Most universities still offer Learning Management Systems (LMS) as the ‘one size fits all’ technology solution for all teachers across all disciplines. Using LMS across diverse campuses has resulted in efficiencies-of-scale for administrators, however LMS integration into teacher practices is minimal (e.g., Conole & Fill, 2005) and teachers’ creative space can be limited for discipline-based innovation. Together, these realities indicate that there are significant barriers to the effective use of LMSs, especially for teaching and learning purposes.
To overcome such barriers, the complex and less visible internal space of teacher beliefs must be understood in relation to teachers’ pedagogical contexts and the affordances they can identify. This paper reports on the findings of six qualitative case studies of teachers at different stages of LMS integration and the extent to which teachers reconciled their beliefs. The results highlight the need for technology environments that better accommodate teacher diversity.
Keywords: teacher beliefs, teacher diversity, affordances, LMS, university teacher education
Culturally authoritative texts such as Text Revision of the Diagnostic & Statistical Manual-IV [DSM-IVTR](
American Psychiatric Association [APA], 2004) describe literate impossibility for individuals with disability labels associated
with severe developmental disabilities. Our qualitative research challenges the assumptions of perpetual subliteracy
authoritatively embedded within the DSM-IV-TR (APA, 2004). U. S. education policy also confronts, at least rhetorically, assumed
hopelessness with reading and writing remediation in schools. Most recently, the federal government has directed national
concern toward issues of literacy acquisition and child failure through the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB). One
description of NCLB provided by the U.S. Department of Education (2004) suggested universal literacy was a primary objective.
However, our research suggests that the NCLB statute appears to emphasize a restrictive standardization as the route to
universal literacy that would in fact leave out many people with severe developmental disabilities.
I had coffee a few weeks ago with another displaced administrator at my university. Like me, he had arrived within the past decade to build something new and different. To some extent, he had succeeded. But, also like me, he had been informed that his leadership services would no longer be required beyond this year.
When he invited me, he asked if I would be uncomfortable meeting in one of the more popular campus coffee spots. "It’s in the shadow of the main administration building," he warned via email.
In his classic 1963 study Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, Richard Hofstadter convincingly argues that Americans’ suspicion of purely intellectual pursuits extends even to our thinking about how to structure and value higher education. He might not have been surprised at the currently popular movement on college campuses that goes under the banners of “experiential learning,” “service learning” and “engaged learning.”
The development of outcomes-based educational (OBE) practices represents one important way in which a learning outcomes approach to teaching and learning can be applied in the postsecondary sector. This study adopts a multiple case study design and profiles seven OBE initiatives being implemented in Ontario’s colleges and universities to better understand the scope of outcomes-based educational practices in the province’s postsecondary sector. ‘OBE initiatives’ are defined as purposeful actions undertaken by postsecondary providers directed at defining, teaching toward and assessing learning outcomes in their educational practice (modified from Jones, Voorhees & Paulson, 2002).
Lesson planning is important for three reasons:
Thoughtful planning creates more purposeful instruction. Lesson planning is what links the curriculum to the particulars of instruction (Clark & Dunn, 1991). Thoughtful planning also helps you understand the content of the lesson, creates a logical sequence of instructional events (Freiberg & Driscoll, 1992), and links activities to instructional objectives.
Ask most people who don’t teach online about the likelihood of academic dishonesty in an online class and you will likely hear concerns about the many ways that students could misrepresent themselves online. In fact, this concern about student representation is so prevalent it made its way into the Higher Education Opportunities Act (HEOA).
Passed into law in 2008, the act brought a few big changes to online education, including a new requirement to “ensure that the student enrolled in an online class is the student doing the coursework.”
In the Fall of 2011, the Toronto School of Theology (TST) within the University of Toronto (UofT) underwent a rigorous quality assurance review of its academic programs by its theological accrediting agency in North America, the Association of Theological Schools (ATS). In all, twenty-one scholars from university-related or free-standing accredited theological institutions with an intimate knowledge of North American theological education—in teams of three, one for each of the six member-institutions of the Toronto School of Theology, and one for the TST consortium itself—strongly affirmed the quality of the programs, including the Doctor of Theology (ThD) research degree program.
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.
Quebec's francophone universities are sites of widespread sexual violence where many are victimized repeatedly, according to results of an online survey released today.
The violence ranged from verbal sexual harassment to sexual assault.
A research team based at the Université du Québec à Montréal surveyed 9,284 people who work or study at six of the province's French-speaking universities.
Student pathways increasingly rely on transfer between postsecondary institutions as greater numbers of students move between institutions, pursue multiple credentials, or return to postsecondary education. In a 2011 survey of Ontario college students, 41% reported having some post-secondary experience; the same survey also found that 19% of respondents said their main goal in applying for their current program was to “prepare for further university or college study.” Transfer of credit for prior learning is clearly an increasingly mainstream educational activity, and institutions are under increasing pressure to improve the processes by which this occurs.
