There is no formal mandate for or tradition of inter-sectoral collaboration between community colleges and universities in Ontario. Follow- ing a regulatory change introduced by the College of Nurses of Ontario in 1998, all Registered Nurse educational preparation was restructured to the baccalaureate degree level through province-wide adoption of a college-university collaborative nursing program model. Despite complex sectoral differences in organizational culture, mandates, and governance structures, this program model was promoted by nursing educators and policy-makers as an innovative approach to utilizing the post-secondary system’s existing nursing education infrastructure and resources. This paper provides an overview
of the introduction of Ontario’s collaborative baccalaureate nursing programs and discusses some of challenges associated with implementing and maintaining such programs.
En Ontario, il n’y a pas de mandat offi ciel ni de tradition de collaboration intersectorielle entre les collèges communautaires et les universités. À la suite d’une modifi cation réglementaire apportée par l’Ordre des infi rmières et infi rmiers de l’Ontario en 1998, toute la formation pédagogique de niveau baccalauréat du personnel infi rmier a été restructurée par l’adoption à la grandeur de la province d’un modèle de programme de formation en sciences infirmières offert conjointement par les collèges et les universités. En dépit de différences complexes entre ces deux secteurs aux plans de la culture organisationnelle, des mandats et des structures de gouvernance, les enseignants en soins infirmiers et les décideurs ont fait la promotion de ce modèle de pro- gramme en tant qu’approche novatrice pour utiliser l’infrastructure et les ressources de formation en sciences infirmières déjà en place dans le réseau postsecondaire. Cet article offre un aperçu de l’introduction des programmes ontariens de baccalauréat conjoint en sciences infir- mières et examine quelques-uns des obstacles associés à la mise en œuvre et au maintien de ces programmes.
THE POSTSECONDARY REVIEW led by Bob Rae has presented a bracing diagnosis of a system he accurately describes as strong, but in serious jeopardy. OCUFA agrees that Ontario’s community colleges and universities are “on the edge of the choice between steady decline and great improvement” and that making the choice for improvement “will require more resources as well as a will to change.”
In other areas, Mr. Rae’s framing of the questions suggests a direction OCUFA would find troubling. The Discussion Paper’s section on “Accessibility” does not consider at all the financial barriers to participating in higher education. Instead, tuition and student aid are a major focus of the “Funding” section, pointing to an apparent belief that reformed student assistance accompanied by higher tuition fees could be a significant source of increased resources for community colleges and universities. In this submission, OCUFA calls attention to evidence from other jurisdictions that student aid innovations, in
particular the “go now-pay later” example currently being exported from Australia to the United Kingdom, will not deliver the hoped-for salvation. Instead, we set out the case for significantly increased public funding for higher education.We have organized our submission along the five main themes set out in the Discussion Paper: accessibility, quality, system design, funding and accountability.
Trust, fights, and child care. When I’m advising start-up teams nowadays, I ask a lot of questions around those three areas. Which makes it sounds more like a marriage counselor’s office, rather than a boardroom, right?
Quite often, the teams I’m talking with think culture is some woo-woo stuff that doesn’t make any difference in the end, or even if they think it does matter, they have an excruciatingly hard time describing what theirs is.
It's one of the commonly held beliefs about First Nations people in this country: they all get free post-secondary education.
Problem is, it's not true. And the reality is much more complicated.
To help make sense of it, here's a little of what Canadians should know about First Nations people and funding for
post-secondary education.
In a much-discussed article at Slate, social psychologist Michael Inzlicht told a reporter, “Meta-analyses are fucked” (Engber, 2016). What does it mean, in science, for something to be fucked? Fucked needs to mean more than that something is complicated or must be undertaken with thought and care, as that would be trivially true of everything in science. In this class we will go a step further and say that something is fucked if it presents hard conceptual challenges to which implementable, real-world solutions for working scientists are either not available or routinely
ignored in practice.
Three teacher education tasks are analyzed using Bateson's "levels of learning" and the distinction between reference experiences and cognitive maps (Dilts, l994). The tasks were 1) writing a risk log of classroom innovations, 2) writing articles, and 3) doing public presentations. Student feedback indicated perceived shifts in behaviors, beliefs, and identities
through both active tasking (reference experiences) and their ongoing dynamic "explanations" (cognitive mapping). The results and activities are then discussed in relation to Freeman's (1992, 1994, 1995) concept of the socialization of teachers into professional discourse and the value of communities of explanation toward continual teacher development.
Professionalism, elucidates the philanthropic dimension of the contemporary faculty career. In this volume, scholars address the notion that in addition to teaching, research, and service, contributing to the public good by way of philanthropy is inherent in the fabric of the academic professorial career and as such, they advocate for its recognition as a dimension of faculty work.
When people first think of professorial philanthropy, they may conjure images of faculty engaging in activities such as community service. Shaker takes a different stance, focusing on the element of the faculty role that serves the public good in its broadest form. Therefore, to illustrate this paradigm shift, Shaker reflects on her graduate advisor’s philanthropic actions from which she benefited, including mentorship sessions, motivational meetings, one-on-one writing time, access to
personal office space, introduction to personal contacts, and gifted books. Employing her personal experience as a springboard, Shaker argues that the faculty profession is “grounded in a responsibility to contribute to the public good. The expectation to meet society’s needs for an educated citizenry and societal requirements to advance and disseminate knowledge lend a philanthropic component to the act of being a faculty member” (p. 11). Thus, Shaker asserts that the faculty profession is anchored in the responsibility to growing demands of research productivity and increased pressure for student accountability, calls to both preserve and recognize the importance of faculty philanthropy.
