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The University of ��ݮ��Ƶ’s Co-operative and Experiential Education (CEE) unit is a global leader in Work-Integrated Learning (WIL) and the first Canadian university to offer a certified WIL curriculum.��

Work-Integrated learning (WIL) helps students to connect classroom learning with real-world experiences where they solve practical problems and learn critical job skills. It also gives industry participants access to students with fresh ideas and solutions.��

For higher education institutions (HEIs),����through improved graduate employability, and increases student satisfaction through workplace contributions and skills development.����

However, the complexity of WIL can make it challenging for HEIs and WIL practitioners to implement, scale and enhance their own WIL programs effectively.����

A global leader in WIL, the University of ��ݮ��Ƶ’s Co-operative and Experiential Education (CEE) unit is well-positioned to help leaders and practitioners overcome those challenges.����

CEE now offers its knowledge and experience through two accredited WIL programs: the����ݮ��Ƶ Institute for Leaders in WIL��and the��WIL Fundamentals Workshop Series. These innovative programs help institutions and WIL leaders and practitioners to understand and adopt best practices for implementing, enhancing and scaling their WIL programs.����

��ݮ��Ƶ Institute for Leaders in WIL��

The University of ��ݮ��Ƶ is home to the Secretariat of the��, an international professional organization dedicated to developing, expanding, branding and advocating for co-op and work-integrated education programs within industry and educational institutions.����

A global visionary in WIL, Dr. Norah McRae is the Associate Provost of CEE and head of the WACE secretariat. She established the����ݮ��Ƶ Institute for Leaders in WIL��to leverage ��ݮ��Ƶ’s expertise and experience in leading high-quality WIL initiatives.����

Dr. McRae launched the professional development offering at the��2023 WACE global conference in ��ݮ��Ƶ. Participants provided feedback in a survey indicating the ��ݮ��Ƶ Institute for Leaders in WIL provided “timely topics, lots of key takeaways and excellent discussion and networking.”��

The ��ݮ��Ƶ Institute for Leaders in WIL��is accredited by the University of ��ݮ��Ƶ and offered by Dr. McRae and WACE. The institute covers a suite of topics relevant to WIL leaders and emerging leaders, including the WIL leadership framework, quality strategic partnerships, research and data, innovation and more. It combines delivered content and small group discussions to help participants explore specific interests, learn from each other and build a global leadership community.��

Read the full article on the Associate Provost, Co-operative and Experiential Education website.

World War II code-breaker and mathematician honoured with commemorative stamp

By Melodie Roschman. This is an excerpt of an article published on ��ݮ��Ƶ News.

��ݮ��Ƶ professor and WWII codebreaker Dr. William T. Tutte (1917-2002) is one of ten individuals being honored by Great Britain’s Royal Mail in commemorating the 80^th anniversary of Victory in Europe (VE) Day.

Tutte’s stamp, which features his photograph in front of a multi-wheeled code machine, recognizes him for “Codebreaking the Lorenz cipher machine at Bletchley Park.”

The stamp is the British government’s first public recognition of the vital role Tutte played in the fight against Hitler’s Nazi regime.

For half a century, however, his work was top secret.��

The Puzzle War

Tutte was born in 1917 in the small town of Newmarket, UK, to a working-class family. He excelled in school, winning scholarships first for high school, then to Cambridge University, where he studied chemistry.

From the beginning, he was interested in mathematics and worked recreationally with three friends to solve several famous combinatorics problems. Their theory regarding one of these – dissecting a square into squares of unequal sizes – was published in Duke Mathematical Journal.

Eventually, this solution would help Tutte earn a reputation as an international leader in combinatorics. First, however, his aptitude for puzzles caught the attention of the British war effort.

Bletchley Park – made famous by Alan Turing and The Imitation Game (2014) – was Great Britain’s top-secret WWII codebreaking research centre. Early in the war, Britain had great success breaking Nazi code encrypted by the Enigma machine, a device that used three movable wheels to create sophisticated ciphers. Soon, however, another mysterious code – nicknamed “Tunny” – emerged. Tunny was being used by Hitler and his generals for vital army communications and was far more complicated than Enigma.

After months of fruitless efforts, the codebreakers got lucky. In August 1941, a German operator in Athens sent a 4,000-character message to Berlin, and – when it didn’t come through properly – he sent the same message again. This time, the operator was lazy: he broke protocol by transmitting twice without changing the encryption settings, and he altered some of his original words and punctuation.

