A total of 61,696 full-time applicants to Ontario colleges opted-in to participate in the 2015
UCAS™:
59,568 English-speaking applicants and 2,128 French-speaking applicants at the time of survey
administration.
• Academica Group provided unique web links as well as the invitation email text to the Ontario
College Application Service (OCAS). OCAS then sent the survey invitation email to college
applicants. Applicant contact information was not shared with Academica Group at any point in the
process.
• The survey was in-field from March 12 to April 21, 2015. Reminder emails were sent on March
24 and April 8 to those who had not yet responded. Respondents who completed the survey were
entered into a draw to win over $5,000 in prizes.
• 14,331 college respondents completed the survey (13,661 English and 670 French) providing an
overall
response rate of 23%.
• This sample size provides results at the 95% confidence level of plus or minus 0.39
percentage points.
• Respondent data was weighted by gender and language to reflect the original population
invited to
participate.
ONE set of circumstances distinguishes the present crucial demand for strong educational leadership from past demands: the pressures for change in school and society outweigh any in the past century. Freedom, democracy, human dignity are under fire. The repercussions of this upheaval are reaching into almost every community in the land. No other period of civilization has witnessed the kinds of changes which have occurred in the past half century and are continuing. Scarcely a single aspect of present-day society has not been altered markedly in this brief period. Building a school program to keep pace with—let alone contribute to—change requires effective educational leadership.
Kennett, Mo.
Drive 90 miles north on Interstate 55 from Memphis, then 20 miles west on Route 412, cutting through seemingly endless fields of cotton, rice, and soybeans. You’ll know you’ve arrived when you see the sign: Welcome to Kennett. Hometown of Sheryl Crow.
This small town in southeastern Missouri used to greet visitors with a different motto: "Service. Industry. Agriculture." But the machine-parts-maker closed and the trailer manufacturer left and the aluminum smelter went under. There’s not nearly as much industry around here as there used to be. Sheryl Crow’s Grammys aren’t going anywhere.
Background/Context: This exploratory feasibility study assesses a mindfulness program in a fifth-grade classroom. The research discussed herein was built on a previous study targeted at a specific population of children within the classroom and assessed the benefits of teach-ing mindfulness meditation to 7- and 8-year-old children who met criteria for generalized anxiety disorder.
Purpose/Focus of Study: The primary aim of this exploratory study was to investigate the feasibility of a mindfulness training workbook written for young children. The mindfulness workbook uses a fictional character in a storybook format. The goal was to help children understand and access their own mindfulness within the classroom setting without instruc-tion by teachers and without using meditation techniques.
California State University at Sacramento, like more than a thousand other institutions in the U.S., uses the learning
management system Blackboard Learn, but likely not for much longer.
Sacramento State is getting ready to upgrade. And like many institutions in its situation, the university is looking at systems that are hosted in the cloud and delivered as software as a service (SaaS).
Moving to the cloud normally means paying more, but it does come with some benefits. Virtually no downtime is a big one. Software providers can push new features and critical patches to all its customers in the cloud, instead of colleges having to take their systems offline for maintenance. Colleges also don’t need to worry about servers if their systems are hosted in the cloud.
What will it take for students to succeed beyond high school? How are schools preparing students for the reality of
college-level work?
One method that has gained popularity in the United States is allowing students to take college-level courses that apply toward their high school credits and can also be transferred to colleges, if they choose to pursue postsecondary education. This is known as a dual-credit program, and it is widely used and popular in the United States.
This report was commissioned by the Canadian Council of Chief Executives (CCCE) as part of a multi-year effort to improve the quality of education and skills training in Canada while enhancing young people’s ability to succeed in the 21st century job market. Opinions in the paper are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the CCCE or its members.
paranoia is widespread in Canada. Elementary pupils are coming home after receiving the “job talk” from their teachers, typically emphasizing the importance of getting good grades so they can get into a high-quality university – rarely a college, a polytechnic institute or an apprenticeship program. Parents worry about enrolling their children in the “right” schools and academic programs. There is growing concern about the transition from school to work. News media, television programs and movies offer tales of underemployed university and college graduates, intense competition for decent jobs and chronic youth unemployment.
Before choosing a supervisor, get to know them—and get to know yourself.
Ask any of my family members and they will tell you that my middle name should be “indecisive.” I am in a constant battle with the “shoulds” and “shouldn’ts” of life. When choosing my undergraduate institution I couldn’t make a decision, so I did what any rational person would do: I rolled a fuzzy dice. Even numbers were one institution and odd numbers were the other. I rolled an even number and based on that one moment in time, the next four years of my life were decided (please note, I do not recommend this method for others).
Data on how well the information and communication technology (ICT) needs of 1354 Canadian college and university students with disabilities are met on and off campus were collected using the newly developed POSITIVES Scale (Postsecondary Information Technology Initiative Scale). The measure contains 26 items which use a 6- point Likert scale (1 = strongly disagree, 6 = strongly agree) to indicate level of agreement with each of the positively worded items. It has three factor analysis-derived subscales (ICTs at School Meet Student’s Needs, ICTs at Home Meet Student’s Needs, E-learning ICTs Meet Student’s Needs) and a total score. Reliability and validity are excellent for both English and French versions. Versions that could be completed online, on paper (printable PDF), and within a Microsoft Word document were found to be equivalent.
It is entirely possible that a common definition of quality in education is an impossible goal. This is puzzling, since everyone knows what it looks like. It is the transfer of enthusiasm for knowledge and discovery from professor to student. It sparks the desire in a new generation to push the envelope of human understanding further than it has ever been pushed. It teaches the weight of responsibility to conduct this discovery responsibly, ethically and with future generations in mind.