Faculty development has its own set of fundamentals. More than 20 years ago, I co-authored a grant establishing the faculty development center at the University of Central Arkansas. Over the years, I have served as faculty coordinator, co-director, and director. My experiences may benefit others who are working in the field or plan to in the future. Here are five fundamentals for designing and delivering effective faculty development:
At the turn of the century there were many companies in business providing the delivery of ice blocks to people’s homes. Then electricity became prevalent, and the refrigerator was invented. Shortly thereafter, these ice block delivery companies went out of business. What they failed to realize was that they were not in the ice block delivery business – they were in the business of delivering personal cooling – for people’s chicken, eggs, and soft drinks. Organizations that design, develop, and deliver training are at the same precipice. If we think that we are in the business of only delivering formally developed, instructionally sound, objective-laden, extremely vetted content in extended chunks, then we will also go the way of the ice-block delivery companies. We are in the business of impact – impact for the learner and the business – in terms of behavior, performance, and, ultimately, the bottom line. Any means in which we are able to provide that should be our focus.
There has been much hype of late about building 'global citizens' out of our internationally mobilehigher education students and academics.
Beware reliance on teaching excellence framework metrics, says Claire Taylor
International learning experiences are invaluable for students. Those who undertake education outside their country of residence develop leadership, self-reliance, language skills, intercultural understanding, sensitivity to local and global issues, and specialist skills when they participate in work placements and field schools. Employers also say that international experience gained through education makes a positive contribution to the workplace.1
Both students and educators have long recognized the value of learning abroad. Despite this, and the fact that almost all Canadian colleges and universities offer education-abroad opportunities (including semester exchanges, short-term study abroad, field school, and service learning), relatively few post-secondary students actually participate. Only 3.1 per cent of full-time university students2 and 1.1 per cent of full-time college students3in Canadian have gone abroad for part of their studies. Compared to some OECD countries, these figures are slim. In Germany, for example, fully 25 per cent of students in bachelors and masters programs have participated in a study abroad experience, and the country hopes to raise this number to 50 per cent by 2020.4
I’ve been ruminating lately about tests and wondering if our thinking about them hasn’t gotten into something of a rut. We give exams for two reasons. First, we use exams to assess the degree to which students have mastered the content and skills of the course. But like students, we can get too focused on this grade-generating function of exams. We forget the second reason (or take it for granted): exams are learning events. Most students study for them, perhaps not as much or in the ways we might like, but before an exam most students are engaged with the content. Should we be doing more to increase the learning potential inherent in exam experiences?
Rural and northern students face unique challenges in accessing post-secondary education. A rural student is a student who identifies as being from outside of the following urban centers: the Hamilton, Ottawa, London, Windsor, the Greater Toronto
Area, Niagara Region, Waterloo Region, Thunder Bay, and Sudbury. A northern student is a student who identifies as being from one of the following regional districts: Kenora, Rainy River, Thunder Bay, Cochrane, Algoma, Sudbury, Timiskaming, Nipissing,
Manitoulin, and Parry Sound.
“I want to be able to engage in the grand calling of a Socratic teacher, which is not to persuade and convince students, but to unsettle and unnerve and maybe even unhouse a few students, so that they experience that wonderful vertigo and dizziness in recognizing at least for a moment that their world view rests on pudding, but then see that they have something to fall back on. It's the shaping and forming of critical sensibility. That, for me, is what the high calling of pedagogy really is.”
Wish I had a dollar for every speech intoned by corporate leaders and politicians alike about the human capital needs of the so-called “learning society” or the “knowledge economy”. Cradle to grave learning is the key to a healthier, safer, more just and prosperous future for all of us. That’s what we’re told. And it’s all true. But public policy lags well behind the Alice in Wonderland rhetoric. “Jam yesterday, jam tomorrow but never jam today,” said Alice. Even in Ontario, with a Premier so committed to education, achieving a seamless continuum of effective learning implied by the learning society vision, remains elusive.
The debate over how universities and colleges should relate to one another has been lively in Ontario for at least two decades.
Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology tasked with examining the future of online
education have
returned with a simple recommendation for colleges and universities: focus on people and process,
not technology.
Back in 2013, an MIT task force presented a vision of undergraduate education at the institute in which students spend half as much time on campus as they do today. Freshman year would be fully online, and instead of a senior year, students would take online continuing education courses to refresh their knowledge and add new skills. That vision leaned heavily on MIT’s work with edX, the massive open online course provider it founded with Harvard University.
Picture it — a group of young people hurriedly making their way to Parliament Hill to meet with MPs
and senators.
Maybe it sounds unlikely, but it happened earlier this month, when student lobbyists had nearly 200
meetings with decision-makers to argue their case for accessible post-secondary education.
The Trudeau government says it’s focused on the promise of innovation and human potential.
Universities are a key part of the conversation — but would the Canadian Federation of Students’
idea of free tuition make Canada more
innovative?
For many decades America enjoyed a well-deserved reputation as a leader in technological innovation and creativity and most countries of the world looked toward the United States for indications of what was likely to become the next global trend. Clearly, America's pre-eminence in many areas of technology has been challenged by such countries as Japan, Germany and more recently China. However, many innovations and developments of a socio-economic nature also tend to have their origins in the U.S. and are frequently a harbinger of what is likely to occur in three, five or even ten years hence in other parts of the world.