Are we more connected than ever or growing further and further apart? “The Future of Connection: Platforms, Privacy, and the Public” is this year’s topic for ARTS 450, a capstone course running in-person this semester.

Students will be exploring both the values and risks of being constantly online and learn to reconsider the intersections between platforms, privacy, and their personal lives. The course will highlight the value of  “innovative and collaborative problem-solving with interdisciplinary teams of students.” Instead of a final exam, students will finish the course by presenting at the 2025 Desmarais Family Summit to share what they have learned with the broader UW community.

The course is open to all undergraduate students with students not required to be within the faculty of arts, or in fourth year, to enroll. Currently, ARTS 450 is only offered once every year in the fall term and the focus topic changes yearly. Asked what makes this course stand out from other course offerings, course professor Douglas Peers shared, “A lot of [students] have project-based courses. This is a project-based course where the students design a project.”

Peers added that course facilitators will aim to pursue course themes that reach across faculties on-campus, making the course relevant and meaningful to all students. Asked how this year’s central topic was chosen, Peers explained that they looked for “topics that are timely, pressing, and require interdisciplinary collaboration such that students in any faculty can contribute.”

He thanked the “generosity of our donors” for giving students the opportunity “to work with not just instructors, but with resources from beyond campus that we’re able to afford through our donors.” The global engagement seminar part of the course has been funded by the Paul Desmarais Family Foundation and the Jarislowsky Foundation.

Both Peers and professor Derek Rayside described how the structure of the course encourages students to “identify a problem, test the problem, and start to develop solutions collaboratively.” Peers emphasized this can contribute to building a student’s project management skills.

Rayside zeroed in on how the format of this course can offer students unique opportunities for growth that can stretch them beyond traditional co-op roles and enable student-centric learning. He described how applicability to the real world is one of the identified learning objectives, which is why students will connect with partners. Some previous partners include the city of Iqaluit, Princess Margaret Cancer Center, and RBC.

According to Rayside, although co-op programs do have an element of connection to the outside world, co-op students are often not part of a student-centric team, but an employee-centric team, stating students on co-op are “getting paid and getting told what to do by and large, right?”

Rayside said that within the course’s context, students are working on a student-centric team, enabling them to hone their design thinking and ability to identify problems. He added that many co-op students or new hires after graduation are not given the opportunity to be in a position of intellectual authority or have much intellectual leadership within a given organization. Through the mentorship under faculty members within the course’s educational environment, he emphasized that “partners are willing to engage and give students that opportunity for intellectual leadership.”