with the CPD team to develop and refine content, create activities, record instructional videos, and build out an asynchronous course experience on our learning management system. Now the CPD team can direct their time and efforts towards one-on-one coaching sessions with each incoming student, while also giving all incoming MBA students access to these necessary skills and resources at their own pace. 

Tags: Career and Professional Development, asynchronous course delivery, skills development 

Universal Design for Learning: Upskilling staff to support DEIA at DeGroote

DeGroote staff connect with our students on a daily basis and often provide invaluable learning opportunities for undergraduate and graduate business students. The TLS team was tasked with determining how we could best support some of these staff in providing effective learning experiences that were centred on diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility. We pulled from the Universal Design for Learning (UDL) framework to provide training to staff through a half-day, in-person workshop. Staff were empowered to consider how they already create flexible learning that welcomes all students, and how they might leverage the recommendations from UDL to improve the reach and impact of their services. 

Tags: custom workshop; universal design for learning (UDL); staff training; diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility 

Experiential Learning: Mapping EL in DeGroote’s Classrooms

In advance of the opening of the McLean Centre for Collaborative Discovery (MCCD), a curriculum mapping exercise started in Spring 2023 to identify experiential learning activities that are currently implemented at the School of Business. In Spring 2025, this mapping identified the courses and instructors that incorporate the application of theory and reflection of learning experiences in undergraduate and graduate programs.  

TLS has completed this effort in collaboration with the Academic Experiential Learning team to recognize faculty, provide adequate support, and inform future programming in MCCD. 

Tags: experiential learning, program development, MCCD, undergraduate programs, graduate programs. 

Experiential Learning: Developing A Quality Framework

With the purpose of increasing the quality of delivery of experiential learning at DeGroote, in winter 2025, TLS partnered with the Academic Experiential Learning team to create a set of standards and rubrics against which all experiential learning activities can be assessed. 

This quality framework will be used internally by experience learning designers, developers, and staff supporting the delivery of experiential learning to support excellence in teaching and learning initiatives. 

Tags: experiential learning, quality, undergraduate programs, graduate programs. 

Teaching Assistants Training e-Module: Standardizing support and excellence for TAs at DeGroote 

The TLS team designed a self-paced Articulate Rise e-module to standardize training for all new Teaching Assistants (TAs) before their first tutorial. Featuring short instructional videos, interactive drag-and-drop lesson-planning exercises, clickable infographics, and scenario walk-throughs, the module gives TAs a shared playbook for effective planning, facilitation, and student engagement. 

In March 2025, a pilot workshop involving undergraduate and graduate TAs demonstrated significant impact. Post session surveys showed an increase in self-rated preparedness, from 3.5 to 4.33 (+23.7%), while clarity, engagement, and scenario relevance all averaged 4.67 out of 5.  

Pilot feedback is driving version 2.0: stronger storytelling, AI-generated micro-learning clips, and more challenging scenarios designed to deepen TAs’ critical thinking and mastery of essential teaching skills introduced in the module. 

Tags: Teaching Assistants (TAs), Tutorial, Instructional videos, Interactive exercises, Scenario walk-throughs, workshop, Critical thinking, Teaching skills.

Integrating Generative Artificial Intelligence: Guiding business students towards ethical, effective GenAI use.

To support Commerce students in using GenAI responsibly, the TLS team collaborated with faculty in the GR0 program to develop targeted tutorial activities and assignments. Through micro-learning experiences, students practiced prompt engineering, fact-checking AI outputs, and making responsible ethical choices. Highlights include the “A Day in the Life” activity, where students crafted AI-generated product pitches, and “Appropriate or Not?”, an ethical case discussion on typical student misconduct. 

Early feedback has shown that these lessons help to demystify inappropriate AI usage and prompt deeper critical thinking among business students. Additionally, TAs are now better positioned to guide students on refining AI-generated content, ensuring academic integrity, while maintaining clear sightlines on students’ use. 

Tags: GenAI, Responsible AI usage, Prompt engineering, Fact-checking AI outputs, Ethical choices, Academic integrity, AI-generated content, Critical thinking, Micro-learning experiences, Business students.

Team Charter: A tool for successful student collaborations

Within the first-year Student Experience & Development course (1GR0), the TLS team created an interactive e-module tutorial and corresponding worksheets to bridge the theoretical concepts of teamwork and group dynamics introduced in lecture into practice, directly preparing students for the course’s end deliverable–the 24-Hour Case. In this challenge, student teams collaborate to develop and present solutions to judges, with top performances being recognized at the end. 

The tutorial guided students through common group challenges, after which they collaboratively created a living Team Charter using a structured, fillable template. Each team explicitly defined their goals and objectives, roles and responsibilities, communication protocols, decision-making processes, and conflict-resolution strategies–skills they need for the 24-Hour Case and future collaborative projects. 

Tags: Teamwork, Group dynamics, 24-Hour Case, Team Charter, Collaboration, Communication protocols, Decision-making processes, Conflict-resolution strategies.