California State University at Sacramento, like more than a thousand other institutions in the U.S., uses the learning
management system Blackboard Learn, but likely not for much longer.
Sacramento State is getting ready to upgrade. And like many institutions in its situation, the university is looking at systems that are hosted in the cloud and delivered as software as a service (SaaS).
Moving to the cloud normally means paying more, but it does come with some benefits. Virtually no downtime is a big one. Software providers can push new features and critical patches to all its customers in the cloud, instead of colleges having to take their systems offline for maintenance. Colleges also don’t need to worry about servers if their systems are hosted in the cloud.
A philosophy is a set of principles based on one’s values and beliefs that are used to guide one's behavior. Even though your educational philosophy may not be clearly defined, it is the basis for everything you do as a teacher (DeCarvalho, 1991). It guides your decision making, influences how you perceive and understand new information, and determines your goals and beliefs (Gutek, 2004). An educational philosophy outlines what you believe to be the purpose of education,
the role of the student in education, and the role of the teacher.
Educational philosophies address the following kinds of questions: Why do we educate people? How should we educate people? How does education affect society? How does education affect humanity? Who benefits from a particular type of education? What ethical guidelines should be used? What traits should be valued? Why type of thinking is of worth? How should we come to know the world and make decisions? What is the educational ideal? What is the natural of reality? What do we believe to be true in regards to knowledge and truth? How do we come to know? What do you believe to be true in regards to humans and human
learning?
When I recently returned to my department after a decade in administration, I looked forward to reconnecting with former olleagues, getting to know the grad students, going to lectures and colloquia, teaching undergrads, and yes, even serving on departmental committees. But when I moved into my faculty office and began my work schedule, I had only one question as I looked around my department: Where did everybody go?
Public and Political attention is increasingly focused on growing soci-oeconomic inequality, in particular the decline of secure, full-time work and rise of more precarious forms of employment. The trend is more evident in some sectors, like retail, than others, but few sectors — whether in the pri-vate or public spheres — appear to be completely immune.
This report explores the extent to which conditions for workers in Can-ada’s post-secondary institutions are shifting as well. More precisely, it asks whether employment on university and college campuses in Ontario is be-coming more precarious, for whom and for what reasons.
If you’re interested in using technology tools to enhance your teaching, it’s easy to get overwhelmed by the mountain of information out there. To make matters worse, much of it is either highly technical or simply not very practical for the college classroom.
Teaching with Technology: Tools and Strategies to Improve Student Learning approaches teaching technologies from your perspective — discussing what works, what doesn’t, and how to implement the best ideas in the best ways.
As governments around the world struggle with doing more with less, efficiency analysis climbs to the top of the policy agenda. This paper derives efficiency measures for more than 8,600 schools in 30 countries, using PISA 2012 data and a bootstrap version of Data Envelopment Analysis as a method. We estimate that given current levels of inputs it would be possible to increase achievement by as much as 27% if schools improved the way they use these resources and realised efficiency gains. We find that efficiency scores vary considerably both between and within countries. Subsequently, through a second-stage regression, a number of school-level factors are found to be correlated with efficiency scores, and indicate potential directions for improving educational results. We find that many efficiency-enhancing factors vary across countries, but our analysis suggests that targeting the proportion of students below low proficiency levels and putting attention to
students’ good attitudes (for instance, lower truancy), as well as having better quality of resources (i.e. teachers and educational facilities), foster better results in most contexts.
Despite research interest in the motivations, experiences and challenges of Ontario postsecondary students who have transferred from college to university, there has been too little in-depth quantitative analysis on these topics. This study contributes to the literature by documenting transfer between York University and Seneca College – two institutions whose strong partnership has encouraged a high volume of transfer in both directions – over a period of 12 years (2000-2012).
In recent years, we’ve been exposed to increasing amounts of headlines about the possibility of machines becoming more intelligent than human beings, and even wresting control over the planet from us entirely. These threatening predictions, which may or may not yet come true, are the result of significant developments in the computer science field called artificial intelligence (also known as AI).
