It is easy to silo away postsecondary education within the confines of our provincial borders. Our hope with this project is to shed light on an issue with which all students regardless of jurisdiction have to deal. The mental health of students is a unifying theme and priority for student organisations such as ours’ across the country.
Unlike some more-easily defined issues being tackled by student organisations, such as high debt
levels and youth employment, mental health-related problems remain somewhat of a taboo subject for legislators and university officials alike.
Traditional lack of awareness and a societal inability to separate mental illness from physical
ailments has contributed to a grossly underfunded and poorly-equipped postsecondary sector that, while well-intentioned, has failed to grasp the magnitude of the mental health challenges facing its students.
There is a long-standing debate over the value of certain postsecondary pro-grams in facilitating employment after graduation. The National Graduate Survey (2005) was used to examine how graduates of various programs differ in their pursuits of higher education, employment status, job-program relat-edness and job qualifications. Results suggest that graduates from humani-ties are more likely to pursue higher education, are less likely to be employed full time, are more likely to have jobs unrelated to their program, and are more likely to be overqualified for their jobs. These findings highlight that humanities programs may not provide the knowledge and skills that are in current economic demand.
One of the important questions to consider in a review of policy for postsecondary education is what kind of system do we need. To provide a reasonably complete answer to that question would require addressing many different dimensions of postsecondary
education including structures, processes, and relationships. In this paper, I will concentrate on two important and closely related subsidiary questions within the broader question of what kind of system we need. Those subsidiary questions are what is the most appropriate mix of different types of postsecondary institutions, and what should be their relationships with one another?1 As those are pretty large questions, within them my principal focus will be even narrower, on the balance and relationship between universities and community colleges.
College teachers love techniques. If you’re invited to lead a teaching workshop, you can expect to be asked, “Will you share some good techniques?” Suggest them in the workshop and watch lots of smiling participants write them down with great enthusiasm. Why do we love teaching techniques so much? Because many of us come to teaching not having many? Because they work? Because they keep our teaching feeling fresh?
Recently, I received an email from a student asking me the name of a writer -- a writer whose book we’d been reading for two weeks. (And discussing in class. And writing about in class.) It was not a textbook, anthology or unusual digital source. It was an old-fashioned printed book containing one play by one writer.
I knew that the student owned the book, because I had seen her with it in class, and in fact, she had told me she was enjoying the reading. However, when it was time for her to do an assignment on the playwright … well, she was stumped. She just didn’t know his name.
I had to explain to her, carefully, and with what I hope was compassion, that if she hadn’t picked up his name in the class discussions so far (or, I was thinking, in the course syllabus and calendar), then she could always try looking on the front cover of the book.
Each year, many of us make New Year’s resolutions and try and keep them. Others, usually newspapers and media outlets, speculate on the key things to watch out for during the coming year. Rather than resolutions or predictions, we list ten developments we wish for online learning in 2016.
We hope these come true, but it will take clear resolution, firm commitment and lots of hard work by all to make them happen. This is why we refer to this as a “wish list”.
Not from the realm of pure speculation, all items in our list are developments from current practices in technology, learning, and public policy.
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."
The boundaries between vocational and academic post compulsory education have been blurred by students combining vocational and academic studies and by students transferring increasingly between the two types of education. Institutions are also blurring the boundaries between the sectors by increasingly offering programs from two and sometimes three sectors. In contrast, teachers seem more entrenched than ever in their own sector. This article reports a project on the preparation of Australian teachers of vocational education. It examines the prospect of integrating the preparation of teachers in post compulsory education to teach in schools, vocational education institutions and higher education institutions. It argues that greater differentiation between different types of vocational teachers and vocational teacher preparation can support the development of a continuum along which it would be possible to establish points of commonality with the preparation of school and higher education teachers.
Now here’s an argument I haven’t heard before: Improving your instruction makes it easier for students to learn. If it’s easier for them to learn, they won’t work as hard in the course, and that means they could learn less. It’s called offsetting behavior and we can’t ask students about it directly because it would be disingenuous for them to admit to studying less when learning becomes easier.
Nearly 25,700 full-time Ontario college students received tuition refunds after a five-week strike derailed their semester.
Ontario's Ministry of Advanced Education confirmed Tuesday that 10.3 per cent of Ontario's roughly 250,000 full-time college students asked for, and received, their money back after the strike.
Minister Deb Matthews said the figures are still preliminary and could change in the coming weeks as further numbers are reported by Ontario's 24 colleges.
