A large majority of first-time international graduate students are master’s and certificate students. • Over three-fourths (77%) of first-time international graduate students in Fall 2015 were enrolled in master’s and certificate programs; however, shares vary by country/region of origin and field of study. • First-time Indian (91%) and Saudi Arabian (80%) graduate students were most likely to pursue master’s and certificate programs, while South Korean (47%) graduate students were most likely to pursue doctoral programs.
Canada’s universities develop globally aware graduates with the internationally competitive skills suited to the jobs of today and tomorrow, while fostering globally connected research and scholarship. Results from a new survey by Universities Canada highlight how universities across the country are highly engaged in and committed to internationalization – and where there is room for improvement.
The higher education world is getting smaller as more and more students are choosing to study abroad. Students are looking to universities to provide an international experience, the opportunity to study alongside students from all over the world, and to give them a truly global higher education community in which to study.
As part of the data collected for the World University Rankings, Times Higher Education asks all institutions to provide figures on the percentage of international students they have. THE has extracted these data and compiled a list of the top 200 universities.
Three of the universities featured in the top five were founded in the past 30 years – perhaps suggesting that younger universities are more appealing to international students.
Sixteen universities from London feature in the top 200, making it one of the most represented cities in the ranking. In fact, the UK as a whole was the most represented country with 72 universities present in the top 200 in total,
compared with 27 from the US and 22 in Australia.
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.
The 2016 Ontario Budget made headlines for its changes to student financial aid in Ontario. By repackaging and re-focusing existing financial aid programs, the Government of Ontario has made a bold promise: that for certain low-income students in Ontario, tuition will now be “free.”
While improving access to postsecondary education is a welcome policy goal, it is important to recognize that the 2016 Budget makes no additional real public investment in university operating budgets. Our universities are already the lowest funded in Canada on a per-student basis, and this situation will continue to worsen. This will have predictable effects on the quality of education at Ontario universities. Class sizes will continue to rise without new funds to support full-time faculty hiring. The number of precariously employed professors will also grow, trapping many in insecure, unsupported positions. While the government has moved to increase access for low- income students, the worsening financial environment begs the question, “access to what?”
Historically, much of education research has focused on exploring the classroom as a context for learning, explaining the learning processes that occur in the classroom, and designing lessons that help students learn. The past decades have seen considerable research on the various social factors that affect learning; they have also seen increasing research into the effects of policy on educational attainment.
The Ontario government said Monday it allowed two provincial colleges to create male-only campuses in Saudi Arabia, but added that gap in the approval process will be closed.
Reza Moridi, minister of colleges and universities, said that Niagara and Algonquin Colleges applied to his ministry to establish the two Saudi campuses, and were given the green light by a previous minister in 2008 and 2012.
However, Moridi said the province’s responsibility was to approve financial plans for the two Saudi
expansions and it was up to the colleges to determine who was admitted.
On university campuses across Ontario, students who are LGBTQ+ face varying levels of discrimination, exclusion, and increased health and safety risks. In the Fall of 2014, OUSA conducted focus groups, interviews, and an online survey designed to gain insight into some of the experiences of LGBTQ+ students and to explore possible policy interventions. Guided by these student voices - and informed by best practices highlighted in existing literature - this paper offers recommendations to improve equity, safety, and inclusion.
Through the writings and research of pre-eminent online learning expert, Dr. Tony Bates
For almost 50 years, Tony Bates has been a consistent, persistent and influential voice for the reform of teaching and learning in post-secondary education, notably through the effective use of emerging technologies. Author of 11 books and 350 research papers in the field of online learning and distance education, Tony Bates is also an advisor to over 40 organizations in 25 countries, and publisher of what is arguably the most influential blog on online learning (link is external) with over 20,000 visits a month. A Contact North | Contact Nord Research Associate, Dr. Bates has helped educators, academic administrators and policy makers grasp key concepts, trends and challenges in online learning This posting is one of a series that looks at Tony’s perspectives and advice on key issues in online learning.