In this paper we utilize interview data to explore the workings of a college–community partnership program that delivers tuition-free, for-credit courses to low-income adult students in neighbourhood-based settings. Addressing the interplay of individual and structural barriers on the educational readiness of students, our findings explore how the program builds participants’
confidence and self-belief, and how the neighbourhood-based delivery model encourages their engagement with post-secondary education (PSE). We find that the value of embedding PSE capacity and resources in low-income communities lies not only in its potential to engage adult learners, but also in how it nurtures a greater sense of community integration and social inclusion. We
conclude by suggesting that our study provides a useful foundation for institutions elsewhere aiming to recalibrate and extend their community outreach strategies when seeking to promote post-secondary access and engagement for low-income populations.
This book tells a painful story.
For over a century, generations of Aboriginal children were separated from their parents and raised in over- crowded, underfunded, and often unhealthy residential schools across Canada. They were commonly denied the right to speak their language and told their cultural beliefs were sinful. Some students did not see their parents for years. Others—the victims of scandalously high death rates—never made it back home. Even by the standards of the day, discipline often was excessive.
Lack of supervi- sion left students prey to sexual predators. To put it sim- ply: the needs of tens of thousands of Aboriginal children were neglected routinely. Far too many children were abused far too often.
Ontario's provincial government recognizes college to university transfer as increasingly important. The challenge that Ontario faces is that its college and university systems were created as binary structures, with insufficient credit transfer opportunities for college students who wish to access universities with appropriate advanced standing. This paper discusses Fanshawe College's consequent attempt to create new pathways for its students within the European Higher Education Area, whose Bologna Process provides an integrated credit transfer system that is theoretically very open to student mobility. This unique project is intended to act as an exemplar for other Ontario colleges seeking similar solutions, and to support an articulation agreement between Fanshawe's Advanced Diploma in Architectural Technology and a Building Sciences Master's program at Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand.
Public schools in the United States are almost as racially isolated today as they were 30 years ago and the majority of schools practice ability group-ing or academic tracking in ways that correlate with students’ race and socioeconomic status (SES). The articles in this set of special issues exam-ine these two organizational characteristics of schools and answer key questions: Does the racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic mix of a classroom or a school make a difference for the educational processes that take place in them? If composition is related to student outcomes, is the return to pre-1980 levels of racial isolation germane to either educational policy or practice?
The signatory institutions to this protocol recognize and affirm their responsibility and obligation to Indigenous education.
Colleges and institutes respect and recognize that Indigenous people include First Nation, Métis and Inuit people, having distinct cultures, languages, histories and contemporary perspectives.
Indigenous education emanates from the intellectual and cultural traditions of Indigenous peoples in Canada.
Indigenous education will strengthen colleges’ and institutes’ contribution to improving the lives of learners and communities.
Abstract Religious colleges and universities make up a substantial segment of the higher education landscape in North America, but the incidence of sexual violence on these campuses remains understudied. This study estimates the incidence of sexual violence on independent Christian campuses using a sample of part-time and full-time undergraduate students (N = 668) from eight private Christian colleges in Ontario, Canada. Using two widely used measures of sexual violence enabled comparisons with studies of self-reported incidents at secular and public colleges and universities. The findings show that 18% of women at religious colleges reported experiencing unwanted sexual contact within the past year, compared to studies of self-reported rates on secular campuses ranging from 21.4% to 31.4%. Exploratory investigation of factors related to victimization suggests that religious colleges may provide a “moral community” that could reduce the risk of sexual violence.
