Let’s focus our evaluations on the research rather than the person completing it. Earlier this month I was evaluating scientific abstracts for an international stem cell conference ( ISSCR). For readers who do not know the process, international experts from across the world get assigned to evaluate the work of their peers to help select which scientists are asked to come and
present their work at the meeting. This is typically done by a panel where average scores are calculated and the best ones are invited to give talks or present posters. The incredible thing about this particular set of abstracts was that after I’d logged on and printed them out to begin my evaluation, I noticed that there was no way of identifying who the scientist was or where they worked, meaning I couldn’t let any biases creep in to my evaluation. Amazing, right? That’s the way it should be.
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.
Transforming higher education processes starts with laying the right foundation for your organization’s workflow. Many higher education institutions have embarked on education transformation initiatives; however, there is still room for improvement to build a more stable transformation foundation.
According to a recent Center for Digital Education (CDE) survey, the top higher education workflow-related challenges include the need for more training and professional development, workflow solutions, better access to information and documentation,
and increased automation.
“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."
How can Canada encourage more postsecondary students to study abroad?
Employers and higher ed institutions have acknowledged the value that this type of experience could bring to the country’s workforce. But only 3.1% of full-time university students and 1.1% of full-time college students have studied abroad as part
of their postsecondary education.
Well-written course outcomes and lesson objectives are the critical foundation of a successful course. Course outcomes and lesson objectives are essential from a standards alignment standpoint, as well as for an overall quality measure of the course.
A learning outcome is a formal statement of what students are expected to learn. Learning outcome statements refer to specific knowledge, practical skills, areas of professional development, attitudes, higher-order thinking skills, etc. that faculty members expect students to develop, learn, or master during a course (Suskie, 2004). Learning outcomes are also often referred to as “expected learning outcomes”, “student learning outcomes”, or “learning outcome statements”.
Colleges and institutes enhance innovation by undertaking applied research that leverages their strong connections to industry and communities. These institutions provide talent, creative ideas and facilities that generate economic and social gains.
• In the past year alone, colleges and institutes worked with over 6,300 partners in all sectors, particularly small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) to develop new or adapted products, services, technology and processes.
• College and institute students are an integral part of applied research activity. Students gain relevant applied research experience through interactions with industry and community partners and are employment ready.
• Increased investments in college and institute applied research will unleash the college sector’s untapped capacity to support industry and community innovation.
Before choosing a supervisor, get to know them—and get to know yourself.
Ask any of my family members and they will tell you that my middle name should be “indecisive.” I am in a constant battle with the “shoulds” and “shouldn’ts” of life. When choosing my undergraduate institution I couldn’t make a decision, so I did what any rational person would do: I rolled a fuzzy dice. Even numbers were one institution and odd numbers were the other. I rolled an even number and based on that one moment in time, the next four years of my life were decided (please note, I do not recommend this method for others).
With the rise in online and hybrid courses at the post-secondary level, many institutions are offering various online learning readiness assessments to students who are considering these instructional formats. Following a discussion of the characteristics often attributed to successful online learners, as well as a review of a sample of the publicly available online readiness surveys, an application of one representative tool is described. Specifically, the Distance Education Aptitude and Readiness Scale was administered in both hybrid and face-to-face sections of beginning post-secondary French across a two-year span. Differences in scores between groups, as well as the relationship between scores and grades are examined.
Colleges and Institutes Canada’s (CICan) priorities for the Federal Election and Budget 2016 on behalf of publicly-funded
colleges and institutes are as follows:
Increase funding for college and institute applied research
Key to improving productivity and innovation for companies and communities
Invest in college and institute infrastructure and equipment
Strategic investments to meet the needs of employers and communities
Increase access to post-secondary education and upskilling for Aboriginal peoples
Essential to support reconciliation and improve education and employment outcomes
Invest in improved labour market information, apprenticeship completion and employability of youth
Key to expanding employment opportunities for Canadians
nternational students have become an increasingly important dimension of Canada‘s educational and immigration policy landscape, which has led to the development of pathways from educational to working visa status. In this report we present an analysis of international student numbers, visa transition rates, processes and government policy evolution with regard to international student entry to Ontario between 2000 and 2012. The report’s findings suggest four major areas of change: increasing male dominance in the number of student entries; the rise in international student entries into the college sector; the increasing importance of international students as temporary workers post-graduation; and the profound shift in source countries for Ontario-bound international students. Policy knowledge in areas related to these issues is vital to Ontario's ability to compete for international students, who can become potential immigrants, while maintaining high-quality postsecondary educational institutions.
Canadian officials are finding it difficult to keep up with the increasing demand from international students, leading to waiting times for visas that are weeks longer than those in Britain or the United States, and reducing the program’s competitiveness.
The lengthy timelines are contained in a report from Citizenship and Immigration Canada (CIC), obtained by The Globe and Mail through freedom of information legislation. While the federal government wants to double the number of students from abroad by 2022, it has not provided sufficient resources to process the increased numbers, the report says. CIC blames this “lack of coordination” between federal departments for an increase of 30 per cent in processing times for study permits and a doubling of the time for temporary resident visas.