The result was a rich sample of Tunny ready to be broken. A linguist and army officer, Brigadier John Tiltman, manually decrypted the individual message. But, after three months of effort, he and his team were no closer to figuring out how the machine generating Tunny worked.

The Unsung Hero

That’s where Tutte came in. He applied methods he had used in his combinatorics work to look for patterns in the Tunny code, and ultimately was able to determine how the Germans’ Lorenz machine was using twelve wheels to encrypt code. “Thus were the entire workings of the TUNNY machine exposed,” he recalls in a 2000 memoir, “without any actual physical machine or manual thereof coming into our hands.”

Tutte also created a statistical method for strategically attacking encrypted code, allowing Bletchley Park to decrypt intercepted Nazi messages in hours instead of weeks. This intel had a crucial impact on the Russian front, at D-Day and in many other parts of WWII.

estimate that the information gained by breaking Tunny shortened WWII by two years, saving more than twenty million lives.

“I have met many people in the course of my life who worked at Bletchley and had no idea who Tutte was,” says Dan Younger, professor emeritus of Combinatorics & Optimization and Tutte’s long-time friend. “And they were all working to realize his statistical method for codebreaking! That’s the shame of him not receiving recognition earlier. He was a central figure in the work that was done at Bletchley Park.”

The Codebreaker's Path to ��ݮ��Ƶ

After the war, Tutte was officially sworn to secrecy regarding his work as a codebreaker. He finished his PhD in mathematics at Cambridge in 1948, and then moved to Canada to work at the University of Toronto. Soon, he became known internationally as a pioneer in graph theory.

In 1962, Dr. Ralph Stanton wooed him to join the brand-new University of ��ݮ��Ƶ, with promises that he could focus exclusively on his true love of combinatorics.

Read the full story on ��ݮ��Ƶ News

Reflections on VE Day, 80 years on

This poster produced by the Hespeler Legion recognizes Bruce and Alexander McLaughlin.��Bruce was killed in action in August 1944, and Alex severely wounded in July 1944, while their brother,��Kenneth, who served in the Canadian medical corps, was part of the active forces in Sicily, Italy, Normandy and the liberation of the Netherlands.

May 8, 2025 marks the 80^th anniversary of Victory in Europe Day (VE Day), the day of the formal surrender of Nazi Germany to the Allies in 1945.

"The war’s impact on ��ݮ��Ƶ Region and Canada was enormous," writes Professor Geoffrey Hayes of the History department. "In 1939, Canada was a poor country with little independent foreign policy. But Mackenzie King (born in Berlin) led a remarkable war effort, pushing Canada’s ��military, industrial, agricultural and financial contributions beyond all expectation. By 1945, Canada’s GDP had doubled in six years, and we had loaned the British some $3 billion dollars. Canadian farmers were sending their crops to help millions of starving people overseas. Canada was then a charter member of the United Nations, “punching above its weight” years before the term became fashionable. Back home, King (reluctantly) helped establish the welfare state with federal housing and veterans programs that sent thousands of men and women to universities. The University of ��ݮ��Ƶ was an echo of that post-war thirst for education."

"Canada put a million men and women in uniform during the war, about 1 in 10 Canadians," Dr. Hayes writes. "Camps in Kitchener (Knollwood Park) and Galt (HMCS Conestoga) saw thousands of women train to join army and navy units. Local factories pumped out boots, uniforms and electronics. The Highland Fusiliers of Canada, raised locally, landed at Juno Beach on 6 June 1944, and fought to the end of the war."

"About 46,000 Canadians died in total, including hundreds from the area. The Martin family of ��ݮ��Ƶ lost son and brother Jamieson soon after D-Day. In August 1944, the McLaughlin family of Hespeler had received word that their son, Bruce had died in Normandy. In September, the Kennedy families of ��ݮ��Ƶ and Galt heard that brothers Peter and Douglas were killed within days of each other fighting for the port of Boulogne. The end of the war in Europe brought celebration to the Hill family. Their son Cameron had spent years in a POW camp after being shot down over Europe. Cam survived. But war’s end also brought grief. A thanksgiving ceremony in ��ݮ��Ƶ park 80 years ago was bittersweet for the young Bean family, who lived next to the park on Young Street. They had just heard that their father and husband, William Bean, had died fighting in March 1945."

"Through family connections and a growing trove of archival collections, our students continue to uncover the remarkable impact of the Second World War on Canada, and this region," Hayes concludes.