Madeline Levine has been a practicing psychologist for twenty-five years, but it was only recently that she began to observe a new breed of unhappy teenager.
When a bright, personable fifteen-year-old girl, from a loving and financially comfortable family, came into her office with the word empty carved into her left forearm, Levine was startled. This girl and her message seemed to embody a disturbing pattern Levine had been observing. Her teenage patients were bright, socially skilled, and loved by their affluent parents. But behind a veneer of achievement and charm, many of these teens suffered severe emotional problems. What was going on?
What Do Colleges and Universities Want Students to Read Outside Class?
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.
"The current economic crisis is a structural one. Emerging industries require that young people possess new knowledge and entrepreneurial skills. Furthermore, tax and regulatory systems often inhibit business formation by young people. Systemic change is needed to help the new generation of young entrepreneurs to succeed in the innovative economy of the 21st century.”
Readers of Faculty Focus are probably already familiar with backward design. Most readily connected with such
researchers as Grant Wiggins, Jay McTighe, and Dee Fink, this approach to course construction asks faculty to initially ignore the specific content of a class. Rather, the designer begins the process by identifying desired learning goals, and then devising optimal instruments to measure and assess them. Only thereafter does course-specific content come into play—and even then, it is brought in not for the sake of “covering” it, but as a means to achieve the previously identified learning objectives. Courses designed this way put learning first, often transcend the traditional skillset boundaries of their discipline, and usually aim to achieve more ambitious cognitive development than do classes that begin—and often end—with content mastery as the primary focus. Although the advantages of backward design are manifest, it’s probably still the exception to, rather than the rule of, course planning.
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 firms and organizations are being challenged to increase productivity through innovation in order to compete on the fiercely competitive world stage and improve the quality of life of Ontarians. Yet, Ontario suffers from innovation gaps
that place its productivity and prosperity goals at risk.
When Cameron Grant attended St. Thomas Aquinas Secondary, an arts school in his hometown of Brampton, he
was passionate about acting.
And looking ahead to his post-secondary education, he liked what he heard about the drama and theatre studies program offered jointly by Sheridan College in Oakville and the University of Toronto, Mississauga (UTM). After four years, he would earn a diploma in acting and an honours bachelor’s degree in theatre.
The number of postdoctoral researchers that burn out at an early stage of their career seems to be increasing, and mental health has been a hot topic at universities and institutes across the world. The scientist in me always wonders why it is this group that is particularly at risk? Funding struggles, job insecurity and pressure to perform are obvious contributors but do they explain the whole picture? In this post, I dare to suggest that dangerous habits of thinking
commonly found amongst the scientific community may also play a role. Do any of the following seem familiar?
Faculty are the critical labor element in the pursuit of the economic goals of community colleges, yet they are not central to institutional decision-making. Their views and values are not consistent with the goals and actions of their colleges. Instead, these goals and actions are aligned with business and industry, directed by government and college administrators. Although there is a misalignment of faculty values and institutional actions, faculty do not comprise an oppositional culture within their colleges. This multi-site qualitative study addresses the presence of tensions between educational values of faculty and the economic values of faculty work.
According to researchers, better-educated parents generally provide their children with a more favourable learning nvironment, increasing the likelihood that they’ll pursue higher education. These parents also have higher educational aspirations for their children, reinforcing this dynamic. On the other hand,“first-generation” youth – those whose par- ents haven’t attended a
postsecondary education institution – are “less likely to plan for higher education, to be convinced of its benefits or to have above-average high school grades,” according to a report from the defunct Canadian Millennium Scholarship Foundation.
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.
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.
Ontarians are most likely to identify the province’s financial situation as the most important issue currently facing the Ontario
government.
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.
So many of our conversations about social media revolve around statistics: two billion Facebook users, 1.5 billion YouTube users, 800 million Instagram users. On a single day we produce 525 million tweets, upload 54 million photos, and watch five billion videos. It is the size of those audiences and the scale of the activity that prove so enticing to academics keen to descend from the ivory tower.
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 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.
Abstract
Canadian students have academic and non-academic obligations, and their ability to balance them may impact university experience. Involvement in academic and non-academic activities, and the perception of balancing them was compared between students with and without disabilities. Results revealed that both groups of students participated in employment, social activities, and family obligations. Furthermore, perceived ability to balance academic and non-academic activities was associated with higher academic self-efficacy and resourcefulness in all students. Relative to non-disabled peers, students with disabilities spent fewer hours participating in non-academic activities, had fewer course hours, but studied as many hours. Students with disabilities who had difficulties balancing their multiple roles were less adapted to university. The time to access accommodations for learning may act as a barrier to adaptation. Creating university policies around accommodations for learning would benefit students with disabilities, and the incorporation of resourcefulness and time-management into university curriculum would benefit all students.
Résumé Les étudiants canadiens ont tous des obligations scolaires et parascolaires, et leur capacité à les équilibrer entre elles peut avoir des répercussions sur leur expérience universitaire. La participation à des activités scolaires et parascolaires, et la perception d’arriver à les équilibrer entre elles a été comparée entre étudiants avec handicap et étudiants sans handicap. Les résultats ont démontré que les étudiants avaient tous des obligations professionnelles, sociales et familiales, peu importe s’ils étaient affligés d’un handicap ou non. En outre, la perception de pouvoir équilibrer entre elles les activités scolaires et parascolaires a été associée à une meilleure efficacité scolaire autodidacte et à un meilleur esprit d’initiative chez tous les étudiants. Comparativement à leurs camarades sans handicap, les étudiants avec handicap consacraient moins d’heures à des activités parascolaires, disposaient de moins d’heures de cours, mais étudiaient autant d’heures. Les étudiants avec handicap qui avaient de la difficulté à équilibrer leurs multiples rôles étaient moins adaptés à la vie universitaire. Comme le temps nécessaire pour accéder aux installations d’apprentissage peut constituer une barrière à l’adaptation, l’élaboration de politiques universitaires autour des installations d’apprentissage serait bénéfique pour les étudiants avec handicap. De même, l’intégration de l’esprit d’initiative et de la gestion du temps dans le programme d’études universitaires profiterait à tous les étudiants.
This paper reports the results of an analysis of persistence in post-secondary education (PSE) for college students in Ontario based on the extremely rich YITS-B dataset that has been used for other recent studies at the national level. We calculate hazard or transition rates (and cumulative transition rates) with respect to those who i) graduate, ii) switch programs, and
iii) leave PSE (perhaps to return later). We also look at the reasons for switching and leaving, subsequent re-entry rates among leavers, and graduation and persistence rates once switchers and re-entrants are taken into account. These patterns are then probed in more detail using hazard (regression) models where switching and leaving are related to a variety of individual
characteristics, family background, high school outcomes, and early pse experiences. Student pathways are seen to be varied. Perhaps the single most important finding is that the proportion of students who either obtain a degree or continue to be enrolled somewhere in the PSE system in the years after entering a first program remains close to the 80 percent mark for the five years following entry. Seventy-one percent of students graduate within five years of starting, while another 6 percent are still in the PSE system.