Internationalization
ASAP 2012 builds on McGill’s international strengths and relationships. McGill is one of the most international universities in North America.
- 20% of our undergraduate students, 29% of our graduate students and almost half of our postdoctoral fellows come from countries other than Canada.
- Nearly 50% of our students indicate that their first language is other than English.
- 60% of McGill’s tenure-track faculty researchers who joined McGill over the last decade have been recruited from outside Canada.
With a 36,000-strong student community drawn from all corners of the world, McGill wholeheartedly embraces internationalization in university life.
Sustainability
Since 2006, McGill has become an innovator in sustainable practices. We are building sustainability through teaching, research and a sense of shared responsibility, and investing in a wide range of improvements—ranging from greener buildings and energy efficiency to bike loans and other sustainable practices—to reduce our institution’s footprint. At the same time, ASAP 2012’s focus on sustainability moves beyond environmental elements to embrace a wide range of targets, including but not limited to fiscal sustainability. In other words, ASAP 2012 reflects our deepened commitment to social equity, the diversity of origin and ideas, environmental management and economic sustainability—everything that sustainability encompasses. At the same time, we must balance current fiscal realities with continued optimism and vision for the future. Such efforts are key for McGill’s role as a leading university in a changed economic and social environment.
Innovation
Recent transformations in information and communications technologies (ICTs) have produced new contexts whereby access to information has the potential to transform research and pedagogy.
While opening opportunities, these developments also pose new challenges for universities that must rapidly develop strategies and processes to fully engage our “digitally born” students—who have very different expectations about what constitutes a productive learning environment—and to help them acquire, use and advance knowledge. This will entail the implementation of innovative processes and new technologies to enhance teaching and learning, as well as conversion of libraries from warehouses of print materials to flexible learning centres with more digital storage options.
McGill has begun to confront these challenges forcefully and aggressively. We have fostered an innovative approach to learning around a four-pillar method grounded in state-of-the-art technologies, evidence-based pedagogy, digital libraries and novel physical spaces for teaching and learning.
ASAP 2012 outlines the ways in which we will keep pace with—and lead—change with strategies and actions that will help us to engage in careful decision-making to realize the potential in these new technologies and related partnership opportunities.