Based on recent polling commissioned by the Ontario Undergraduate Student Alliance, an overwhelming majority of Ontarians (69.3%) believe that the current practice of increasing postsecondary tuition fees by five percent annually is unfair. When prompted to evaluate different policy alternatives, 59.6 percent agreed that the government should freeze tuition, while 70.8 percent agreed that all future increases should be tied to inflation. OUSA believes that this data indicates that a change to Ontario’s current tuition framework to either a lower increase or a freeze would be strongly supported by the public.
It is a given in higher education that we are preparing students for the world of work and for life. It is also a given in today’s world that higher education’s product must be of quality and that higher education must be held accountable for student learning. Finally, it is a given, as well, that the expectation is to do more with less, to find efficiencies.
These principles, along with rising tuition costs, have placed higher education under the microscopes of both the legislators and the public. To emerge from this examination, college leaders must monitor student outcomes regularly to determine roadblocks to student success and to determine revisions, improvements, and optimal resource use.
This section contains policy, procedures and guidance used by Immigration, Refugees andCitizenship Canada staff. It is posted on the Department’s website as a courtesy to stakeholders.
To make the comparison that one should never properly make, Higher Degree Research (HDR hereafter) supervision shares with parenting its status as that topic about which every person has an opinion. Watching other people supervise can be as exacerbating as observing a nonchalant parent whose child is throwing food in a café. When a postgraduate student takes directions that one could never possibly recommend, it is easy to imagine that better training was possible, that bad choices were made at crucial junctures, and that somewhere sits a parent reading the newspaper while the floor gets covered in spaghetti. The neglectful supervisor, like the neglectful parent, is easily viewed as a person of a certain type, such that quotidian discussions of supervision practices easily deteriorate into a moral commentary on personal virtues and vices. Although providing short-lived pious pleasures, the urge to judgment can be damaging to higher degree research cultures. Supervision practices need to be understood not as expressions of a moral disposition (friendly, mean, forgiving) or achievements of profound intelligence (the cult of the inept genius), but as institutionally responsive practices within a
broader tertiary system that remains unclear about what higher degree research should achieve, and apprehensive about what its graduates should aspire to afterwards.
When Michael Prior came to the University of British Columbia in 2008, he expected to spend the standard four years at the school.
Now in his ffth year, he realizes his original plan was unrealistic. The 22-year-old English Literature major has funded most of his own education, so he works for pay about 20 hours a week. That requires a lighter course load.
ackson started speech class barely audible. A thin, Latino teen, with an Abe Lincoln beard, ear gauges the size of silver dollars, and a loose, enigmatic smile, you couldn’t help liking him. If you could hear him, that is.
ut the other night, hot off winning a video game tournament, he demonstrated how to play Street Fighter Five, his assion. He leaned toward the audience, core muscles taut, arms swinging, and illustrated in ringing tones the omplex moves and strategies of an expert gamer.
t was the first time I saw video games as something akin to playing cello, rather than a brain-dead addiction. fter the speech, he mentioned that people had asked him to give them lessons, and I said he should charge oney. $25 an hour would be cheap compared to violin teachers who charge $60 an hour. I could see his eyes grow big as thoughts whirled behind them.
Recently we posted a brief research finding from Stanford math professor Jo Boaler: “Timed math tests can
discourage students, leading to math anxiety and a long-term fear of the subject.” That terse conclusion, from a
2014 article in Teaching Children Mathematics, provoked a torrent of passionate comments as educators and former
students weighed in on the merits of timed testing.
The debate split the audience in half. One side argued that timed testing was valuable because there are real
deadlines in life and careers—and real consequences to missing them. Others felt that timed testing causes a kind
of paralysis in children, throwing a wrench into students’ cognitive machinery and hindering deeper learning. What’s
the point of timed testing, the latter group argued, if the results are as much a measure of fear as aptitude?
Statistics Canada is moving to reinstate its Full Time-University and College Academic Staff System survey, and to include information on part-timers.
The data it will reveal is bound to shed much-needed light on a growing challenge that is already well-recognized but far too infrequently discussed in academia: the recent surge in numbers of underemployed PhD graduates at Canada’s universities.
Institutions have made their best efforts to encourage graduates to think beyond university jobs, and have directed more toward careers in government and the private sector. Yet serious challenges within the system remain — for recent PhDs themselves, for the renewal of the academy, and for Canada’s future research potential.
This exploratory comparative study examines the meaning-making experiences of six sexual minority males attending college or university in Canada or the United States. All of the participants identified as sexual minority males who were cisgender, out to family and/or friends, and between 20 and 24 years of age. In particular, the participants spoke about the intersections
between their race, gender, and sexual orientation as salient aspects of their multiple identities. Using a blend of qualitative methods, including case study, phenomenology, and grounded theory, I identified four themes that emerged from the data: (1) engagement in a social justice curriculum; (2) involvement in LGBT student organizations or resource centres; (3) experiences
of discrimination and dissonance; and (4) engagement in reflective dialogue. I discuss the implications of these themes for professional practice and future research.
