Higher education's approach to fostering students' innovation potential has focused mostly on developing innovation leadership among a select cadre of students, originally in entrepreneurship and more recently in social sector innovation. But what about the rest of our graduates: what capability do all our graduates need if they're going to engage effectively with innovation in the workplace? Can elements of this capability be adapted to enhance their roles as community members and global citizens as well?
In order to develop the capability for workplace innovation in all our students, we're going to have to begin tackling the challenge in the space where all of them already participate – within our teaching and learning environments.
U of T responds to a rise in mental health needs on campus.
Mentoring is one of the many aspects of faculty positions that are not generally taught, even though it is crucial in higher education. Faculty members are expected to advise undergraduates, graduate students and colleagues, although rarely with any support or recognition for this work. As a result, faculty members often mentor as a response to how they were mentored: a cold and distant adviser may serve as a cautionary tale or a role model.
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.
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?
Many of the public battles for transgender students have centered on the bathrooms they want to use. And according to a new paper, gender-neutral restrooms are the accommodation transgender and gender-nonconforming college students want most on their campuses. But there’s much more on their wish lists that would make them feel safe and comfortable.
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).
The push-back was strong when we sought to increase the diversity of teachers through a modified admissions policy in our education degree program.
The makeup of the Canadian population is changing rapidly. The percentage of the population who identify as Indigenous is increasing; the percentage of new immigrants who are from racial, ethnic or linguistic minority groups is growing; those who identify as LGBTQ are feeling increasingly safe to be open about their identities; and individuals with disabilities are making dynamic contributions to Canadian society. Although our communities are becoming increasingly diverse, the makeup of the teaching profession remains relatively stagnant, with white, female teachers making up more than 80 percent of the teaching force. While our communities are becoming richer with diversity, the teaching profession is not.
With a mandate to prepare students for the labour market, ‘communication’ figures prominently among the essential employability skills that Ontario’s colleges are expected to develop in students prior to graduation. As a result, many colleges have instituted measures to help shore up the skills of students who are admitted to college yet who do not possess the expected ‘college-level English’ proficiency. Several have addressed this challenge by admitting these students into developmental communication classes, which are designed to build their skills to the expected college level.
The existence of ‘Learning Styles’ is a common ‘neuromyth’, and their use in all forms of education has been thoroughly and repeatedly discredited in the research literature. However, anecdotal evidence suggests that their use remains widespread.
This perspective article is an attempt to understand if and why the myth of Learning Styles persists. I have done this by analyzing the current research literature to capture the picture that an educator would encounter were they to search for “Learning Styles” with the intent of determining whether the research evidence supported their use. The overwhelming majority (89%) of recent research papers, listed in the ERIC and PubMed research databases, implicitly or directly endorse the use of Learning Styles in Higher Education. These papers are dominated by the VAK and Kolb Learning Styles inventories. These presence of these papers in the pedagogical literature demonstrates that an educator, attempting to take an evidence-based approach to education, would be presented with a strong yet misleading message that the use of Learning Styles is endorsed by the current research literature. This has potentially negative consequences for students and for the field of education research.
Clare Sully-Stendahl is barely old enough to vote, at 18, but the first-year university student has been making career
choices for years. “I’ve always liked the humanities and the sciences,” she says from her dorm room in Halifax. “But in high school, there was pressure to pick one over the other.”
Instead of opting for theatre or film studies classes, Sully-Stendahl decided to be strategic and chose a second science while still in high school. But, “physics and I didn’t really get along very well. There’s no way I would continue with that in a career. I chose it because I knew a lot of universities require physics for engineering, medicine, a lot of sciences . . . ”
Accessibility offices are encouraging students with autism to turn to their peers for support through university life.
When accessibility specialist Jamie Penner started at the University of Manitoba in 2009, a series of eye-opening client meetings made him reconsider how the institution was accommodating students with an autism spectrum disorder. “One of my first students on the spectrum had a course in ancient history covering some battle. I asked him what the lectures were like and he really only could remember or focus on the fact that they used a certain weapon in the battles. He was paying attention, he was listening, but he got so sidetracked,” Mr. Penner recalls.
I often wonder if we are not living the reality of the boiling frog metaphor. Drop the frog into a pot of boiling water, and the smart fellow instantly jumps out to save himself. But throw the unsuspecting frog into cool water, he will contently swim, unaware that the water is being slowly heated over a long period. The frog eventually cooks because he is inattentive to the small, incremental changes in temperature and thus goes numb to the realities of the water he’s swimming in until it’s too late.
Part 2: How Social Media Support and Expand Teaching and Learning
All post-secondary faculty and students use educational technology– whether for classroom-based, blended or fully online learning and teaching.
This three-part series, Three Pillars of Educational Technology: Learning Management Systems,
Social Media, and Personal Learning Environments, explores the learning management system (LMS), social media, and personal learning environments – and how they might best be used for enhanced teaching and learning.
