This report on international undergraduate students is part of a series commissioned by the UK Higher Education International Unit to systematically examine the UK’s market position with respect to international student recruitment and the international student experience. It complements two companion reports that look at the UK’s competitive advantage concerning international taught postgraduate students and international postgraduate research students.
Between 1991 and 2011, the share of young people with a university degree increased significantly, as did the share of young workers employed in professional occupations. Nevertheless, many young university degree holders could still be considered ‘overqualified’—working in occupations requiring lower levels of education. In this article, changes in the overqualification among young graduates are examined over the period from 1991 to 2011.
Friendships can blossom naturally between scholars and students, but are they always problematic? Nina Kelly
navigates the boundaries.
The rapid turnover of technology and ever expanding network of data and information which underpin the knowledge economy have led to a reevaluation of the importance of knowledge to the economic process. Economists now conclude that human capital - the ideas, skills, and expertise of people - is a fundamental driver of economic growth. Demand for employees that possess a mix of both “hard” and “soft” skills is rising
This guide contains practical steps that will help public sector agencies and departments develop a social media strategy and policy to gain maximum value from social media efforts. It also outlines some smart records retention practices—so you’ll be better prepared to respond to open records requests or other e-discovery needs when they arise.
That was the theme of third annual reconciliation forum, held at University of Manitoba.
More than 350 leaders from universities, colleges and Indigenous communities gathered at the University of
Manitoba for the third annual Building Reconciliation Forum. The theme for this year’s event, held on November 8
and 9, was “The Journey Toward a Reconciled Education System.”
In response to the 94 calls to action issued by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada in 2015,
educational leaders, academics, students and Indigenous people from across the country came together to share
what is currently being done at postsecondary institutions to make reconciliation a reality, and to discuss what still
needs to happen at the institutional level.
It would be a shame if the lesson learned is simply to remove the controversial bits from your course.
The issues of freedom of speech and transgender rights, highlighted by recent events involving a teaching assistant at Wilfrid Laurier University, remind me of my first year as a university instructor in the late 1990s, when I taught a communications course on advertising at York University. (Yes, I understand that the status of a TA is different than that of an instructor, but I think for the purposes of this anecdote, the principles are similar.)
While teaching the course, I saw an ad for Sauza tequila in the campus newspaper. It featured a photo of an attractive, swimsuit-wearing woman, with the phrase, “She’s a He,” written across her chest. The ad’s tag line read: “Life is Harsh, Your Tequila Shouldn’t Be.” (The ad didn’t identify the model, who in fact was Caroline Cossey, a transgender model.)
To meet the challenges currently facing it—chief among them, to remain viable in an era when traditional sources of funding such as state funding and tuition are decreasing or reaching their market limits—higher education depends on its leaders’ capacities to deal with current challenges, envision change, and make that change happen. In March 2012, the TIAA-CREF Institute hosted a summit on leadership and governance to explore what it will take to steer higher education through this new landscape.
Critics of posttenure review of faculty members rightly trace the practice’s origins to the 1990s, when tenure came under fire from conservative state legislators and trustees who assumed that, once granted tenure, the typical professor felt free to come in late, go home early and spend the hours in between hiding from students at the faculty club.
The truth turned out to be the opposite. Instead of laying the foundation for an assault on tenure, the rapid spread and implementation of posttenure review on most state campuses and many private ones demonstrated that the vast majority of tenured faculty work just as hard and well as they did during their probationary years.
Jobs paranoia is widespread in Canada. Elementary pupils are coming home after receiving the “job talk” from their teachers, typically emphasizing the importance of getting good grades so they can get into a high-quality university – rarely a college, a polytechnic institute or an apprenticeship program. Parents worry about enrolling their children in the “right” schools and academic programs. There is growing concern about the transition from school to work. News media, television programs and movies offer tales of underemployed university and college graduates, intense competition for decent jobs and chronic youth unemployment.
Tioga High School senior Emily Kennedy studies a child development college course online in Groveland, as part of
a collaboration with Columbia College.
The clearest and most consistent message received by the Steering Committee through its working group reports and submissions from the wider community is that, as the University of Toronto seeks to respond fully and faithfully to the challenges issued by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (“TRC”), our focus must be on concrete action. The Steering Committee (the “Committee”) is of the same mind. Therefore, this report will be framed around a series of ‘calls to action,’ mirroring the work of the TRC itself.