Many colleges speak of the importance of increasing student retention. Indeed, quite a few invest substantial resources in programs designed to achieve that end. Some institutions even hire consultants who promise a proven formula for successful retention. But for all that effort, most institutions do not take student retention seriously. They treat student retention, like so many other issues, as one more item to add to the list of issues to be addressed by the institution. They adopt what Parker calls the "add a course" strategy in addressing the issues that face them. Need to address the issue of diversity? Add a course in diversity studies. Need to address the issue of student retention, in particular that of new students?Add a freshman seminar or perhaps a freshmen mentoring program. The result is that student experiences are increasingly segmented into smaller and smaller pieces; their relationships with faculty, staff, and each other becoming more narrow and specialized; their learning further partitioned into smaller disconnected segments.
This short piece addresses the question: “What strategy-based knowledge do we possess that will be effective in addressing the needs of the lowest performing 20% of students in large education systems?”
My first and most important response is that in order to improve part of the system you have to focus on the entire system — raise the bar and close the gap for all. But let me start with a single school example.
Research is reviewed in a rigorous manner, by expert peers. Yet teaching is often reviewed only or mostly by pedagogical non-experts: students. There’s also mounting evidence of bias in student evaluations of teaching, or SETs -- against female and minority instructors in particular. And teacher ratings aren’t necessarily correlated with learning outcomes.
Anyone hoping to understand China and Chinese people’s behaviour in the present day must examine China’s long history and culture, as these often have crystallized into current behavioural patterns. This paper discusses one important push-out factor for Chinese students’ outbound mobility, and an element that is ignored in many futuristic predictions of international student
mobility: traditional Chinese educational culture. I conduct an in-depth analysis of three major aspects of Chinese educational culture in relation to Chinese students’ international mobility: the education-first culture, the saving culture, and the extended-family culture. I argue that these three aspects will continue to drive Chinese students’ outbound mobility.
There is currently no shortage of debate about post-secondary education policy in Canada. This reflects widespread agreement regarding the importance of skills, knowledge and innovation in a modern economy and society. As the
respective heads of two of the country’s leading academic and business organizations have put it: “Ensuring our country’s long-term economic growth and continued prosperity—and realizing this country’s promise—will depend heavily on the education and skill levels of Canadians and their success in creating and applying ideas and knowledge” (Beatty and Morris,2008)
The Canadian Mental Health Commission, launched August 2007, proposed to create a national mental health strategy with the release of the draft document, Toward Well-being and Recovery: A Framework towards a Mental Health Strategy for Canada, January 2009. The Ontario Ministry of Health and Long-term Care released its document; Every Door is the Right Door - Towards a 10-Year Mental Health and Addictions Strategy: A discussion paper in July 2009. While both documents recognize the importance of targeting youth for interventions in order to improve population mental health, the reports overlooked the key role that colleges and universities play in promoting community mental health.
We, as Ontario College Health Association (OCHA), an association for college and university health services, are health educators/ health promoters, nurses, physicians, and medical clinic staff and managers, witness the devastating effects of mental illness on our students. Speaking from our shared experience as some of the front line care givers of students with mental illness, we will highlight in this report, the importance of targeting postsecondary students, the role that colleges and universities play in mental health promotion, and the barriers that prevent proactive and seamless mental health care on campuses.
In this article we describe our experiences with using small-group instruction in college settings for a combined total of 60 years. Since others, including Johnson and Johnson (1989), Kagan (1994, 2009), Sharan (1994), and Aronson (2011), have developed specific forms of group work, such as structured controversy, jigsaw, and group investigation, we will focus on how we have used group work as a core technique and have developed additional procedures that seem to potentiate the power of group work, regardless of the specific procedure and discipline.
The combination of work and study has been hailed as crucial to ensure that youth develop the skills required on the labour market so that transitions from school to work are shorter and smoother. This paper fills an important gap in availability of internationally-comparable data. Using the 2012 Survey of Adult Skills (PIAAC), it draws a comprehensive picture of work and study in 23 countries/regions. Crucially, it decomposes the total share of working students by the context in which they work (VET, apprenticeships or private arrangements) and assesses the link between field of study and students’ work. The paper also assesses how the skills of students are used in the workplace compared to other workers and identifies the socio-demographic factors and the labour market institutions that increase the likelihood of work and study. Finally, while it is not possible to examine the relationship between work and study and future labour market outcomes at the individual level, some aggregate correlations are unveiled.
Forty one Canadian postsecondary institutions self-selected to participate in the Spring 2016 ACHA National College Health Assessment and 43,780 surveys were completed by students on these campuses.
For the purpose of forming the Reference Group, only Canadian institutions that surveyed all students or used a random sampling technique are included in the analysis. This report includes only data from 7,240 students at 10 schools in Alberta, Canada. All schools collected data via the ACHA-NCHA web survey. The mean response was 19% and the median was 17%.