Roughly a year ago, I wrote a column on "The 4 Properties of Powerful Teachers," and named "personality" as one of those qualities. While recognizing that everyone is different, and that personality isn’t necessarily something we can control, I was attempting to identify key characteristics that most of my best teachers, from kindergarten through graduate school, had in common.
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?
Increased demands in professional expectations have required online faculty to learn how to balance multiple roles in an open-ended, changing, and relatively unstructured job. In this paper, we argue that being strategic about one’s balance of the various facets of online teaching will improve one’s teaching efficiency and effectiveness. We discuss the balancing issues associated with four key online teaching facets: course design/development, delivery of the course content, assessments/feedback, and professional development. We conclude with a template for a strategic professional development plan that addresses these key facets.
This report presents the findings of a one-year study of the creation and implementation of a new Français course at the University of Ottawa, offered as a pilot project in 2012-2013. The course was created at the request of francophone first-year students from regions of Canada where the French language is in a minority context. These students reported experiencing difficulty in bridging the gap between the literacy skills they acquired in secondary school and the academic literacy skills
required of them to succeed in the mandatory foundational French courses (FRA courses) and other courses taught in French (Lamoureux et al., 2013).
Tioga High School senior Emily Kennedy studies a child development college course online in Groveland, as part of
a collaboration with Columbia College.
The University community has an interest in improving the happiness and well-being of graduate students for a straightforward reason: to enable graduate students to do their best work. Balanced, happy people are more productive, more creative, more collaborative, better at pursuing long-term goals, more likely to find employment, and more physically and psychologically resilient, among other things. Positive emotion is associated with curiosity, interest and synthetic thinking. In contrast, depression is associated with loss of interest, helplessness, difficulty concentrating and remembering details, and worse. For more on this, see Part VI, “The Objective Benefits of Subjective Well-Being,” from the World Happiness Report.
This series of reports explores new forms of teaching, learning and assessment for an interactive world, to guide teachers and policy makers in productive innovation. This fourth report proposes ten innovations that are already in currency and are having an increasing effect on education. To produce it, a group of academics at the Institute of Educational Technology in The Open University collaborated with researchers from the Center for Technology in Learning at SRI International. We proposed a long list
of new educational terms, theories, and practices. We then pared these down to ten that have the potential to provoke major shifts in educational practice, particularly in post-school education. Lastly, we drew on published and unpublished writings
to compile the ten sketches of new pedagogies that might transform education. These are summarised below in an approximate order of immediacy and timescale to widespread implementation.
The Ontario Ministry of Community and Social Services estimates that one in seven people in Ontario have a disability.1 A disability can affect a person's ability to achieve post-secondary education, and can also greatly influence their experience within a post-secondary institution. Due to overall rise in enrollment we believe that living with disabilities are an emerging issue in the post- secondary sector. Why is this population growing? In Ontario, 34 percent of people between the ages of 15 and 64 with
disabilities have a college or university degree.2 Past governments have reflected this concern within two ground-breaking bodies of legislation: the Ontarians with Disabilities Act (ODA; 2001), and within the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act (AODA; 2005). Collectively, these laws mandate that persons living with disabilities in Ontario be sufficiently accommodated.
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.
This report maps learning outcomes associated with three Ontario advanced diploma programs in Business (Accounting Administration, Human Resources Administration, and Marketing Administration) in order to determine whether these credentials are equivalent to baccalaureate degrees in an international (European and American) context. In so doing, it draws on recent discussions of learning outcomes in both Ontario and the European Higher Education Area (EHEA), particularly with regard to the Bologna Process. It also provides more information for current Ontario debates about the positioning of the three-year advanced diploma.
Whether the separation is voluntary or not, losing a tenure-line or otherwise full-time faculty member is always a costly to an institution. The departing professor will take any external research grants with him or her, not to mention the sunk costs of hiring and training. Then there are additional costs that are harder to quantify, such as those to morale, mentorship, service and leadership in a department.
While the cost of tuition and the rate at which it increases are obviously important subjects to students, they often cloud other important tuition-related issues. For instance, there are currently no regulations governing how and when universities may charge students tuition, meaning that each institution has the freedom to set individual payment processes.
