Northlands College faculty and staff from across Northern Saskatchewan gathered today for the institution’s first professional development in-service gathering since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. “Such gatherings are critical to the professional development of faculty and staff across Northern Saskatchewan, particularly during our year of transformation as we align the needs of communities and industries, while reflecting the Saskatchewan 2030 Growth Plan,” said Karsten Henriksen, Northlands College’s President & CEO.
Diverse guest speakers included Dr. Alec Couros, who presented a session on the role of Chat GPT in teaching and learning environments, and Dr. Bruce Rutley, who spoke about the role of Applied Research and how it may be used by the college to address a variety of northern challenges and opportunities, such as applied natural resources management, product and services development, infrastructure, and conservation.
Building on the role of technology in the classroom and the realities of Industry 4.0, members of the college community were given the opportunity to explore the role of virtual reality as a tool to bridge the vast distances of Northern Saskatchewan, while creating access to new markets for Northern products and services.
Judy Pelly, an Anishinaabe-Saulteaux who was born and raised on Cote First Nation, was the event’s keynote speaker. A residential school survivor, Judy is also a mother to three sons, and Kohkum to five grandchildren.
An alumna of the University of Saskatchewan, Judy spent 15 years as an Indigenous Education Manager for Alberta Learning. She later returned to Saskatoon, where she worked in various capacities with several Federation of Sovereign Indigenous Nations (FSIN) institutes.
Central to the college’s work of growing enrollment, Dr. Clayton Smith from the University of Windsor addressed the topic of Strategic Enrollment Management in support of the college’s Strategic Enrollment Team, which is tasked with creating “whole of life” recruitment and retention strategies to support northern learners as they “Find Their
North”.
Northlands College’s 2023 gathering marks the institutions first gathering in over 3 years and is one of many initiatives to be hosted by the college in its 2023 Year of Transformation.