Nearly 25,700 full-time Ontario college students received tuition refunds after a five-week strike derailed their semester.
Ontario's Ministry of Advanced Education confirmed Tuesday that 10.3 per cent of Ontario's roughly 250,000 full-time college students asked for, and received, their money back after the strike.
Minister Deb Matthews said the figures are still preliminary and could change in the coming weeks as further numbers are reported by Ontario's 24 colleges.
There’s mounting evidence suggesting that student evaluations of teaching are unreliable. But are these evaluations, commonly referred to as SET, so bad that they’re actually better at gauging students’ gender bias and grade expectations than they are at measuring teaching effectiveness? A new paper argues that’s the case, and that evaluations are biased against female instructors in particular in so many ways that adjusting them for that bias is impossible.
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.
Every year around this time, those of us on a college campus begin to engage in an ancient ritual — talking about the quality of next year’s incoming class.
The end of winter and the emergence of spring is when I start to overhear, or participate in, conversations with my peers or with admissions staffers about how smart our next year’s students will be. Our admissions office ranks prospective students on a numerical system, and everyone wants to know the new numbers: How many 1s and 2s are we getting? How many 7s or 8s? We cock our heads and consider the ratios, hoping for the best possible batch of students.
After years of teaching face to face, many instructors are able to begin teaching a traditional, classroom-based course without having the entire course laid out ahead of time. This approach doesn’t work very well in the online classroom where careful planning and course design is crucial to student success.
Good online course design begins with a clear understanding of specific learning outcomes and ways to engage students, while creating activities that allow students to take some control of their learning. It also requires a little extra effort upfront to minimize
two of the most common frustrations of online learning: 1. confusing course organization (how course elements are structured within the course) and 2. unclear navigation (what links or buttons are used to access these elements).
The myth that online education courses cost less to produce and therefore save students money on tuition doesn’t hold up to scrutiny, a survey of distance education providers found.
The survey, conducted by the WICHE Cooperative for Educational Technologies (WCET), found that most colleges harge students the same or more to study online. And when additional fees are included, more than half of distance ducation students pay more than do those in brick-and-mortar classrooms.
The higher prices -- what students pay -- are connected to higher production costs, the survey found. Researchers sked respondents to think about 21 components of an online course, such as faculty development, instructional esign and student assessment, and how the cost of those components compares to a similar face-to-face course. he respondents -- administrators in charge of distance education at 197 colleges -- said nine of the components cost more in an online course than in a face-to-face course, while 12 cost about the same.
At a time of increasingly complex societal challenges and tight fiscal constraints, all participants agreed that social finance offers an opportunity for Canada to mobilize new sources of capital to generate positive social and financial returns. Despite recent advancements in the field of social finance, Canada remains in the early adoption stage and has yet to reach a stage of maturity. Participants agreed that transformational change takes time and commitment; as such, it should such change, reporting that there is increasingly more openness to innovation and more permission to think differently.
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.
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.
Education is consistently one of the least covered topics in the Canadian news media. According to Influence Communication, a Canadian research firm, only 0.16% of 10.9 million stories published or broadcast in Canadian media in 2014 concerned education, both the K-12 and postsecondary education sectors (Influence Communication, 2014).
However, research has found that news coverage of more specific policy areas, such as the environment or health, has stronger effects on public perception than coverage of broad policy issues such as the economy and jobs (Brown, 2010; Kingdon, 2003; Soroka, 2002). An evaluation of the frequency and tone of media coverage of postsecondary education (PSE) in Canada can thus yield valuable insights about public awareness and opinions of this sector.
Research Question
How has coverage of Canadian postsecondary education in the Canadian media changed over the last 15 years?
Educational Consulting Services (ECS) has supported every college in Ontario in the planning of their campuses and buildings. The focus of this work has been the reconciliation of the colleges’ education and training missions with their infrastructure. As campus and space planners, ECS has assisted in enhanced space management, transformation of facilities, and improved utilization.
This report is a compendium of observations and a high level commentary on the question of capital funding. It was prepared at the request of ACAATO and draws on ECS’s experience in Ontario and other jurisdictions. The report also draws on
information provided by college administrators for this study.