Change in education is easy to propose, hard to implement, and extraordinarily difficult to sustain (Hargreaves & Fink, 2006, p. 1).Sound familiar? I am sure it does if you have spent any time in a school leadership role!
Continuous, sustainable educational improvement is possible. However, it is most dependent on successful leadership. Andy Hargreaves and Dean Fink make such a case in their book Sustainable Leadership and further note a relevant truism: Making leadership sustainable is difficult too (p. 1). This easy-to-read text is full of such principles, each of which makes the book a powerful and timely read. This book addresses one area of school leadership that is a most important, yet often neglected subject in education today: educational improvement as correlated with leadership sustainability. Kouzes and Posner (1995), support such an integrated concept in their classic read The Leadership Challenge by relating the following: There are monumental differen es... (preview
truncated at 150 words.)
This article makes the case that Canadian universities—both within and be- yond their campuses—must broaden their visions of third-age learners. Ca- nadian third-age learners—defined for the purposes of this article as persons seeking formalized education who are in the stage of life beginning at retire- ment—are more numerous, active, financially stable, and diverse as well as healthier and better educated than at any other time in our history. It follows that Canadian universities have much to offer and gain by both deepening and broadening their involvement with these learners. I argue that universi- ties must consider multi-pronged forms of collaboration and must be motivated, at all times, not by short-sighted financial concerns but by their core obligation to serve the public good by fostering community engagement.
You wait with anticipation. You receive the email: Course assignments are posted. You click on your Course Assignment. And—you’re assigned to teach a course that you have never taught before. Maybe you feel excitement, maybe you feel anxiety, or some mixture of the two. Emotion aside, how do you plan a new course?
This paper explores the potential of cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT), to provide new insights into community service-learning (CSL) in higher education. While CSL literature acknowledges the influences of John Dewey and Paolo Freire, discussion of the potential contribution of cultural-historical activity theory, rooted in the work of Russian psychologist
Lev Vygotsky, is noticeably absent. This paper addresses this gap by examining four assumptions
associated with activity theory: the rejection of a theory/practice divide, the development of
knowledge as a social collaborative activity, the focus on contradictions in and across activity
systems, and the interventionist approach
aimed at transformation.
The Early Childhood Education Report 2017 is the third assessment of provincial and territorial frameworks for early childhood education in Canada. Nineteen benchmarks, organized into five equally weighted categories, evaluate governance structures, funding levels, access, quality in early learning environments and the rigour of accountability mechanisms.
Results are populated from detailed provincial and territorial profiles developed by the researchers and reviewed by provincial and territorial officials. Researchers and officials co-determine the benchmarks assigned. We are pleased to welcome Nunavut and Yukon as new participants in this edition. ECEReport.ca includes the profiles for each jurisdiction, including the federal government, plus the methodology that shapes the report, references, charts and figures and materials from past reports.
Research in commercial organizations has provided a multitude of examples on how leadership development can effectively foster employees’ performance and work-related attitudes such as commitment or satisfaction. In contrast, to date systematic leadership development is largely lacking for employees in higher education. However, we suggest that the positive effects of leadership development in commercial organizations also apply to the academic context. Thus, the purpose of this applied article is to present two approaches to the development of
leadership in higher education. More specifically, we provide a detailed description of two different programs offered to researchers at a large German university. The first program constitutes a leader development initiative for junior faculty on an individual level, whereas the second focuses on the development of leadership within university departments on a group level. We provide recommendations for establishing and evaluating effective leadership development in higher education.
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.
Occasionally I’m asked about quitting, particularly “quitting” a PhD program. This happened several times last week,
when I was in Vancouver.
Contrary to what you may hear or what your own internal critics tell you, there’s no shame in moving on. I remember a long post on a Versatile PhD forum from “PJ,” an ABD thinking about leaving instead of spending another two years (minimum) to finish their PhD. In response, one commenter wrote, “But the real question is, do you want to be a quitter? Now, not everyone will view that question the same, and I’m sure many will say that equating quitting a PhD program to being a quitter is not valid, but in reality, it is.” No! Thankfully, most other commenters on the thread offered more nuanced and helpful reflections and advice. “Finishing is not just about the destination,” one former tenure-track professor pointed out. “If that’s the only thing you want, then it’s a tough few years ahead.” Indeed.