This qualitative investigation identifies a condition of frenetic change experienced by organizational members at two university colleges in British Columbia, Canada, during the past decade. Prominent outcomes of the formal designation of five former community colleges as university colleges included curricular change and the evolution of a new institutional mission. The brief history of the university colleges of British Columbia parallels the process of economic globalization in the province of British Columbia, and the responses of managers and faculty at university colleges indicate that globalization influenced the formation
and functioning of these institutions.
What will the scale-up of the internet of things, the rising sharing economy and a zero marginal cost society mean for civilization? Nothing short of historic.
Is there a tipping point at which students who take a blend of online and in-person coursework are doing too much online? That question goes to the heart of something called the online paradox.
The online paradox has inspired much debate, and it describes two seemingly contradictory things. The first is
that community-college student who take an online course are more likely to fail than are those who take it face-to-face. The second is that community-college students who take some online classes are more likely to complete their
degrees than are those who don’t take any.
Abstract
A number of factors have been identified in the research literature as being important for student success in university. However, the rather large body of literature contains few studies that have given students the opportunity to directly report what they believe contributes to their success as an under- graduate student. The primary purpose of this study is to explore students’ descriptions of the personal resources that they use to succeed while attempt- ing to reach their goals as well
as those personal characteristics or obstacles that keep them from reaching their goals. Prominent themes supportive of student success included having a future orientation, persistence, and executive functioning skills such as time management and organization. Results also demonstrate that stress, inadequate academic skills, and distractions are detrimental to student success in university. This study is unique in that it gathers the content data directly from the population of interest; it is one of the few qualitative studies of undergraduate students’ self-generated percep tions. Implications for university administrator and academic counsellors and directions for future research are discussed.
Résumé
Des travaux de recherche ont déjà relevé certains facteurs comme étant importants pour la réussite des étudiants de niveau universitaire. Mais bien qu’abondante, la recherche n’a cependant pas donné aux étudiants de premier cycle la possibilité de communiquer directement leur avis quant aux raisons de leur réussite. Le but principal de cette étude est d’explorer les descriptions que les étudiants font des ressources personnelles qu’ils utilisent pour atteindre leurs objectifs et, ubsidiairement, les caractéristiques personnelles ou les obstacles qui les empêchent d’atteindre leurs objectifs. Parmi les thèmes importants menant à la réussite des élèves on trouve l’orientation vers l’avenir, la persévérance et des compétences exécutives telles que la gestion du temps et l’organisation. Les résultats démontrent également que le stress, des compétences académiques inadéquates et les distractions représentent des obstacles à la réussite des études universitaires. Cette étude est unique car elle collige les données directement de la population concernée. Elle est aussi l’une des rares études qualitatives portant sur la perception des étudiants de premier cycle. On y examine les conséquences pour les administrateurs universitaires et les conseillers scolaires, de même que les orientations possibles de futures recherches.
Canadian higher education has in the past few years succumbed to a mood of despair and defensiveness. Until just a few years ago, it was characterized by a confident, forward-looking energy, secure in the notion that it was the pre eminent engine of national development. Since then, we have seen our relative salaries decline; our plant, equipment, and libraries erode; our jobs threatened; and the value of our contribution to Canadian society severely questioned. A number of explanations could be given for this dramatic reversal of our fortunes, with emphasis ranging from demographics to poor public relations, from econo mic stagnation to short-sighted political manoeuvering. One popular explanation is that Canadian higher education is now Qustly) paying off debts it incurred in a Faustian compact with homo economicus. We financed our tremendous growth of yesteryear, this explanation purports, on promises of contributing substantially (or worse, by ourselves, delivering) u nprecedented economic growth and indus trial expansion. Now that industrial expansion has come to a standstill (and even
declined), the primary case for generous funding of higher education is at best called into question, and at worst severely u ndermined.
For those who accept this retributional explanation of the cause of the current crisis of finance and purpose in higher education, Global Stakes, will likely be perceived as one of the most exciting and optimism-creating books to come along in several years, and one which may galvanize a new sense of pu rpose and direc tion among the scientific and technological sectors of higher
education. Reactions to this book in the higher education community as a whole, however, are likely to be extreme. Others may dismiss it as merely self-serving advancement of a computer/electronics lobby or pandering to the wishful fantasies of engineering deans. Humanists and classicists may (for reasons suggested by the authors) be simply bewildered by it, or wonder if the cure advanced in this book is worse than the present illness in higher education.
This is the first article in a series designed to help you create an Individual Development Plan (IDP) using myIDP, a new Web-based career-planning tool created to help graduate students and postdocs in the sciences define and pursue their career goals. To learn more about myIDP and begin the career-planning process, please visit: http://myidp.sciencecareers.org.