It’s no breaking news that technology is here to stay. Among other things, this means that all schoolkids today, including your child, grandchild, niece and nephew, rely on their tech skills to excel at school. By the time they finish school, they will be required to implement a variety of tech skills on a daily basis at work.
As a parent, grandparent, aunt or uncle you now have to teach your child a new skill: tech intelligence. And the worst part is that by their teens, your kids are likely to surpass your tech-savviness, so you have to do it as early as you can
When Canada was created in 1867, the churches were already operating a small num-ber of boarding schools for Aboriginal people. In the coming years, Roman Catholic and Protestant missionaries established missions and small boarding schools throughout the West. The relationship between the government and the churches was formalized in 1883 when the federal government decided to establish three large residential schools in west-ern Canada.
Engagement. . .it’s another one of those words that’s regularly bandied about in higher education. We talk about it like we know what it means and we do, sort of. It’s just that when a word or idea is so widely used, thinking about it often stops and that’s what I think has happened with engagement.
The focus of the article is to provide recommendations for how to design learning environments to foster
greater creativity. I bring together art education research, creativity research, and learning sciences research to provide recommendations for how to design learning environments to foster creative learning outcomes.
The skills that individuals develop play a pivotal role in determining their labour-market opportunities and life chances in general, and are of vital importance to a country’s economic performance and many social outcomes. Post-secondary education (PSE) is a primary means by which Canadians obtain the skills that they need.
It is therefore essential to have accurate, up-to-date, and relevant learning and labour market information (LLMI) that is widely available so that all players in the PSE system – students making their PSE choices, PSE institutions deciding which programs to offer, policy makers, and the general public – can make informed decisions.
Listening: An Introduction
There seems to be a growing realization of the importance of solid listening and communication skills. After all, lack of attention and respectful listening can be costly ‐ leading to mistakes, poor service, misaligned goals, wasted time and lack of teamwork.
The philosophical halls are ringing lately with an argument over the virtue of graduate-student publication. J. David Velleman, a professor of philosophy at New York University, started the clamor in July when he posted "The publication Emergency" on a philosophers’ blog, "The Daily
Nous."
Velleman makes a simple but radical two-part proposal:
First, philosophy journals "should adopt a policy of refusing to publish work by graduate students."
Second, to give teeth to the ban, Velleman suggests that philosophy departments "adopt a policy of
discounting graduate-student work in tenure-and-promotion reviews."
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.
Every year, some 55,000 students make transfers between post-secondary institutions within Ontario (ONCAT Annual Report 2016-17). Some students decide to transfer mid-degree to enter specific programs with courses they could not take elsewhere. Others may transfer for a variety of reasons, whether it be to make university more affordable, to be closer to family, or to improve the student’s mental health. The choice to transfer institutions is one made with the student’s academic and personal best interests in mind, and oftentimes the student has little to no control over the circumstances driving their decision.
This report is an assessment of the programme “Lernen vor Ort” [LvO – “Learning Locally”] initiated by the German federal government in order to support the development of local governance structures in education. LvO ran between 2009 and 2014 in about 40 participating local governments, which were chosen in a competitive process. It aimed at promoting cooperation between local governments and civil society stakeholders, creating sustainable structures in educational monitoring, management and consulting as well as improving local capacities in knowledge management. Besides providing
important background information on the German education system and the design of the LvO programme, this study engages in five detailed case studies of the implementation of the LvO programme in different local authorities. These studies are mainly based on approximately 90 interviews with local and national experts, and stakeholders. The main findings are that LvO can be regarded as a success due to the fact that it had a lasting and probably sustainable impact in the cases studied in this report, in particular with regard to those structures that produce concrete and visible outputs, such as educational monitoring. The case studies also reveal a number of local factors that influence the relative effectiveness of the implementation of the programme. Political leadership and support from the head of the local government are crucial, in particular during critical situations during the implementation. Furthermore, the impact of the programme was particularly positive, when the process of local implementation was characterised by clear communication strategies, broad stakeholder involvement in governing bodies and the implementation of concrete goals and projects. However, relative success also depended on important background factors such as local socio-economic conditions as well as financial and administrative capacities, which could not be adressed directly by the programme’s goals. The report concludes with some general recommendations and lessons learned of relevance for other countries.