One of the commitments emerging from the Canadian Education Association’s What’s Standing in the Way of Change in Education? workshop in Calgary in October 2013 was to convene a series of Regional Workshops designed to expand
the conversation about change in Canada’s education systems. To this end, in the Spring of 2014, similar workshops were held in New Brunswick, Manitoba, Ontario and British Columbia with a final session held in Quebec in August, 2014.
There has been much hype of late about building 'global citizens' out of our internationally mobilehigher education students and academics.
For a growing number of student, the post-secondary experience invovles a mixed backpack of university courses, college programs, intrships, an online class or two, and even perhaps a few YouTube tutorials. But whatever the mix,it's bound to be unique for each student.
We set out to determine whether hybrid delivery of a college program could facilitate completion of an apprenticeship. We found unanticipated complexity in the answer. The hybrid program delivered completion rates and average student grades that were comparable to those in a program delivered entirely in the classroom, but in only half the required time. However, we found that performance in the in-class portion of the program was not always linked to apprenticeship completion. The factors affecting completion are varied, in part because different stakeholders place a different value on completion.
TheEffective Classroom Interactions (ECI) online courses were designed to provide an engaging, effective and scalable approach to enhancing early childhood teachers’ use of classroom practices that impact children’s school readiness. The created courses included several versions aimed at testing whether or not certain design aspects could increase participation and subsequent learning outcomes. The purpose of this study was to examine the extent to which early childhood teachers accessed the courses and varied in their (a) participation in the core course content and (b) optional discussion board as a result of the course experience they were assigned to as well as individual characteristics that may be associated with participation. As might be expected, findings indicated that early childhood teachers accessed the course often on nights and weekends, even though participating centers allowed their teachers to do coursework during work time. In addition, participants reported high levels of satisfaction with their experience. Both persistence in the ECI courses and overall completion of activities were higher than those reported in other studies of online learning. The participation of early childhood educator teachers was consistently predicted by comfort with technology, credit or non-credit status and assignment to the group that included regular conferences with the instructor. These relationships, however, did not always occur in expected ways. Implications for exploring online learning as a feasible option for early childhood educators are discussed.
The comparative performance of education systems is attracting more attention than ever before. In Canada, questions have been raised about whether we are keeping pace with the world’s leading education systems, and whether our performance has been eroding over time. There are also concerns about whether too many students from less advantaged backgrounds are being left behind. This report reviews the latest international evidence regarding achievement and equity in education. It shows that, in terms of achievement, Canada consistently places among an elite group of high performing countries and economies.
Moreover, Canada continues to be a leader in terms of equity: public schools in Canada are among the best in the world at helping to level the playing field between rich and poor children, and Canada is one of only a very few high-immigration countries that show no significant achievement gap between immigrants and non-immigrants. In fact, Canada distinguishes itself by its ability to combine high levels of achievement and high degrees of equity in education.
At the same time, Canada is not without its challenges. There has been a modest decline in Canada’s performance over time, and Canada’s relative advantage is diminishing as a number of other rapidly modernizing countries are catching up. And while the education attainment of Aboriginal peoples in Canada is increasing, the achievement gap between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal peoples at the higher end of the education attainment spectrum is still getting wider. No matter how well Canada may have performed to date in any given international study, there is will always be a need to strive for improvement.
The purpose of this document is to provide a high-level introduction to economic impact analysis (EIA) in a postsecondary education (PSE) context, written for a non-subject-expert audience of postsecondary institution stakeholders. It is intended to serve as broad context for individuals in the postsecondary education community who may wish to measure the economic impacts of their institutions or understand the methods, findings and limitations in studies done elsewhere. The information contained herein is of a general nature and is not intended to be an exhaustive, detailed quantitative textbook in actually conducting such studies, nor is it intended to address the circumstances of any specific individual or entity.
Welland, Ont.-based Niagara College offers tourism, hospitality and business courses at its campus in Taif, which opened in 2014, while Ottawa's Algonquin College offers 10 programs, including business, accounting and electrical engineering technician, at a campus opened in 2013 in the city of Jazan.
The Local 242 OPSEU rep said faculty members are uncomfortable with the school's association in Saudi Arabia, a country with a "horrible" human rights record, he said. Ramkissoonsingh said staff has been against the Saudi expansion since day one, and have continued to feel uncomfortable as their course material is taught at the segregated campus.
Two years ago, Niagara College successfully bid to open a campus in Saudi Arabia. At the time, the school said they expected an annual injection of $8 million to the college budget, said Ramkissoonsingh.
The focus of this paper is on the importance of early educational engagement in the retention of postsecondary students. Tinto (1975, 1987) argues that greater academic and social integration in college leads to higher rates of retention. Empirical tests of the claim have been mixed and a frequent criticism of such studies is that the variables used to construct the academic
and social integration measures are not consistent across studies, making it difficult to replicate the results of individual studies. Questions on the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE), however, offer a way around the difficulty of generalization. NSSE, administered nationally to freshmen and seniors by the Center for Postsecondary Research and Planning at Indiana University, is designed to measure student engagement. Since many of the questions about engagement are concerned with various aspects of students’ integration, by using the questions on NSSE to measure social and academic integration we hope to provide an easy and replicable way to examine the effect of integration on student retention.
Many higher education institutions use student satisfaction surveys given at the end of a course to measure course and instructor quality. But is that really a true measure of quality? All things being equal, an instructor who teaches a rigorous course will likely score much lower than an instructor whose course is a little less demanding.
Then there’s the whole timing of the satisfaction surveys. For the most part, students are simply glad the course is over (even if they liked it) and put little thought or time into completing the survey. Unless of course they know they failed, in which case you will get a detailed assessment of how you are boring, inflexible, out of touch, or otherwise unfit to teach.