Over the last 30 years, Canadians have watched with concern as voting rates among younger people have declined, with the result that in the 2011 federal election, the majority of young people opted not to cast a vote. The low voting rate among younger Canadians is often viewed as evidence that young people today are more apathetic or lazy than any other generation before. Samara's latest research “Message Not Delivered” debunks these myths. Check out this infographic of the main findings.
Post-secondary education is a cornerstone of Ontario’s continued prosperity. The Ontario government realizes this and confirmed its commitment to expanding post-secondary education in the 2010, 2011 and 2012 provincial budgets. The government announced funding allocations in all three budgets to support enrolment growth in the post-secondary sector. The 2011 budget committed the province to creating 60,000 more spaces in colleges and universities.
Colleges have a strong role to play in this equation, ensuring that students are not only attracted to post-secondary education, but also retained until graduation. However, Ontario colleges play an even more vital role in that they tend to attract students who do not usually pursue post-secondary education due to real or perceived barriers and challenges in accessing and succeeding in higher education. These students often come from underrepresented groups and, due to their unique circumstances, face a number of risks to completing their credential, unless they receive additional support through services and programs.
It’s hard to believe that we have less than a month left until September. The beginning of the month of August marks the acceptable time to get ready for back to school. For many this may simply involve picking up some pencils, notebooks, a new backpack, and possibly some fresh new kicks.
However, for those joining the 447,000 Ontarian undergrads, this checklist goes way beyond object necessities. Being a fifth year student, I pretty much got the drill locked down when preparing for the upcoming year. Look over my class schedule and plan accordingly, check in on my finances and budget for the upcoming year, and finally list out methods in which I plan to upkeep my personal wellness. At this point, I wouldn’t say I’m an expert in fulfilling each step, but it is nice to be moving towards a general direction. This definitely was not the case in my first year.
The past several decades have seen an interest in learning surge. It’s always been part of our educational endeavors, but the recent focus on it has been intense—that is, for teachers. Our interest is not shared by most of our students. They are still pretty much all about grades, preferably those acquired easily. They will work for points, but not very enthusiastically, if at all, without them.
If you walk into any dollar store in Canada you'll notice three things. First, things are cheap — not surprisingly, usually a dollar. Second, outside of food, nothing is made in North America. Third, they're often packed with customers.
The dollar store is a microcosm of what's wrong with our economy. In the closing days of the Cold War, the grinning avatars of hard conservatism — Reagan, Thatcher and Mulroney — helped to kick start a new global order that would supposedly bring prosperity to all by removing barriers to the free flow of investment capital and trade. Once the Berlin Wall fell, the last real barrier to a globalized world economy disappeared and it was full steam ahead.
Over two decades, governments and technology corporations followed suit by adding one brick after another to the ziggurat of the globalized economy: NAFTA (1988 and 1994), the invention of HTML and thus the Internet (1991), the Uruguay Round of GATT negotiations (1986-94), the WTO (1994), conservative Work Bank policies (from the 1990s on), the concentration of mass media in fewer and fewer hands, the Web 2.0 (2004 and on), deregulated financial markets under George W. Bush, smartphones (starting with Blackberries in 2003). The new order had its global markets, global communications network and a friendly banking system in place. This ziggurat is now more or less complete, with only a few outliers like North Korea beyond the pale.
Two weeks ago, I received a rape threat in my campus office.
I am an academic, an instructor of political science, a researcher, and an administrator, and I received an anonymous phone call describing in explicit and vulgar detail exactly how and where the man on the phone would rape me.
The police were called, my phone number was removed from the university website, and I have taken steps to remain safe in my office, but the vulnerability remains.
he vulnerability. I was made to feel vulnerable in my office — my professional space — which is perhaps the one place in my life where I feel most empowered and assertive.
As I sat in my office the next day, I wondered how many of my male colleagues have received an anonymous rape threat on their office phones. As a woman in academe, I am held to the same standards as my male counterparts, and yet I am also being threatened with sexual violence while I am working. Just add that to the list of things female academics must deal with, all while still teaching, publishing, and serving their departments and universities.
The current Ontario government has been formulating ideas for systemic change in higher education since at least 2005, when the Rae Review was released. Some of the issues raised in that review are still with us now – and one of those issues is university differentiation, which has come up yet again via a data set (PDF) from the Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario (HEQCO) and most recently in the provincial government’s draft (PDF) of a framework for differentiation (here’s a good summary by Gavin Moodie).
Canadian nursing students are calling for changes to the current entry-to-practice exam which they say is loaded with American content and lacks crucial Canadian context.
The calls were made Friday at the Canadian Nursing Students' Association national conference in Winnipeg. More than 400 nursing students gathered for the event and many signed a related petition.
The new exam was developed by the National Council of State Boards of Nursing in the United States and replaced the Canadian Registered Nurses Exam in 2015.
Students must pass the new exam to be able to practice nursing. If they fail, they can retake it after 45 days.
This story begins late last school year, when I was standing in front of my Introduction to Film class, getting set up for the day’s session. The technology in the classroom was often glitchy, so I’d given myself plenty of time. I chatted with my teaching assistant about the new Twin Peaks while logging in to my email to retrieve the PowerPoint I’d sent myself.