Ask most people who don’t teach online about the likelihood of academic dishonesty in an online class and you will likely hear concerns about the many ways that students could misrepresent themselves online. In fact, this concern about student representation is so prevalent it made its way into the Higher Education Opportunities Act (HEOA).
Passed into law in 2008, the act brought a few big changes to online education, including a new requirement to “ensure that the student enrolled in an online class is the student doing the coursework.”
Canada's universities make essential contributions to our nationa innovation system, from conducting discover-driven research to partnering with industry on practical solutions to immediate problems. Universiites are key economic drivers of regional and national prosperity. They generate the ideas and solutions used by communities, small and medium enterrises, national and multi-national companies and sectors of the economy across the country
Dengting Boyanton, author of Teachers and Students as Co-Learners: Toward a Mutual Value Theory, experienced “extreme culture shock” when she left her native Chinese educational system to begin graduate study in education at the
University of Virginia in 2003. Despite the fact that she had been an enthusiastic and successful learner in her home country, Boyanton often felt perplexed and disappointed regarding the behavior expected of her in U.S. classrooms. She was inhibited about speaking up in class, afraid to ask questions of her professors or classmates, and insecure about offering her opinions and comments.
Boyanton’s international student colleagues, with whom she shared her feelings, reported experiencing the same negative emotions. When Boyanton began questioning American-born students about their classroom experiences—with the goal of helping herself and other international students adjust to American classroom culture—she discovered to her surprise that American students also felt alienated, invisible, and lonely in their classes. For example, one Caucasian male student
told her, “Like most new students here, you feel lonely, nobody knows you, nobody talks to you, and nobody seems to care about you either” (p. xvii).
Colleges can not only help students past their immediate crises, writes Joseph Holtgreive, but also encourage them to unlock capacity that they didn't know existed and ways of tapping into it.
The contemporary university has grown to be a fairly complex institution sustained by many competing interests, not all of which are directly concerned with promoting the work of study, broadly conceived. My concern in the fol- lowing is with the quality of the subjective experience of studying that universities are still meant to provide. By subjective experience I mean the
mindful engagement that is study, and my focus is on such study as it is found in undergraduate programs leading to undergraduate degrees. Given the threat of a growing indifference between professors and students concerning their shared engagement in courses offered at the undergraduate level (offered because of professors’ institutional obligations, taken because of students’ degree requirements), I reconsider the subjective investment of mindful engagement that these courses nevertheless represent.
Teacher evaluation is a major policy initiative intended to improve the quality of classroom instruction. This study documents a fundamental challenge to using teacher evaluation to improve teaching and learning.
The existence of ‘Learning Styles’ is a common ‘neuromyth’, and their use in all forms of education has been thoroughly and repeatedly discredited in the research literature. However, anecdotal evidence suggests that their use remains widespread.
This perspective article is an attempt to understand if and why the myth of Learning Styles persists. I have done this by analyzing the current research literature to capture the picture that an educator would encounter were they to search for “Learning Styles” with the intent of determining whether the research evidence supported their use. The overwhelming majority (89%) of recent research papers, listed in the ERIC and PubMed research databases, implicitly or directly endorse the use of Learning Styles in Higher Education. These papers are dominated by the VAK and Kolb Learning Styles inventories. These presence of these papers in the pedagogical literature demonstrates that an educator, attempting to take an evidence-based approach to education, would be presented with a strong yet misleading message that the use of Learning Styles is endorsed by the current research literature. This has potentially negative consequences for students and for the field of education research.
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.
Aboriginal people in Canada have long understood the role that learning plays in building healthy, thriving communities. Despite significant cultural and historical differences, Canada’s First Nations, Inuit and Métis people share a vision of learning as a holistic, lifelong process.
It is a fundamental responsibility and obligation of government and of institutional leaders to assure that postsecondary institutions are sustainable and capable of providing a high quality academic experience.
This paper offers a conceptual framework for examining the sustainability of Ontario’s public postsecondary institutions. It discusses the definition of the term “sustainability,” how it can be measured and the various tools and strategies available to both institutions and government to meet sustainability risks when they are identified.
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).