It may seem natural for a president to try to appease a board, but establishing clear roles and boundaries is vitally important, write Barbara McFadden Allen, Ruth Watkins and Robin Kaler.
This research report represents the first phase of a multi-year collaborative research initiative of the Association of Colleges of Applied Arts and Technology of Ontario.1 The initiative is designed to develop a cohesive picture of the pathways from secondary school to college. The major purpose of this phase of the research was to identify secondary school students’
perceptions of Ontario colleges and of college as a possible post-secondary educational destination for them, and to determine the factors that have shaped these perceptions. A second purpose was to identify secondary school student achievement patterns, graduation rates and course enrolments in order to consider their influence on current and future college enrolments.
Last year, Yukon College announced that, by 2021, it would become Yukon University. The territory’s minister of education, Doug Graham, had approved the institution’s name change in November, but the transition has been in the works for several years, according to Yukon College president Karen Barnes. Also in November, Sheridan College, based in Brampton, Ontario, hosted a town hall meeting to outline its progress in becoming Sheridan University – a journey that started in 2011 when Sheridan’s board of directors approved the institution’s plan. Sheridan College president Jeff Zabudsky expects the process to be completed in 2020.
The 2012-13 Senate Academic Planning Task force was asked to explore "virtualization and online learning" at Queen's. In the early days, we became familiar with the history of the discussions and identified a number of controversies that had made it difficult to reach a consensus on the role of online learning at Queen's. As new and familiar themes emerged, we realized that the issue of online learning is far more complex than it had seemed, reaching into areas such as course quality, curriculum
planning, staffing, resource allocation, unit autonomy, and academic freedom. We hope that the report provided will address many of the issues about online learning that have been raised within the community. Recognizing that some of our recommendations will fall short of unanimous agreement from the community, we hope that the report will be received as balanced and progressive.
As online education moves from the fringes to the mainstream, one question still persists: “How do I know what my online students have learned?” There are no simple answers, just as there aren’t in face-to-face courses, but with a little creativity and flexibility, you soon discover that the online learning environment opens up a host of new student assessment possibilities. And, just as with traditional courses, the trick is finding the right combination that works best for your particular course.
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.
Georgia State University (GSU), a public university in Atlanta with nearly 33,000 undergraduates, has dramatically improved its rates of student success over the past decade. GSU’s six-year graduation rate has increased from 32 percent in 2003 to 54 percent in 2014.1 During the same period, GSU has made a concerted effort to increase enrollment for traditionally underserved students. Remarkably, the share of its students who are Pell eligible nearly doubled, from 31 percent in 2003 to 58 percent in 2013.
GSU’s success with traditionally underserved students has received broad recognition. National media outlets have touted the innovative programs undertaken at GSU,2 and President Obama praised GSU during the 2014 White House College Opportunity Summit.3 GSU is a core member of the University Innovation Alliance, and now hosts approximately 80 visits each year from representatives of other colleges and universities seeking to understand how GSU has achieved its success.4 To research this case study, we visited GSU’s downtown Atlanta campus in March 2015, spending two days meeting with 17 administrators and staff members.5
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.
This study focuses on culturally endorsed implicit theories of leadership (CLTs). Although cross-cultural research emphasizes that different cultural groups likely have different conceptions of what leadership should entail, a controversial position is argued here: namely that attributes associated with charismatic/transformational leadership will be universally endorsed as contribut- ing to outstanding leadership. This hypothesis was tested in 62 cultures as part of the Global Leadership and Organizational Behavior Effectiveness (GLOBE) Research Program. Universally endorsed leader attributes, as well as attributes that are universally seen as impediments to outstanding leadership and culturally contingent attributes are presented here. The results support the hypothesis that specific aspects of charismatic/transformational leadership are strongly and universally endorsed across cultures.
MANY an ephemeral emphasis has come and gone in education. Teachers still activ can remember when they were first challenged by the Palmer method of handwriting, the additive method of subtraction, homogeneous grouping, or the Dalton Plan for individualized instruction. For some years after World War I, Teachers College gave
courses in how to Americanize the flood of recent immigrants. During depression years some states began to require that their schools give instruction in the Cooperative Movement. Viewing the upsurge, in the past dozen years, of educational articles, pamphlets, films, talks, and workshops on intergroup relations, one might first ask whether this, too, will swiftly run its course as another educational fad— inspired, of course, by the highest motives.
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.”
International learning experiences are invaluable for students. Those who undertake education outside of residence develop leadership, self-re;iance, language skills, intercultural understanding, sensitivity to local and global issues, and specialist skills when they participate in work placement and field schools.
As I've mentioned before, my 7-year-old daughter takes piano lessons. One of the biggest challenges has been getting her to play for herself, not for her parents. Often I'll ask her how she thought she played a song and I'll get a shrug in return. She plays, but she doesn't listen to herself play. That lack of listening, I fear, is a sign that she's just playing because we're making her.
Many of the teaching tips I've suggested in this column have been meant to encourage your students to take responsibility for their learning. For active-learning strategies to really work, I've argued, we need students to buy in completely to our courses. They need to want to learn for themselves — not for us or a grade. To accomplish that, we can invite students to take some control over the syllabus. We can turn course policies into collaborative projects, in which students have an equal say in determining important aspects of the course. We can encourage students to articulate their goals for the course, rather than just expect them to meet ours. And we can design our courses to make sure we haven't foreclosed any of those possibilities.
The Ontario Ministry of Community and Social Services estimates that one in seven people in Ontario have a disability.1 A disability can affect a person's ability to achieve post-secondary education, and can also greatly influence their experience within a post-secondary institution. Due to overall rise in enrollment we believe that living with disabilities are an emerging issue in the post- secondary sector. Why is this population growing? In Ontario, 34 percent of people between the ages of 15 and 64 with
disabilities have a college or university degree.2 Past governments have reflected this concern within two ground-breaking bodies of legislation: the Ontarians with Disabilities Act (ODA; 2001), and within the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act (AODA; 2005). Collectively, these laws mandate that persons living with disabilities in Ontario be sufficiently accommodated.
This report provides parliamentarians with an assessment of the state of the Canadian labour market by examining indicators relative to their trend estimates, that is, the level that is estimated to occur if temporary shocks are removed.
To provide additional information on labour utilization that may not be captured by typical indicators for younger workers, PBO also examines how the educational credentials of younger university graduates match their occupational requirements.
UBC dataset on PhD outcomes holds key for prospective graduate students to make an informed choice about obtaining PhD training.
Last week, I received an email from my PhD alma mater UBC and instead of a request for donations or an invitation to an event with the expectation of soliciting a donation later, I was treated to a new dataset emerging from the west coast. UBC has collated responses from its PhD graduates between 2005 and 2013 (myself included!) into an outcomes website and document. This is a great move for a number of reasons, but perhaps most importantly, it holds the key for prospective graduate students to make an informed choice about obtaining PhD training – a comprehensive set of data showing what those who have come before you have done.
Cite this publication in the following format:
KPMG LLP (2015). Measuring the Economic Impact of Postsecondary Institutions – Appendix Toronto: Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario.
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).
Would you believe me if I told you that young Canadians likely had a major impact on the outcome of the 2015 Canadian general election?
Probably not. That’s because we have continually heard over and over that young people are politically disengaged. Few pay attention to politics. Few vote. And there is plenty of evidence that supports these claims. Elections Canada estimates that during the 2011 federal election, only 39% of Canadians aged 18 to 24 showed up at the polls. In 2008, it was 37%, down from 44% two years earlier.
But the 2015 Canadian election may have been the start of a political awakening of a new electoral powerhouse in Canada.