La présente étude comparative exploratoire examine les expériences de recherche de signification de six hommes de minorité sexuelle fréquentant des collèges ou des universités au Canada et aux États-Unis. Tous les participants se sont définis comme des hommes cisgenres âgés entre 20 et 24 ans et ayant dévoilé leur homosexualité soit aux membres de leurs familles respectives, soit à des amis. Les participants ont entre autres identifié le recoupement de race, de genre et d’orientation sexuelle comme étant les principaux aspects de leurs multiples identités. À l’aide d’une variété de méthodes qualitatives
dont la phénoménologie, la théorie ancrée et des études de cas, j’ai relevé quatre thèmes récurrents parmi les données recueillies : (1) la participation à des programmes d’études en justice sociale; (2) l’implication dans des organisations estudiantines ou des centres de ressources pour LGBT; (3) l’expérience de discrimination et de dissonance; et (4) l’engagement
dans un dialogue réfléchi. Je discute des conséquences de ces thèmes en milieu professionnel et en prévision de futurs projets de recherche.
In our second annual student survey, Maclean’s reached more than 17,000 students at almost every university campus across the country. They told us how often they’ve cheated as well as how much time they spend studying, partying, working and on extracurricular activities. It is one of the largest surveys of its kind and provides a wideranging snapshot of student life on university campuses across the country in real time.
Respondents also told us whether they feel their school has prepared them for the workplace, offering insight into which universities—and which programs—are doing the best job preparing students for the real world. St. Francis Xavier came out on top for this one measure, with 53% of students strongly agreeing they had the skills and knowledge needed for employment. For some programs, the results were even better, with 71% of St. FX nursing students saying they’d been well prepared. We also asked whether the schools helped with writing ability, with St. Thomas ranking first on that front. In addition, we surveyed professors to see whether incoming university students had the academic skills needed for success.
At least one university has explicitly restricted students’ use of editors for their assignments.
Over the last several years, staff members at the Centre for Academic Communication at the University of Victoria
reported to administrators some curious conversations taking place around editing. The centre offers free services
to students to assist them with reading comprehension and writing, but staff members are instructed not to correct
students’ work, only pose questions. Students, however, had different expectations and complained when centre
staff wouldn’t “fix up” their papers.
Professors, too, misunderstood the role of the centre; some sent students there because they wanted staff to
improve their students’ work. What’s more, the centre received calls from parents asking how much editing they
could do on their children’s papers without it being considered cheating.
In summary, the OECD assessment of the strengths and challenges of the Canadian postsecondary vocational education and training (VET) system is as follows:
It’s hard to pick up a publication these days without reading something about blended course design or the flipped classroom. Even mainstream media have begun to cover these new approaches to teaching and learning that put more emphasis on active learning.
But despite their growing popularity, defining blended learning and flipped learning is more difficult than one would expect. Both models have a variety of definitions, and many consider the flipped classroom a form of blended learning. The Sloan Consortium has one of the most precise definitions, defining blended as “instruction that has between 30 and 80 percent of the course content delivered online.” For the sake of this report, we’re using a more broad definition of blended learning as a course that uses a combination of face-to-face and online learning.
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).
Graduates themselves are often unsure of where to look for opportunities outside academe.
Two major developments in the financial management of higher education have occurred more or less contemporaneously: incentive or performance funding on the part of government and incentive-based budgeting on the part of institutions. Both are based on fiscal incentives. Despite their several inherent and interconnected similarities, incentive funding and incentive-based budgeting have been viewed and appraised on parallel tracks. This study investigates their convergence. In doing so, it sharpens the definitions of both, identifies their respective track records, and discusses problems that are chronic to both. The study concludes that although incentive funding and incentive-based budgeting are sometimes at cross-purposes, they are func-tionally interconnected. The study uses Canada as an example because it is the jurisdiction that so far has seen the most extensive mutual deployment of performance funding and incentive-based budgeting.
The purpose of the lecture was to pose the question whether education is possible today. The author begins by contrasting two prevalent responses to the question: (1) that it is obviously possible since we can see all around us teachers and students working in classrooms, and (2) that it is obviously not possible because the educational system has been subverted to serve the ends of a global economic order. The author argues that while there is evidence to support both responses, they dismiss, in effect, the question of education’s possibility and thus undermine its authentic enactment. The article describes an approach to keeping the question open and in public view.
TORONTO — Ontario's minister of post-secondary education says he's concerned that two publiclyfunded Ontario colleges have opened campuses in Saudi Arabia that don't allow women.
On Wednesday, Colleges and Universities Minister Reza Moridi said decisions on the operation of a campus, including student composition, are up to each college's board of governors.
But late Thursday, after a lot of criticism on social media about the male-only campuses, the minister had a change of heart about Ontario colleges teaching courses that deliberately exclude women.
"I understand and appreciate the concern that has been raised in recent weeks around some of these international activities, particularly around two Ontario colleges running male-only campuses in Saudi Arabia," Moridi said in a statement to The Canadian Press. "I share those concerns."
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.
The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between each of the five personality factors in the Big Five Inventory (BFI) and online faculty student evaluations. Faculty members from the School of Criminal Justice (CJ) and the School of Information Technology (IT) from an online university were asked to complete the BFI (44 item personality inventory). There were 179 valid BFI surveys returned with matched student evaluation data. There were small correlations between some of the five factors and student evaluations for all subjects. However, when separated by school, there were no statistically significant correlations for faculty inIT but there were significant correlations with moderate effect sizes for faculty in CJ.Keywords: Big Five Inventory, Student Evaluations, Online Instructors Relationship Between Personality Characteristics of Online Instructors and Student Evaluations