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.
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.
When it comes to assessment, there are enough perspectives, stakeholders, tools and methodologies to make your head spin. To be sure, despite the admirable goal of improving student learning by assessment, the trend toward greater accountability is often viewed as something that is imposed upon higher education institutions; infringing on an institution’s autonomy and stifling faculty members’ academic freedom without providing truly meaningful data to justify the additional workload it generates.
Meanwhile, others accept the fact that assessment is here to stay and strategies that, with careful planning, it’s entirely possible to design exactly the type of assessment systems you need to get precisely the type of information required for an accurate picture of learning outcomes.
This report documents the central role of the college-educated workforce in improving labour productivity across the economy and supporting an innovation culture in the workplace. It describes critical “enabling occupations” that play a key role in allowing
companies to build a culture of innovation in the workplace which they need if they are to continually restructure for success. It develops a “Prosperity Cycle” model and demonstrates the importance of college graduates in building a culture of innovation in a
dozen key Ontario industries.
This article explores the internationalization of Canadian universities, with a focus on the rise of foreign postsecondary students in Canada, the economic impacts, and the various benefits, challenges, and adjustments that have been
influenced by the continuing demographic shifts on Canadian campuses since 2000. Rooted in recent global and Canadian higher education internationalization trends, this paper suggests that accommodations for such shifts have
not kept pace with the influx of culturally and linguistically diverse foreign students, whose population growth rate outpaces domestic university students’ by several times. I conclude with unresolved dilemmas that continue to pose challenges for Canadian universities, and with suggestions for manageable supports to ensure the needs of students are responsibly balanced with the economic constraints of universities.
This chapter examines how the three most common types of engagement found among adolescents attending high-performing high schools relate to indicators of mental and physical health.
According to Statistics Canada, 25% of Canadian college students drop out of post-secondary training. Many instructors comment that college students are increasingly hard-pressed to keep up with assignments and readings. Would improving student performance through Essential Skills (ES) training enable students to become more effective, and therefore less likely to drop out? In January 2012, Douglas College recruited students into the National Framework for Essential Skills Research Project. In total, 143 students were tested using the Test of Workplace Essential Skills (TOWES) and Canadian Literacy Evaluation (CLE). Of these, almost two-thirds tested below the minimum Level 3 recommended for success in work, learning, and life. Since only those that scored a Level 2 in Document Use were eligible to participate in the project, 66 students were invited to take part in weekly study sessions. Of these, 37 students chose to participate. Following 10 weeks of study sessions, students were tested again. The results indicate that almost all the students moved positively within Level 2 and 75% moved from Level 2 to Level 3 or Level 2(3).
Few counseling programs directly address the importance of self-care in reducing stress and burnout in their curricula. A course entitled Mind/Body Medicine and the Art of Self-Care was created to address personal and professional growth opportu-nities through self-care and mindfulness practices (meditation, yoga, qigong, and conscious relaxation exercises). Three methods of evaluating this 15-week 3-credit mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) course for counseling students indicated positive changes for students in learning how to manage stress and improve coun-seling practice. Students reported positive physical, emotional, mental, spiritual, and interpersonal changes and substantial effects on their counseling skills and thera-peutic relationships. Information from a focus group, qualitative reports, and quan-titative course evaluations were triangulated; all data signified positive student responses to the course, method of teaching, and course instructor. Most students reported intentions of integrating mindfulness practices into their future profession.
Work-integrated learning (WIL) has been identified as a key strategy for supporting Canada’s postsecondary education (PSE) system in responding to an increasingly dynamic, globalized, knowledge-based economy. Ontario in particular has been described as a “hot bed” of co-operative education (Ipsos Reid, 2010). However, while there is a common belief that WIL improves employment outcomes (see Gault, Redington & Schlager, 2000; Kramer & Usher, 2010), research on this topic has generally been specific to certain programs and types of WIL (Sattler, 2011).
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).
As our nation strives to have all students graduate from high school ready for college and other postsecondary learning opportunities, we have to confront the reality that we are far from achieving this goal. The problem is most severe with
economically disadvantaged students. For example, in states where all eleventh graders take the ACT® college readiness assessment, only 45% of low-income students in 2012 met the ACT College Readiness Benchmarks in English, 30% in reading,
21% in mathematics, and 13% in science. For many students, especially those from disadvantaged backgrounds, learning gaps
appear in early childhood.2 Large numbers of disadvantaged students enter kindergarten behind in early reading and mathematics skills, oral language development, vocabulary, and general knowledge. This situation poses a challenge for
intervention models that presume that 15% or so of students need short-term additional help, 5% or so need long-term intervention, and the regular academic program will take care of the rest. In cases where the great majority of students are
academically behind and need major assistance, the regular academic program must be upgraded to deliver a richer curriculum to all students. Such a curriculum is highly beneficial for all students, but is especially critical for disadvantaged students, who often arrive from home with limited knowledge and vocabulary. School districts must develop a system of practices that enable such a curriculum to be taught effectively.
