TORONTO — Two Ontario colleges have opened campuses in Saudi Arabia that don’t accept female
students in their classes.
Niagara College offers tourism, hospitality and business courses at its campus in Taif, while Algonquin
College offers 10 programs, including business, accounting and electrical engineering technician, at a
campus in the city of Jazan.
Metrics are used throughout Ontario’s postsecondary education system—for determining university funding, judging institutional performance, and gauging student perceptions. But metrics are not always the best tool for evaluation, and often have unintended consequences.
In my educational leadership work, I’ve talked with administrators and faculty from across the country who are interested in creating safer and more supportive, engaging, and inspiring school
environments.
But we are confronted with the challenge of disengagement in America’s schools. Simply put, schools are places here too many kids do not want to be. And when this happens, they vote with their feet to leave, or stay and truggle, dissociate, or worse. A Gallup study showed that 24 percent of fifth graders were disengaged. That percentage grew to 39 percent for middle school students and 56 percent of students in high school. (And that 56 percent doesn’t include all those disengaged youths who had already dropped out.)
Engineering is synonymous with design. It is a skill that is inherently understood by experienced engineers, but also one of the most difficult topics to teach. McMaster University’s first-year Design & Graphics is a required course for all engineering students. The course has taught hand-sketching, 3D solid modeling, system simulation, 3D rapid prototyping, and culminated in a project in gear train design that requires a combination of the core course topics. Students chose their own three-member teams and lab sections were randomly assigned one of three modalities for completion of the design project: Simulation (SIM), in which they produced and verified a design using a simulation tool; Prototyping (PRT), in which they used a 3D printer to create a working plastic model of a design; or Simulation and Prototyping (SIM+PRT), in which they used both tools to complete a design.
FREUD commented on the insults heaped on man since the Renaissance. He suggested that all the discoveries made by man in recent centuries have automatically, as it were, become techniques of debunking. And he saw psychoanalysis in this light too, as meeting resistance bewcause of its wound to human pride.
We are often warned against being judgemental. “Judge not, lest ye be judged”, for example, reminds us how vulnerable we are to others’ estimations of us, and how likely those estimations are to be biased.
Nevertheless, we continue to make judgements, both positive and negative, because we have evolved to do so. Human brains have been “domesticated” by our need to live in groups to survive. We assess others carefully, and monitor their views of us; if those views are negative, we may be cast out of the group.
According to the 2011 National Household Survey (NHS), immigrants accounted for 21% of Canada’s overall population, and among those who immigrated to Canada between 2001 and 2011, 41% held a bachelor’s degree or higher. Yet immigrants are less likely than the Canadian-born to be employed, and those who are employed are more likely to be overqualified relative to their occupation. They are also less likely to be working in an occupation that matches their field of study. The degree to which immigrants experience these disadvantages varies according to how long they have been living in Canada, with more established immigrants (those who have lived in Canada 10 years or more) showing higher employment rates and education-to-occupation match rates than immigrants who have not been in Canada as long.
The goal of attracting more international students is an increasingly common theme in discussions on the future of post-secondary education in Canada. The goal of making Canada a premiere destination for post-secondary students from around the world has been repeated throughout the past decade by provincial and federal levels of government and leaders in the post-secondary sector from coast-to-coast. “International students in Canada,” the Advisory Panel on Canada’s International Education Strategy noted, “provide immediate and significant economic benefits to Canadians in every region of the country.”1 The panel advocates for a doubling of the number of international students studying in Canada over the span of a decade, from just under 240,000 in 2011 to over 450,000 in 2022.
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.
Many countries strive to make postsecondary education maximally accessible to their citizens under the assumption that educated citizens boost innovation and leadership, resulting in social and economic benefits. However, attempts to increase access, especially in contexts of stagnant or diminishing financial support, can result in ever-increasing class sizes. Two aspects of large classes are extremely worrisome. First, economic and logistical constraints have led many such classes to devolve into settings characterized by lectures, readings and multiple-choice tests, thereby denying students experience and exercise with important transferable skills (e.g., critical thought, creative thought, self-reflective thought, expressive and receptive communication). Second, such classes are depicted as cold and impersonal, with little sense of community among students.
1) Strengthening our Canadian fabric
• How many newcomers should we welcome to Canada in 2017 and beyond?
• How can we best support newcomers to ensure they become successful members of our communities?
• Do we have the balance right among the immigration programs or streams? If not, what priorities should form the foundation of Canada's immigration planning?