That’s when I saw the message from my department with the subject header “2017-2018 Budget Cuts.” “Well, that can’t be good,” I thought and clicked to open it. It began, “Dear Sara, As you might know, the university is in the midst of a significant budget cut across all units for Financial Year 2018, which starts July 1.” And it ended, “Within this context, we unfortunately will not be able to offer the courses that we projected for you in 2017-2018. I am sorry to let you know about this development …”
Now that more that 75 percent of the instructors teaching in higher education in the United States do not have tenure, it is important to think about how the current political climate might affect those vulnerable teachers. Although we should pay attention to how all faculty are being threatened, nontenured faculty are in an especially vulnerable position because they often lack any type of academic freedom or shared governance rights. In other words, they are a class without representation, and they usually can be let go at any time for any reason. That type of precarious employment, which is spreading all over the world to all types of occupations, creates a high level of professional insecurity and helps to feed the power of the growing managerial class.
More than half of black college students fail to complete thier degree work - for reasons that have little to do with innate ability or environmental conditions. The problem, a social psychologist argues, is that they are undervalued, in ways that are sometimes subtle and somes not.
Women in the sciences who earn PhDs are less likely than their male counterparts to pursue tenure-track positions at research universities. Moreover, among those who become STEM researchers, men have been found to publish more than women. These patterns raise questions about when sex differences in publication begin. Using data from a survey of doctoral students at one large institution, this study finds that men submitted and published more scholarly works than women across many fields, with differences largest in natural/biological sciences and engineering. Potential contributing factors are considered, including sex differences in faculty support, assistantships, family responsibilities, and career goals.
Keywords: career development; doctoral students; equity; faculty development; gender studies; graduate education; higher education; publications; regression analyses; research; secondary data analysis; sex; STEM; survey research; women’s issues
Abstract
At one of Ontario’s largest universities, the University of Ottawa, course evaluations involve about 6,000 course sections and over 43,000 students every year. This paper-based format requires over 1,000,000 sheets of paper, 20,000 envelopes, and the support of dozens of administrative staff members. To examine the impact of a shift to an online system for the evaluation of courses, the following study sought to compare participation rates and evaluation scores of an online and paper-based course evaluation system. Results from a pilot group of 10,417 students registered in 318 courses suggest an average decrease in participation rate of 12–15% when using an online system. No significant differences in evaluation scores were observed. Instructors and students alike shared positive reviews about the online system; however, they suggested that an inclass period be maintained for the electronic completion of course evaluations.
Not at all, according to Dave Zwieback, the Head of Engineering at music analytics company Next Big Sound (acquired by Pandora) and author of Beyond Blame: Learning From Failure and Success. Zwieback has spent decades leading engineers in companies operating in high-stakes, pressure-cooker industries, such as technology, financial services and pharma, where it’s commonplace for someone to take the fall when critical systems fails.
“But why do I have to go? School is not fun!” That quote is from a first-grade child, asking his mom why he has to go every single day to this place that he was told was going to be a lot of fun, but has not lived up to the hype. If he could articulate further, he might say, "I am only six. I like to have fun, but school is not fun and from what I can tell, it's going to get worse every year, not better."
At most colleges and universities, summer offers a blessed break from the regular meetings of the academic year. It’s a relief to have a few months’ free from having to jockey for air time, listen to long-winded people opine on matters they know little about, navigate petty factional skirmishes, or shore up colleagues whose ideas are routinely shot down.
Now that it’s September, the prospect of returning to meeting-heavy days may seem enervating. But what if we made 2019-20 the year in which we change the traditional dynamics of our meetings? Could we find ways to make them more productive, less
contentious, and more open to voices that usually get muffled or silenced?
Last October, we argued that various changes in the post-secondary landscape have converged to create a compelling need—and opportunity—for PSE to shift toward a new paradigm of Education & Career Development (ECD). That paper generated considerable interest, and also some great discussions flowing from several keynotes and presentations
Media and policy commentary have focused lately on Canadian employers’ apparent inability to find employees with the desired labour market skills. To explore this issue further, HEQCO reviewed and summarized the current discourse surrounding a “skills gap” in The Great Skills Divide: A Review of the Literature and conducted an analysis of Canadian job advertisements geared toward recent postsecondary graduates in Bridging the Divide, Part I: What Canadian Job Ads Said. In the latter publication, 316 job advertisements for entry-level positions requiring postsecondary education were examined to ascertain the education credentials, work experience and essential skills employers were seeking. To follow-up on Bridging the Divide, Part I, the current report analyzes survey responses from 103 employers that posted job advertisements included in the preceding study.
In particular, employers were asked if they had filled the advertised position or, if not, the reasons for being unable to find someone to hire. Those employers that had filled the position were also asked about the successful candidates’ qualifications and performance on the job so far.
The promotion of mental health and well-being in our students, faculty, and staff is important to the University of Calgary. Given the symbiotic relation between health and education, Universities are increasingly recognized as places to promote the health and well-being of the people who learn, work and live within them. Research-intensive universities create cultures that demand high performance while promoting excellence and achievement, and also carry the risk of stress, stigma, and challenges to mental health. With the recognition of the importance of promoting mental health and intervening to address illness in a timely way, we join groups across Canada and beyond that are committed to enhancing the mental health of university students, faculty, and staff.
Another semester is over, and it's always a bitter sweet moment! Nevertheless, I'm glad that my students' - at least
most of them - successfully completed my courses. However, I'm also sad that another group is gone; it's a kind of a
proud parent moment --- no matter the age of my students.
Usually for a few days after a semester ends, I reflect on the things that went well and anything that could be
improved. It's in this critical examination of the latter that my teaching and classroom learning environment evolves
toward reflections of organizational growth and team-based results. My progression as an educator is driven by
continuous feedback from multiple sources. Throughout the semester, students are encouraged to provide me with
honest and candid feedback, which can be used to make my teaching along with my courses better.