This study examined aspects of approval processes for baccalaureate degree programs in colleges in the following 11 jurisdictions: Alberta, British Columbia, Austria, Denmark, Finland, Flanders, Florida, Germany, Ireland, the Netherlands, and New Zealand. More detailed profiles are provided for seven of the jurisdictions. In order to make the data more relevant for the Ontario reader, some comparisons with characteristics of the baccalaureate degree approval process in Ontario are noted.
Instructors of large classes must contend with numerous challenges, among them low student motivation. Research in evolutionary biology, echoed by work in other disciplines, suggests that aspects of the classroom incentive structure – such as grades, extra credit, and instructor and peer acknowledgment – may shape motivations to engage in studies and to collaborate with peers. Specifically, the way that incentives are distributed in relative quantity (the slope of competition; the proportion of benefits earned through performance relative to peers) and space (the scale of competition; the proportion of peers with whom one is competing) may affect strategies to cooperate or to compete with others.
Most universities still offer Learning Management Systems (LMS) as the ‘one size fits all’ technology solution for all teachers across all disciplines. Using LMS across diverse campuses has resulted in efficiencies-of-scale for administrators, however LMS integration into teacher practices is minimal (e.g., Conole & Fill, 2005) and teachers’ creative space can be limited for discipline-based innovation. Together, these realities indicate that there are significant barriers to the effective use of LMSs, especially for teaching and learning purposes.
To overcome such barriers, the complex and less visible internal space of teacher beliefs must be understood in relation to teachers’ pedagogical contexts and the affordances they can identify. This paper reports on the findings of six qualitative case studies of teachers at different stages of LMS integration and the extent to which teachers reconciled their beliefs. The results highlight the need for technology environments that better accommodate teacher diversity.
Keywords: teacher beliefs, teacher diversity, affordances, LMS, university teacher education
This roundtable will focus on access to capital markets to meet the needs of a growing number of First Nations businesses and communities seeking financial participation in projects that can be valued in hundreds of millions of dollars. Based on the analysis below, we propose the following key issues and questions for discussion:
According to a new survey of more than 4,000 undergraduates at 10 community colleges across the nation, half of all community college students are struggling with food and/or housing insecurity. Fully 20 percent are hungry and 13 percent are homeless. These numbers are startling and indicate the need for a multi-pronged, comprehensive set of institutional, state, and local policies to alleviate the barriers presented by poverty, so as to improve educational success.
Background/Context: PISA has come up with an ingenious solution to the problem of how to measure student achievement across national school systems with different curricula. Instead of measuring how well students learn what they are taught in each system, it measures a set of economically useful skills that no one teaches.
Women who start college in one of the natural or physical sciences leave in greater proportions than their male peers. The reasons for this difference are complex, and one possible contributing factor is the social environment women experience in the classroom. Using social network analysis, we explore how gender influences the confidence that college-level biology students have in each other’s mastery of biology. Results reveal that males are more likely than females to be named by peers as being
knowledgeable about the course content. This effect increases as the term progresses, and persists even after controlling for class performance and outspokenness. The bias in nominations is specifically due to males over-nominating their male peers relative to their performance. The over-nomination of male peers is commensurate with an overestimation of male grades by 0.57 points on a 4 point grade scale, indicating a strong male bias among males when assessing their classmates. Females, in contrast, nominated equitably based on student performance rather than gender, suggesting they lacked gender biases in filling out these surveys. These trends persist across eleven surveys taken in three different iterations of the same Biology course. In
every class, the most renowned students are always male. This favoring of males by peers could influence student self-confidence, and thus persistence in this STEM discipline.
KSU redefined the MOOC value proposition through collaboration of university leadership and faculty. The new proposition shifts measures of success beyond just course completion to include measures that benefit students, faculty, and the institution. Students benefitted through access to open educational resources, the acquisition of professional learning units at no cost, and the potential of college credit at a greatly reduced cost. Academic units benefited through a mechanism to attract students and future revenue while the university benefited through digital impressions, branding, institutionally leveraged scalable learning environments, streamlined credit evaluation processes and expanded digital education.
Whenever I assign a long reading for homework or offer to peruse one collectively, a tremendous
sigh can be heard filling up the room. Groans of “Do we have to?” or “I’ve never read anything that
long in my life” punctuate the anticipated boredom, and everyone settles in to (grudgingly) do the
work.
For instructors, that isn’t a rare occurrence. Our roles require us teach basic tenets of literature, engage students in thinking about rhetoric and symbolism, and ideally guide them as they evolve into better writers and critical thinkers. However, as we try to reach students who are reading increasingly shorter and shorter pieces, or not at all, one question arises: Do we need to change how and what we teach in English courses, or is it already too late?