How to create a targeted resumé for industry positions.
It is well known that a strong curriculum vitae is crucial when applying to positions within academia. The same holds true if you are applying for industry positions. However, an application for those types of roles will require you to submit a concise resumé instead of a lengthy CV. Many graduate students may be inclined to include all of their accumulated academic experience on the resumé with the hope that the hiring manager will be able to assess what is most relevant to the job posting. In this case, however, more is not always better, as employers prefer resumés that outline the skills and experiences relevant to the position, presented in a succinct and tailored format. Given the years of experience gained throughout your academic career, it can sometimes be an overwhelming task to condense the information from your CV into a resumé that is often only two pages long. The following recommendations are designed to help guide you through the process of converting your CV into a targeted resumé.
Schools are also looking to encourage domestic students to benefit from international students’ presence.
As the blip-blip-bloop of the classic Skype ringtone connects me with Zack (Guanglong) Pang at Wilfrid Laurier University, it occurs to me that a little box like this on a computer screen may be the only window through which this international student has seen his family for the past few years – they live half a world away in his hometown of Shenyang, an industrial city in the northeastern part of China. Mr. Pang, who at the time of this interview was finishing his bachelor of science degree at Laurier and preparing for a master’s in geography at York University starting this fall, cheerfully returns my wave at the screen.
Hilda Neatby, the author of So Little for the Mind, which stirred up a national debate about education in the 1950s, finds an unlikely ally in Michel Foucault. Both believe that progressive education, grounded in scientific pedagogy, is a means of domination rather than liberation. Both trace its roots to the 18th-century Age of Reason, which, according to Foucault, gave birth to the “disciplinary society” and, in Neatby’s view, destabilized the balance between faith and reason. Although they are philosophically far apart (Foucault, a Nietzschean; Neatby, a Christian), they have a startlingly similar appraisal of the progressive school.
You’ve heard it a million times: being in school isn’t the “real world,” and the longer you’re in school, the less you know about how that “real world” functions. The laws that govern everything and everyone else, especially in the working world, haven’t been applying to you. And you -- the coddled, brainy, time-wasting human being who dares to think that intellectual pursuits are worth valuable years of your life -- you are in for a loud wake-up call. Just wait and
see.
Contrary to popular and judgmental opinion, however, your doctoral experience is some of the best working world experience you can get. The clearer you are about why that is the case, the more it can help you survive -- and sometimes thrive -- both in graduate school and in whatever jobs or careers come later.
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.
This quantitative study examined the relationship between the Big 5 personality traits and how they relate to online teacher effectiveness. The primary method of data collection for this study was through the use of surveys primarily building upon the Personality Style Inventory (PSI)(Lounsbury & Gibson, 2010), a work-based personality measure, was the instrument used to assess personality measures. In addition an evaluation instrument was developed by the researchers to evaluate classroom performance across a 10-point scale. In total 115 instructors from a large predominantly online university were surveyed through Qualtrics for personality traits and then had their courses evaluated for effectiveness and quality utilizing measures based on the Quality Matters program. Using a Pearson product moment correlation coefficient, it was found that 9 personality traits were significantly correlated with online teaching performance. While the results of this study can only be seen at this point as preliminary, it does open the door to further studies to determine if online teacher training or professional development interventions should take a different approach. Ultimately, the findings of this study demonstrated that personality does play a significant role in the effectiveness of online teaching performance.
To some people, “reconciliation” is the re-establishment of a conciliatory state. However, this is a state that many Aboriginal people assert has never existed between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people. To others, “reconciliation,” in the context of Indian residential schools, is similar to dealing with a situation of family violence. It is about coming to terms with events of the past in a manner that over-comes conflict and establishes a respectful and healthy relationship among people going forward. It is in the latter context that the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (trc) has approached the question of reconciliation.
To the Commission, “reconciliation” is about establishing and maintaining a mutu-ally respectful relationship between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal peoples in this country. For that to happen, there has to be awareness of the past, acknowledgement of the harm that has been inflicted, atonement for the causes, and action to change behaviour.
I have written this Guidebook to assist users interested in creating a campus that will be more global in its mission, programs, and people. My approach is to focus on the views and contributions of the people who are engaged in higher education. Thus it has a “person” emphasis rather than a structural or policy point of view. I do this since I think that the goals, aspirations, and achievements of those working and studying on campus is the critical factor in creating a campus with a global perspective. (Campus is to be broadly defined to include both “in-place” multiple sites and virtual.)
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 haracteristics 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.