The combination of work and study has been hailed as crucial to ensure that youth develop the skills required on the labour market so that transitions from school to work are shorter and smoother. This paper fills an important gap in availability of internationally-comparable data. Using the 2012 Survey of Adult Skills (PIAAC), it draws a comprehensive picture of work and study in 23 countries/regions. Crucially, it decomposes the total share of working students by the context in which they work (VET, apprenticeships or private arrangements) and assesses the link between field of study and students’ work. The paper also assesses how the skills of students are used in the workplace compared to other workers and identifies the socio-demographic factors and the labour market institutions that increase the likelihood of work and study. Finally, while it is not
possible to examine the relationship between work and study and future labour market outcomes at the individual level, some aggregate correlations are unveiled.
At most colleges and universities, summer offers a blessed break from the regular meetings of the academic year. It’s a relief to have a few months’ free from having to jockey for air time, listen to long-winded people opine on matters they know little about, navigate petty factional skirmishes, or shore up colleagues whose ideas are routinely shot down.
Now that it’s September, the prospect of returning to meeting-heavy days may seem enervating. But what if we made 2019-20 the year in which we change the traditional dynamics of our meetings? Could we find ways to make them more productive, less
contentious, and more open to voices that usually get muffled or silenced?
Constant communication, trust and transparency, frequent feedback and offering recognition – these are all things that research consistently suggests managers should focus on in order to improve employee engagement. But you’ve read this before, and we don’t want to tell you what you already know.
The rise of online and hybrid courses at the higher education level increases the need for distance
learning infrastructures to nourish online faculty preparedness and student online learning success. One part of the distance learning infrastructure is incorporating the use of educated and trained instructional designers to assist faculty in developing robust and quality online courses. Developing online courses with an instructional designer is a very laborious process, but the results can outweigh the struggles that facultyexplain what is involved in an established six-step course development model for developing, reviewing, and delivering a quality online course.
Canada's ranking in the newest How Canada Performs: Innovation report card is good news. Canada ranked 9th among 16 countires , comparied to 13th in the previous Conference of Canada ranking.
We live in a world where economic, social and personal fulfillment depends less upon what we know, and more upon what we are able to learn, how we think and the degree to which we are able to respond to change around us. As centres of learning and discovery, universities play a crucial role in this process. Universities transform the lives of people, who in turn transform
our communities, our country and the world.
An Ontario Public Service Employees Union (OPSEU) Local 352 member speaks to a man crossing the union�s picket line at Fleming's Sutherland Campus during a faculty strike on Monday, October 16, 2017. Union members, including college professors, instructors, counsellors and librarians, hit the picket line Monday after negotiations between it and the College Employer Council fell flat. JESSICA NYZNIK/Peterborough Examiner/Postmedia Network
While the balancing power of collective bargaining is a positive force, Ontario's provincial government was right to order striking community college teachers back to work.
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.
Top motivations to study or train abroad remain the same as in recent years: the opportunity to live abroad and meet new
people, improve foreign language proficiency, develop transversal skills. Just after comes the wish to enhance employability abroad for more than 85% of students.
On average, Erasmus students have better employability skills after a stay abroad than 70% of all students. Based on their personality traits, they have a better predisposition for employability even before going abroad. By the time they return they have increased their advantage by 42% on average. While 81% of Erasmus students perceive an improvement in their transversal skills when they come back, 52% show higher memo© factors. In all cases, they consider the improvement of skills to be greater than they expected before going abroad.
Despite great diversity in community colleges across the nation, most are facing declining resources that threaten to cripple the quality of programs and services provided. The Great Recession exacerbated trends that were already obvious in many colleges, including dwindling state appropriations, shrinking property values, and demands to restrain tuition increases to protect our long-cherished mission of accessibility. In many cases, rural community colleges have been hardest hit due to aging, tax resistant populations, barriers rooted in generational poverty, and shortage of growth-oriented businesses and industries. While resources have declined, deferred maintenance has increased, resulting in deteriorating buildings, laboratories that do not reflect industry standards, and infrastructure issues ill-suited for training skilled workers who can compete in our high tech, global society.
After one too many students called me by my first name and sent me email that resembled a drunken late-night Facebook post, I took a very fogeyish step. I began attaching a page on etiquette to every syllabus: basic rules for how to address teachers and write polite, grammatically correct emails.
Over the past decade or two, college students have become far more casual in their interactions with faculty members. My colleagues around the country grumble about students’ sloppy emails and blithe informality.
Mark Tomforde, a math professor at the University of Houston who has been teaching for almost two decades, added etiquette guidelines to his website. “When students started calling me by my first name, I felt that was too far, and I’ve got to say something,” he told me. “There were also the emails written like text messages. Worse than the text abbreviations was the level of informality, with no address or signoff.”
TORONTO, Feb. 14, 2017 /CNW/ - A new national survey released today reveals a bold portrait of Canada's Millennials (those born between 1980 and 1995), that for the first time presents the social values of this generation, and the distinct segments that help make sense of the different and often contradictory stereotypes that so frequently are applied to today's young adults.