Résumé Quoique les universités religieuses contribuent considérablement à l’ensemble de l’enseignement supérieur en Amérique du Nord, la fréquence des agressions sexuelles sur leurs campus demeure peu étudiée. La présente étude estime le nombre d’agressions sexuelles sur des campus chrétiens indépendants à l’aide d’un échantillon d’étudiant(e)s de premier cycle à temps partiel et à temps plein (N = 688) provenant de huit universités chrétiennes privées en Ontario (Canada). L’utilisation de deux échelles d’agressions sexuelles fréquemment utilisées a permis de comparer notre étude à d’autres études qui traitent de la fréquence d’agressions sexuelles déclarées par les victimes dans les universités laïques et publiques. Nos résultats démontrent que dans les universités religieuses, 18 % des femmes ont rapporté des contacts sexuels non désirés au cours de l’année dernière, comparativement à de 21,4 à 31,4 % des femmes des universités laïques ayant rapporté des agressions sexuelles. Des facteurs liés à la victimisation suggèrent la possibilité que les universités religieuses puissent offrir une « communauté morale » qui diminue les risques d’agression sexuelle.
The leadership literature suffers from a lack of theoretical integration (Avolio, 2007, American Psychologist, 62, 25–33). This article addresses that lack of integration by developing an integrative trait-behavioral model of leadership effectiveness and then examining the relative validity of leader traits (gender, intelligence,
personality) and behaviors (transformational-transactional, initiating structure-consideration) across 4 leadership effectiveness criteria (leader effectiveness, group performance, follower job satisfaction, satisfaction with leader). Combined, leader traits and behaviors explain a minimum of 31% of the variance in leadership effectiveness
criteria. Leader behaviors tend to explain more variance in leadership effectiveness than leader traits, but results indicate that an integrative model where leader behaviors mediate the relationship between leader traits and effectiveness is warranted.
Canadian universities will welcome unprecedented numbers of international students this fall, with some institutions seeing jumps of 25 per cent or more in admissions of students from abroad, evidence that Canada is increasingly seen as a tolerant, stable destination in a world beset by political uncertainty, the schools said.
Applications from international students were up by double digits this year, with record levels of interest from American students. Many observers had suggested that the election of Donald Trump was a reason. But until this month, when many foreign students must respond to admission offers, it was not clear how that interest would translate into enrolment.
“We have a rising tide of isolationism and exclusion in Europe, in the United States, and people are looking to Canada,” said David Turpin, the president of the University of Alberta. “We will have these incredible students who will be educated in Canada, and in many, many cases go back home and build linkages that are crucial for our future development,” he said.
Contract academic faculty make an enormous contribution to postsecondary institutions: in teaching, in research, and in administrative service. And yet they inhabit an uncertain, and sometimes perilous, space within the Canadian university system. For the most part, they lack job security. Their salaries are usually low. Many receive few, or no, health benefits. Most have no access to a pension plan. Full-time contract faculty teach more students, and over longer hours, than do their tenured and tenure-track colleagues: this can create challenges in staying current with changes in their disciplines and staying competitive in the narrowing job market. Many contract academic faculty report lack of access to meaningful decision-making within their Departments. Many perceive themselves to be unprotected by the basic protocols of academic freedom. The Association of Canadian College and University Teachers of English (ACCUTE) seeks the support of our association members, our fellow scholarly associations, and Canadian English Departments in establishing more equitable, humane and respectful working conditions for Canada’s contract faculty professionals.
In the latest edition of our blog, we hear from Dr. Adam Gaudry. In this piece, Adam explores the historical and contemporary tensions that exist between units like Indigenous Studies and the academy. Perfectly timed, Adam’s piece draws our attention to the calls to Action in the recently released Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
This handbook is intended to serve as a resource for fculty, staffk academic leades and educational developers engaged in program and course desing/review, and the assissment of program-level learning outcomes for program improve. The assessment of learning outcomes at the program-level can assist in making improvements to curricula, teaching and assessment plans.
The Public Policy Forum has organized a series of roundtables to discuss strategies to better connect First Nations, Metis and Inuit businesses and communities with affordable financing and new sources of funding. Our goal is to develop a series of concrete recommendations to help inform a comprehensive strategy that enhances First Nations, Metis and Inuit access to capital. The first roundtable was held in Toronto, with the focus of discussions being access to large-scale commercial financing. Our second roundtable was held in Vancouver and considered where capital can be better leveraged for First Nations, Metis and Inuit communities.