Recognition of the importance of a high-quality system of postsecondary education (PSE) in meeting the demands of Canada’s knowledge-based economy has focused recent media and policy attention on the role of Ontario’s colleges and universities in facilitating the successful transition of postsecondary graduates to the labour market. In particular, there is growing interest in the expansion of postsecondary work-integrated learning (WIL) programs – which include co-op, clinical placements, internships, and more – as a means of improving students’ employment prospects and labour market outcomes. These programs are also believed to benefit students in other ways, for example, by enhancing the quality of the postsecondary experience and improving learning outcomes. Yet despite assumptions about the benefits of postsecondary WIL programs, relatively little empirical research has been conducted to assess students’ perspectives on the value of WIL and the learning outcomes associated with WIL participation.
Attention now turns to the upcoming report of the fundamental science review panel chaired by David Naylor.
The Trudeau government tabled its second budget on March 22, promising to address economic challenges facing the country and cultivate a nimble workforce through investment in education and skills development. Among its many elements, the budget expands the Canada Student Loans and Grants program and earmarks $90 million over two years for Indigenous students. However, the budget included no new funding for the three major research granting councils – the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council and the Canadian Institutes for Health Research – dismaying many in the research community.
The main task of the Working Group on Adult Learning of the INES Labour Market, Economic and Social Outcomes network is the development of indicators on Adult Learning for publication in the annual volume “Education at a Glance” of the OECD. As part of this task, a list of 18 policy goals/issues in the domain of adult learning have been identified through broad consultations. After identifying the policy goals a theoretical framework was developed in order to be able to systematically select indicators for monitoring them. The theoretical framework is based on a systemic approach, identifying context, input, processes, output and outcome of the system of Adult Learning. The policy goals to be monitored and the theoretical framework constitute the basis for the definition and selection of a list of indicators which might be published in EAG. The third element in the development of international indicators is the existence of comparable data of good quality. The paper includes a list of 44 indicators which are practical to publish with existing data sources or with data sources likely to become available in the near future. The coverage of the policy areas is uneven, reflecting both the focus of existing data sources and the difficulties of some data gathering exercises.
Canada's post-secondary institutions are at the forefront of excellence in science, research and innovation. They help to
train the workforce of tomorrow and create the knowledge and insights needed by the private and public sectors to build a
clean, sustainable economy.
Rise of the machines: tools may monitor eye movement and facial expressions Computer-based teaching applications that monitor and respond to students’ performance are set to allow for increasingly personalised learning experiences, but users must have a say on how much information they are willing to share.
A total of 1,518 on-line interviews were conducted for the study between December 10th and 14th, 2012. The margin of error for a representative sample of this size is 2.5 percentage points within a 95% confidence interval. The margin of error is greater when looking at sub-segments of the population.
They always say that the country’s pillar of success can be view based on the quality of its education. For many, it is pivotal for the country to invest in education sector to ensure that its people can be able to attain a desirable employment and standard of living for themselves. That is why for the past decade we witness how the Philippine government restructured multiple times its basic educational system and continue to search for possible upgrade needed in the prevalent state of education in the Philippines. The latest is the implementation of K-12 program whose goal is add an additional two-year in basic schooling as senior high school and the inclusion of technical and vocational courses as part of the option especially to those students not planning to go to college, thus it will give them opportunities to be employed blue-collar work. The new curriculum was introduced and started in 2011 by Former DepEd secretary Armin Luistro. It has been a challenge but a strategic move on the part of the government because the successful implementation of the K to 12 programs in the country will ensure that our educational system can be able to produce graduates who are globally competent that are capable to get employed because they have skills needed to fulfil the pillars of globalized world.
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 as companies respond to intensified global economic competition.
Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, questioning, intersex, asexual, and ally (LGBTQQIAA) students are not commonly discussed in teacher education programs. Issues related to LGBTQQIAA learners need to be addressed in schools and in teacher education programs. Extant research shows that LGBTQQIAA students often face hostile school climates, with few resources and little support, which can lead to higher levels of absence and truancy, lower levels of academic achievement, and numerous negative health outcomes. This article uses autoethnographic methods to examine the experiences of an activist group working with preservice teachers, teacher educators, and other social justice advocates on a long-term service project for undergraduate teacher candidates aimed at increasing recognition of and giving voice to K–12 LGBTQQIAA students’ experiences. Issues related to agency and resistance are addressed, and implications for teacher preparation programs are discussed.