<p class="Abstract"><span lang="EN-ZA">The COVID-19 pandemic has caused a paradigm shift in how teachers, instructors and students approach teaching and learning, especially concerning the migration to online learning environments. One of the most challenging aspects of adapting to online/virtual education is evaluating students’ knowledge acquisition through learning assessments. The lack of face-to-face proctoring renders many of the traditional paper-based assessment techniques impractical, especially in the context of an engineering education that is heavily focused on applied learning. Since virtual education now represents an important evolution in education, it is pertinent for educators to familiarise themselves with the new possibilities of assessment methods in a virtual setting and to design tailored assessment strategies for individual courses. This article reviews and summarises commonly employed virtual assessment methods that are applicable to most engineering educational situations, such as open-book exams, online quizzes, or peer assessments. The paper also discusses some concerns that may arise in implementing these methods. Additionally, there is a particular focus on qualitatively-graded ePortfolios as a unique pedagogical tool in the virtual classroom due to their role as both a repository for storing learning artifacts and a vehicle for advancing students’ learning experience.</span></p>

This paper will focus on the sustainability crisis in the funeral industry, with a particular look at conventional forms of funeral style like burial and cremation. Burials and cremations pose a threat to land scarcity and natural resource pollution. This is especially the case for Mountain View Cemetery in Vancouver, BC. In response to these crises, newer "sustainable" deathstyles have arisen, but they do not come without their own risks. This paper assesses the risks of conventional forms of funeral styles alongside their sustainable counterparts and their inclusion in the current regulatory policies of Ontario. A third section will focus on the social and cultural barriers that resist the just transitions to unconventional deathstyles. The final section includes recommendations to expand current legislation to accommodate the newer forms of disposal and minimize their associated risks, as well as additional consumer rights procedures to address the social barriers that impede the adoption of these alternatives.

Introduction:In Canada, any adult who is aware of the permanent consequences of a tubal ligation is allowed to receive it, yet many doctors refuse to perform the procedure on women, especially those from marginalized communities. The purpose of this report is to investigate and identify some of the barriers that impede Canadian women's ability to access voluntary sterilization. There is a particular focus on how Canada's history of eugenics and coerced sterilization shapes the current conditions under which women seek and are too often refused access to permanent contraception. Methods: Six qualitative, semi-structured interviews were conducted with scholars and activists in the field of Reproductive Justice (RJ) and reproductive healthcare. The interviews facilitated discussions about reproductive autonomy, patient rights, and patriarchal attitudes in medicine. An RJ framework and thematic analysis were used to uncover systemic barriers from the interview responses. Results: As discovered through the interviews, the most prevalent barriers to access to voluntary sterilization in contemporary Canada include race, class, language, ethnicity, disability, age and parity. An RJ framework identifies historical parallels to these present-day barriers by looking at the historical and colonial forces that disempower intersectional marginalized communities and influence their reproductive decisions today. Discussions: Canada's eugenics attitudes from the past seep into the current barriers to access faced by women of colour, low-income women, female newcomers, women with disabilities, and young or nulliparous women. The assumption that these women are not capable of deciding the right course of action for their own bodies and thus should not be trusted by healthcare providers in making these decisions is a consistent problem in both time frames. Conclusion:The restrictions and modes of disempowerment placed on variously positioned women in the past come back in a new form that leads to those same groups being doubted and denied reproductive justice in the present. Many of the interviewees believed that increasing diversity in the medical field is necessary to help alleviate the discrepancies in how contraceptive healthcare is given.

The faculty of engineering at XYZ University is very diverse with students coming from a variety of socio-economic backgrounds and nationalities. There is an expected level of prerequisite knowledge for courses in the program, especially for subjects in mathematics and physics. Yet, a significant number of students struggle to reach the same level of prior knowledge as their peers due to a lack of educational resources or due to language barriers. Entering lectures without the expected baseline understanding of the concepts increases the risk of cognitive overload because these students exert additional mental effort in retaining the pre-lecture information along with the lecture content. As a solution to this problem, we present a suite of web-based interactive programs that are accessible to the students outside the class.  The Software Suite will provide supplementary material to assist with self-paced learning in a 3rd year undergraduate engineering course, i.e., Finite Element Analysis, at XYZ University’s ABC Department. It will enable students design and analyze various engineering applications, namely, Spring System, Trusses, Beams, Frames, and Heat Transfer along one or two dimensions. The purpose of the interactive platform with several programs is to actively engage the students with this cognitive tool to cement their understanding of the concepts instead of passively perceiving it as a tutor or repository of information.

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