The results show that Millennials cannot be lumped into a single group defined by their age, or by other demographic characteristics such as gender, region or socio-economic status. They are a diverse part of the Canadian society, made up of six social values "tribes", each reflecting a distinct worldview and approach to life. While Millennials may share some common experiences and aspirations as befits their stage in life, there are notable differences in outlook and life path across these tribes, be they "Engaged Idealists," "Bros and Brittanys," or "Lone Wolves."
Public post-secondary institutions are responsible for delivering both high-quality education and research in the public interest. This responsibility requires the right for academic researchers to exercise independent inquiry that is free of influence or restrictions from both the government and private industry.
Over the last two decades, there has been increasing pressure from the private sector to re-shape the mission of the university to be more closely aligned with the needs of business. In the area of university research, this has led to a premium placed on research commercialisation. This shift in focus of publicly-funded institutions is a significant departure from the academic principle of independence on which universities have operated for centuries.
One of the most serious problems facing colleges and universities today is that so many students leave before finishing their studies. When students drop out, it is bad for them because they lose huge future career and income potential; bad for the institution they leave because of lost reputation, revenue, and opportunity to make a difference in the students’ lives; and bad for society because of the need for an educated work force that is able to compete in the global marketplace.
Although there are many reasons students drop out, 12 research-validated risk factors, often in various combinations, help account for why most students drop out. These risk factors apply at a wide variety of
institutions of higher education. Here are the risk factors and the means to mitigate them.
Quebec's francophone universities are sites of widespread sexual violence where many are victimized repeatedly, according to results of an online survey released today.
The violence ranged from verbal sexual harassment to sexual assault.
A research team based at the Université du Québec à Montréal surveyed 9,284 people who work or study at six of the province's French-speaking universities.
Want a Loyal Team? Choose Kindness over Toughness
Media and policy commentary have focused lately on Canadian employers’ apparent inability to find employees with the desired labour market skills. To explore this issue further, HEQCO reviewed and summarized the current discourse surrounding a “skills gap” in The Great Skills Divide: A Review of the Literature and conducted an analysis of Canadian job advertisements geared toward recent postsecondary graduates in Bridging the Divide, Part I: What Canadian Job Ads Said. In the latter publication, 316 job advertisements for entry-level positions requiring postsecondary education were examined to ascertain the education credentials, work experience and essential skills employers were seeking. To follow-up on Bridging the Divide, Part I, the current report analyzes survey responses from 103 employers that posted job advertisements included in the preceding study.
In particular, employers were asked if they had filled the advertised position or, if not, the reasons for being unable to find someone to hire. Those employers that had filled the position were also asked about the successful candidates’ qualifications and performance on the job so far.
When it comes to Canadian universities, the level of funding doesn’t predict performance, according to a new report from the Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario (HEQCO). In its newest and most comprehensive analysis of Canadian postsecondary systems, HEQCO finds that Ontario and Nova Scotia are top performers overall despite lower per-student operating costs, while other provinces that spend the same or in some cases considerably more money achieve average or below average performance.
This report summarizes several phases of a multiphase science education
development project occurring between April, 2004 and November, 2009 in three Inuit
communities in the northern Qikiqtani (Baffin Island) Region of Nunavut, Canada.
Although the Canadian Council on Learning (CCL) funding for this project is confined to
the development, implementation and evaluation of the influence of Inuktitut-language
place-based resources on Inuit students’ learning, it is believed by the participants of this
project that because of the dissemination forum provided by CCL, the contents in this
report should be a cumulative summary outlining the chronology of the project and its
overall findings. The project, in its entirety, is motivated to assist Inuit school communities
in achieving their aspirations for science education. The project overall focuses on (1)
establishing the current situation in science education in Kindergarten through to Grade 7
in the Qikiqtani communities, (2) identifying developmental aspirations for stakeholders
within the communities and potential contributors and constraints to these aspirations, (3)
implementing mechanisms for achieving identified aspirations, (4) evaluating the
effectiveness of such mechanisms and (5) providing suggestions for further development
projects established to assist Aboriginal, especially Inuit, communities in achieving their
goals for curriculum, in particular, science education. This project attempts to “combine the
views of both worlds” in science education for Qikiqtani students; that is, it combines the knowledge, practices, values, beliefs, and ways of knowing of both the community of scientists and Inuit culture. Equally, it also combines the views of both worlds in achieving these goals through two process development frameworks: Urie Bronfenbrenner’s bioecological model (a model that identifies teacher attributes and the environment in which they work as determinants on development) and Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit (IQ, Inuit ways of knowing and doing). This report focuses upon an evaluative overview of all phases of the
development project and the efficacy of this “two-way” model in fostering school development, especially in the area of science education.
In Germany, strong public and private investments in apprenticeship training have created a well-coordinated and functional
apprenticeship system. Its success renders the German apprenticeship system a model that other countries look to for ideas and inspiration. Nevertheless, German governments, businesses, employee groups, researchers, and other stakeholders continue to seek ways to improve the system.