Elementary and high schools spend so much time on the content-laden curriculum that students are unprepared for the analytic and conceptual thinking they'll need at university
Has Ontario’s educational system taught a decade of students not to think? There is growing evidence that the combination of standardized testing with a content-intensive curriculum that’s too advanced – both introduced by the Conservative government between 1997 and 1999 – has done exactly that.
A dramatic indication that there could be a serious problem was the performance of my introductory physics class on their November test last year. It was identical to one given in 1996, but the class average over this 10-year period had plummeted from 66 to 50 percent. There is about a five-percent fluctuation in this test grade from year to year due to variation in student ability
and the difficulty of the questions but, when I looked at the class average over the many times I have taught the course since 1981, I found that four of the five lowest grades have occurred in the last four years, with the lowest this year. When I enquired elsewhere at Trent University, I found the same pattern in the mathematics department, where the first test in linear algebra was down some 15 percent from its historic mean, and the calculus average had dropped nine percent from the year before.
The past millennium has witnessed a myriad of technological changes, and there has been exponential growth in the same over the past century. Yet the design of the classroom has changed relatively little over the same time period. The classroom of Aristotle was organized more or less in the same fashion as that of Thomas Aquinas or Einstein. This design emphasizes the so-called “sage on the stage” model where a lecturer addresses an auditorium of students who are expected to listen, absorb, and retain this knowledge. The model continues to be the staple of pedagogical practice in the 21st century. Although the sage-on-the-stage model still dominates, there is a great deal of research suggesting more efficient and effective ways of imparting knowledge.
MORE DIRECT FORMS OF READING ASSESSMENT Bibliograph
Self-determination theory (Deci & Ryan, 1985, 1991), when applied to the realm of education, is concerned primarily with promoting in students an interest in learning, a valuing of education, and a confidence in their own capacities and attributes. These outcomes are manifestations of being intrinsically motivated and internalizing values and regulatory processes. Research
suggests that these processes result in high-quality learning and conceptual understanding, as well as enhanced personal growth and adjustment. In this article we also describe social-contextual factors that nurture intrinsic motivation and pralmote internalization, leading to the desired educational outcomes.
Many people who work at colleges and universities have expressed concern about the new administration’s executive orders and policies regarding immigration, as well as the reactions of international students and scholars to it. However, more fundamental issues related to the internationalization of higher education that should not be ignored have been emerging for some time.
In this age of global connectivity, internationalization in academe has become an increasingly normal practice. That has proven to be profitable for institutions and beneficial for the career prospects of international students. But even before the recent political turmoil and upheaval, not all has been as good as it may have seemed. Those directly involved in the process -- domestic students, international students and professors -- have been voicing dissatisfaction.
LEESA WHEELAHAN
This contribution to the symposium on Michael Young’s article ‘Overcoming the crisis in curriculum theory: a knowledge based approach’, supports his contention that curricu- lum theory has lost sight of its object—‘what is taught and learned in schools’, and argues that this has particularly deleterious consequences for vocational education and training (VET). VET is
unproblematically positioned as applied, experiential and work- focused learning, and it is seen as a solution for those who are alienated from or unsuc- cessful in more traditional forms of academic education. This article argues that rather than being a mechanism for social inclusion, VET is instead a key way in which social inequality is mediated and reproduced because it excludes students from accessing the theoretical knowledge they need to participate in debates and controversies in society and in their occupational field of practice. It presents a social realist analysis to argue why VET students need access to theoretical knowledge, how a focus on experiential and applied learning constitutes a mechanism for social exclusion and what a ‘knowledge rich’ VET curriculum would look like.
Keywords: vocational education and training; social realism; applied
disciplinary knowledge; curriculum; knowledge
The development of outcomes-based educational (OBE) practices represents one important way in which a learning outcomes approach to teaching and learning can be applied in the postsecondary sector. This study adopts a multiple case study design and profiles seven OBE initiatives being implemented in Ontario’s colleges and universities to better understand the scope of outcomes-based educational practices in the province’s postsecondary sector. ‘OBE initiatives’ are defined as purposeful
actions undertaken by postsecondary providers directed at defining, teaching toward and assessing learning outcomes in their
educational practice (modified from Jones, Voorhees & Paulson, 2002).
Many of us here on the Student Vu staff have transferred between programs or between institutions at some point in our academic career so we were very interested to hear about current students' perceptions of and experiences with transferring.