By Dr. Ian Gibson

Today’s students are expected to develop a whole range of skills—ones that, indeed, are crucial to their postsecondary success—that they just aren’t acquiring in their academic classes. However, these “transferable” skills often look so ordinary to us that we are unlikely to consider them worthy of comment, let alone inclusion in our curricula.

Can a student, for instance, communicate effectively with their peers in a group setting? Can they adapt to an unfamiliar syllabus in a new class? Can they successfully manage their own time, handing in assignments by the required due dates?

We might take for granted that our students can do these things and that they will come to class prepared with a baseline of such abilities. But what happens when this is not the case? How can we respond, as educators, when we see our students failing to thrive—not only with respect to the content of our courses, but also with what we would consider the basic requirements to successfully complete a university course?

Students need opportunities to develop and reflect upon these skills while they work through their course materials. And what we ought to do,— because these skills are crucial to our students’ ability to succeed not only in their careers but academically as well—, is provide them with those opportunities, allowing them to begin acquiring those transferable skills identified for their importance by the Government of Canada in its Skills for Success model.

Here, then, is something that you might try.

Memorial and the Future Skills Innovation Network

For a little over a year now, Memorial has been rolling out FUSION (the Future Skills Innovation Network), a federal grant-funded initiative that aims to address this skills gap at universities across the country. FUSION’s series of online modules, developed by an instructional design team at Carleton in collaboration with project leads at each participating institution, is organized according to thematically distinct skills. The modules are named for their content—for example, Adaptability, Self-Management and Digital Literacy.

Students at participating institutions, including Memorial, can enroll in and complete FUSION modules. In addition, the individual modules, which each take around four hours to finish, can be imported into a course’s Brightspace shell. This allows instructors to easily incorporate the development of transferrable skills into their courses by incorporating FUSION modules into their curricula.

FUSION’s aim is to foster students’ engagement with and development of their transferable skills at the same time as they master course content. The content of these modules asks students to consider and articulate the fact that they are not only learning about fluid dynamics or the Kreb cycle or Jane Austen; they are also learning to communicate, work in teams and solve complex problems. By incorporating FUSION modules into your courses, you can support students not only in their learning as it relates to your academic discipline but also in their development of a skillset that will benefit them throughout their academic journeys.

FUSION at Memorial 

At Memorial, the use of the FUSION modules in course materials has varied. Typically, instructors have offered students a small percentage of their course grade upon module completion—somewhere between three and five percent. This gives students an incentive to work on a particular skill by completing the module, and, importantly, they get to do so in context—the Collaboration module might be used in conjunction with a group project, for example, or the AI Literacy module might be assigned just before a research paper.

To date, just over 300 students have completed a FUSION module, and almost 2,000 are enrolled in the program. In the winter term of 2025, 77% of students enrolled in the curricular version of FUSION either agreed or strongly agreed that their skill and practices improved through completing a module.

Dr. Ian Gibson

Dr. Ian Gibson is an instructional design specialist and FUSION project lead for Memorial University. He is an occasional copyeditor and per-course instructor in the English department. If you are interested in trying out a module, please contact Dr. Gibson at iang@mun.ca.