Mental ill-health can lead to poor work performance, high sickness absence and reduced labour market participation, resulting in considerable costs for society. Improving labour market participation of people with mental health problems requires well-integrated policies and services across the education, employment, health and social sectors. This paper provides examples of policy initiatives from 10 OECD countries for integrated services. Outcomes and strengths and weaknesses of the policy initiatives are presented, resulting in the following main conclusions for future integrated mental health and work policies and services:
Student mobility refers not to just the physical ability of a student to move from one institution to another, but the more comprehensive understanding of a student as an independent agent who - as their own needs and desires change - requires the ability to move from one institution to another to achieve their educational goal, be it a college certificate, diploma, or undergraduate degree. The policy has been broken into three key pillars, which cover the mobility parency, Consistency, and
Student Support.
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.
Abstract
This article explores the relationship between unionization and academic freedom protections for sessional faculty in Ontario universities. Specifically, we compare university policies and contract provisions with a view to determining whether unionized sessionals hired on a per-course basis have stronger academic freedom protections than their non-union counterparts.
We then explore whether particular kinds of bargaining unit structures are more conducive to achieving stronger academic freedom provisions. Finally, we consider whether academic freedom can be exercised effectively by sessionals, whether unionized or not. We conclude that unionization does help to produce stronger academic freedom protections for sessional faculty and that faculty association bargaining unit structures are most likely to help deliver this outcome. We further conclude that academic freedom is difficult to exercise for sessional faculty, regardless of union status, but that unionization offers greater protections for sessionals facing repercussions as a result of asserting their academic freedom.
Keywords: academic freedom, sessional instructors, contract faculty, faculty associations, unions, bargaining unit structures
The purpose of this paper is to discuss various issues surrounding the community college baccalaureate. In 2009, President Barack Obama provided a vision to increase graduation rates for students across the nation and challenged higher education to double the number of college degrees conferred nationwide by 2020. In addition, the President urged the country’s 1,200 community colleges to be instrumental in this initiative, as they have the capacity to provide the education necessary to produce a competitive workforce. In 2011, the dialogue continues and intensifies. At the 2011 Building a Grad Nation Summit, Vice President Biden issued a call to action to boost college graduation rates across the country and help the nation meet the President’s goals. He states, “Right now we’ve got an education system that works like a funnel when we need it to work like a pipeline.”
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.
Research on role congruity theory and descriptive and prescriptive stereotypes has established that when men and women violate gender stereotypes by crossing spheres, with women pursuing career success and men contributing to domestic labor, they face back- lash and economic penalties. Less is known, however, about the types of individuals who are most likely to engage in these forms of discrimination and the types of situations in which this is most likely to occur. We propose that psychological research will benefit from supplementing existing research approaches with an individual differences model of sup- port for separate spheres for men and women. This model allows psychologists to examine individual differences in support for separate spheres as they interact with situational and contextual forces. The separate spheres ideology (SSI) has existed as a cultural idea for many years but has not been operationalized or modeled in social psychology. The Sepa- rate Spheres Model presents the SSI as a new psychological construct characterized by individual differences and a motivated system-justifying function, operationalizes the ideology with a new scale measure, and models the ideology as a predictor of some important gendered outcomes in society. As a first step toward developing the Separate Spheres Model, we develop a new
measure of individuals’ endorsement of the SSI and demonstrate its reliability, convergent validity, and incremental predictive validity. We provide support for the novel hypotheses that the SSI predicts attitudes regarding workplace flexibility accom- modations, income distribution within families between male and female partners, distribu- tion of labor between work and family spheres, and discriminatory workplace behaviors. Finally, we provide experimental support for the hypothesis that the SSI is a motivated, system-justifying ideology.
This work explores and addresses the programmatic support of doctoral student socialization via
social media.
The Commission for the Future of Graduate Education, the Council of Graduate Schools, and the Educational Testing Service have deemed the study of historically marginalized students as being critical to address vulnerabilities with our approach to supporting these learners and strengthening our national capacity for innovation (Council of Graduate Schools and Educational
Testing Service 2010; Sowell, Allum, & Okahana, 2015). There are many milestones to celebrate regarding the experiences of marginalized students including the increase of racial and cultural diversity among doctoral students and degree completers, and the various programmatic efforts supporting them. Remarkably, the Survey of Earned Doctorates reports that African American doctoral degree attainment has increased 70% between 1993 and 2013 (National Science Foundation, 2015).
However, there is a paucity of literature qualitatively evaluating these students’ experiences as well as ways to engage
programmatic efforts to critically manage the doctoral process. Empirical evidence-based strategies are needed to examine marginalized doctoral student perceptions of their engagement with these programs as well as their usefulness in supporting degree attainment nationally. This commentary aims to identify and explore programmatic efforts supporting the socialization of historically marginalized students with an s the marginalized doctoral fluenced by social movements and the issues being addressed within the context of social media. s the marginalized doctor fluenced by social movements and the issues being addressed within the context of social media.