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).
NEW YORK -- Administrators sometimes disagree with faculty members about the value of online education, and nthusiastic instructors sometimes clash with skeptics. But what can colleges do when their students are the ones esisting change?
he question emerged here last week as the Teagle Foundation, which supports liberal arts education, brought ogether grant recipients to provide updates on nine projects involving blended learning -- face-to-face courses with ome online content. The collaborative projects, many of which won’t conclude until 2017 and 2018, have attracted articipation from more than 110 faculty members and staffers and 115 students at about 40 colleges and universities in 16 states.
Rates of depression and anxiety among young people in America have been increasing steadily for the past 50 to 70 years. Today, by at least some estimates, five to eight times as many high school and college students meet the criteria for diagnosis of major depression and/or anxiety disorder as was true half a century or more ago. This increased psychopathology is not the result of changed diagnostic criteria; it holds even when the measures and criteria are constant.
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.
Interest from Americans looking to study in Canada has increased sharply since the election of Donald Trump as the
next U.S. president, Canadian universities say.
For example, the University of Toronto’s enrolment website received 10 times more traffic from computers based in the United States on the day after the election than on the day before, said Ted Sargent, the school’s vice-president international.
On Nov. 8, the site received a typical 1,000 visits, Sargent said. On Nov. 9, the number jumped to 10,000.
This!project!researched!the!impact!of!bachelor!degrees!on!colleges!and!students.!It!includes!four!main! methodological!components.!The!first!was!an!extensive!literature!review!of!the!literature!in!Ontario,! Canada!and!international!relevant!jurisdictions.!This!is!included!in!the!main!report.!The!literature!review! also!analysed!39!theses!on!college!baccalaureates!in!the!North!America,!including!seven!based!on! Canada.!This!is!included!as!Appendix!2.!The!second!is!the!process!of!data!analysis!which!had!two! components.!The!first!component!was!analysis!of!open!access!policy!and!accreditation!documents!and! college!websites.!The!second!component!was!analysis!of!the!Ontario!Student!Satisfaction!Survey,!the! Graduate!Outcomes!Survey,!the!Ontario!Employer!Survey!of!college!graduates!and!college!enrolment! data!and!graduation!rates.!The!second!consists!of!interviews!with!102!people,!including!policy!leaders,! institutional!leaders,!faculty!members!and!degree!students.!The!fourth!is!a!curriculum!analysis!that! compares!and!contrasts!four!degrees!in!colleges,!four!degrees!in!universities!that!emphasise! experiential!learning,!and!four!degrees!in!traditional!universities.!
The 2016 First-Year Student Survey marks the 22nd cooperative study undertaken by the Canadian University Survey Consortium/Consortium canadien de recherche sur les étudiants universitaires (CUSC-CCREU). The 2016 survey involved 34 universities and almost 15,000 first-year university students from across Canada.
I continue to be impressed by the need for teachers to clarify common aspects of instruction instead of assuming that students’ understanding of what they entail are the same as ours. Participation is a good example. How often is it defined in the course syllabus? How often is it characterized beyond the basics when it’s discussed at the beginning of the course or at different times throughout the semester? We do probably agree on the essentials— questions, answers, and comments—but much more
than that is needed if classroom interaction is to realize its potential as a student engagement strategy. Here’s an example of the degree of clarification I think we should be after:
W e’ve all read the startling stories about lax standards in higher education. As faculty members, we’ve struggled with the growing expectation among undergraduates that a minor amount of work should be the norm for collegelevel courses. In their 2011 book, Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses, Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa found that half of the students in the study’s sample "had not taken a single course during the prior semester that required more than 20 pages of writing, and one-third hadn’t taken one that required even 40 pages of reading per week."
New thinking about course scheduling policies and practices makes student needs a top priority