This paper seeks to address the systemic barriers that impact the ability of Aboriginal peoples to access, persist and succeed in post-secondary education. Given histories of discrimination and chronic underfunding of Aboriginal education at both the K-12 and post-secondary level, OUSA believes that action must be taken by all levels of government and institutions. This
is particularly pressing as recent figures have shown that the attainment gap for Aboriginal peoples1 may in fact be widening. OUSA affirms the importance of self-determination for Aboriginal peoples, and stresses that any policy intervention must be undertaken in direct partnership and consultation with Aboriginal communities.
During the 2014-15 academic year, 9.4 percent of all students attended more than one institution, a figure that has remained constant for the last three years. In each year shown, the mobility rate was highest for students who began the academic year at a two-year public institution. The postsecondary student one-year mobility rate is the percentage of students, across all levels of study, who enrolled in more than one institution within a single academic year (including summer and concurrent enrollments). It
provides a current indicator of the likely double-counting of institution-based annual enrollment reporting.
The increasing scarcity of women within higher academic ranks is troublesome, especially as associate and full-professors with tenure are generally those tapped for leadership positions. This study surveyed female administrators in distance education in an effort to thematically analyze their perceptions of distance learning in higher education. Themes that garnered more input from the women included the following: assumptions of gender disparity, the optimistic viewpoint that in the future more women will succeed as administrators in distance education, and the belief that the role of administrators was to provide value and goals in distance education but that change in this arena was too slow and obstructions to the quality of distance learning needed to be eliminated. In addition, it appears that Caucasian (non - Hispanic) women are more prone to suggest that gender disparity is a problem and women who hold a higher level of administration spoke less often about problems with gender disparity and appeared to have a more positive attitude.
As recent state critiques of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) make clear, the states and federal government are far apart in their understanding of how the spirit of NCLB might continue to take tangible form. This brief article lays out some of the major divides and their implications and urges that the two sides work in good faith to bridge them.
It comes as little surprise that the consensus forged around the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) back in 2001 has begun to unravel. The surprise was that such a consensus was achieved at the time—and doing so required, besides hard work, an appeal to ambiguity during the legislative process that could not be sustained once implementation of the law began. Once the Department of Education, states, and districts had to tangle with the tangible requirements of (among other things) setting standards, creating tests, hiring highly qualified teachers, and providing supplemental tutoring, the widely supported ideal of “accountability” was bound to give way to a series of definitional disputes.
Along with the massification of higher education and increasing costs, the pressure on institutions to retain all students to degree completion has been mounting (Crosling, Thomas, and Heagney, 2008). On an international level, for the first time in
the nation’s history, the Unites States is falling behind other nations in terms of the percentage of the population who is educated (National Science Board, 2008). Nationally, obtaining a higher education degree has been linked to economic growth (Baum and Ma, 2007), which may be particularly poignant during the current recession. At an institutional level, the costs of not retaining students are substantial, both financially and in terms of prestige (Crosling, Thomas, and Heagney, 2008).
No validated tools assess all four competency domains described in the 2011 report Core Competencies for Interprofessional Collaborative Practice (IPEC Report). The purpose of this study was to develop and validate a tool based on the IPEC Report core
competency domains that assesses the interprofessional attitudes of students in the health professions.
The quality of students’ relationships with teachers and peers is a fundamental substrate for the development of academic engagement and achievement. This chapter offers teachers and researchers a motivational framework that explains how positive
and negative student–teacher and student–peer relationships are sustained in the classroom, and strategies for creating solutions to improve relationships.
It’s a confusing post-secondary landscape out there, with universities that are home to colleges and colleges becoming universities. Then there are the polytechnics. A true polytechnic offers four-year bachelor’s degrees, but isn’t a university. It offers apprenticeship programs and on-the-job learning, but isn’t a community college. The wrong thing to do would be to go by the name.
Post secondary education continues to face major challenges in Ontario. Despite an injection of much needed funding in 2005, Ontario universities remain chronically under funded. Inadequate support threatens the global competitiveness of Ontario
universities and the provincial economy.
The need for online and blended programs within higher education continues to grow as the student population in the nited States becomes increasingly non-traditional. As administrators strategically offer and expand online and blended programs, faculty recruitment and retention will be key. This case study highlights how a public comprehensive university utilized the results of a 2012 institutional study to design faculty development initiatives, an online course development process, and an online course review process to support faculty participation and retention in online and blended programs. Recommendations based on this case study include replicable strategies on how to increase faculty participation and retention in online and blended programs using collaboration, support, and ongoing assessment. This case study is a compendium to the 2012 Armstrong institutional study highlighted in the article "Factors Influencing Faculty Participation & Retention In Online & Blended Education."