Ontario's provincial government recognizes college to university transfer as increasingly important. The challenge that Ontario faces is that its college and university systems were created as binary structures, with insufficient credit transfer opportunities for college students who wish to access universities with appropriate advanced standing. This paper discusses Fanshawe College's consequent attempt to create new pathways for its students within the European Higher Education Area, whose Bologna Process provides an integrated credit transfer system that is theoretically very open to student mobility. This unique project is intended to act as an exemplar for other Ontario colleges seeking similar solutions, and to support an articulation agreement between Fanshawe's Advanced Diploma in Architectural Technology and a Building Sciences Master's program at Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand.
Inside Higher Ed’s fourth annual survey of college and university faculty members and campus leaders in educational technology aims to understand how these groups perceive and pursue online learning and other issues related to technology-enabled education.
I didn’t always want to be a professor, but when I learned what a professor did (or what I thought they did), I decided
it was exactly the profession from which to do the things I wanted to do. My early career dreams primarily revolved
around three things: I wanted to be an actress, an activist and a writer.
Reality got the best of me, and I decided none of those things were viable career paths. Or at least not financially
lucrative career paths, which was a necessity for someone who grew up working-class with a single mom. By the
end of college (which I attended by the grace of loans and persistence), I was enamored with the professors who
taught me theories to make sense of my positionality as a woman, a poor person, a queer femme, a white person,
etc. I also witnessed professors publishing books as well as doing activist work on their days away from the campus.
And they got to perform, in a way, in front of the students they taught. I felt like it was a legitimate dream career, and
I was nothing short of elated when I was accepted tuition-free into a master’s and then a Ph.D. program.
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 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.
The scholarly literature on “active learning” is almost shockingly positive. Over and over again, when active-learning
strategies have been studied — particularly when they have been compared to lecturing — they have been found to
increase student learning.
A 2014 meta-analysis of 225 studies measured student performance in STEM courses taught by traditional lectures against courses that used active-learning strategies. Using a cautious methodology to avoid biases, the study found a marked difference between the two categories. Average marks in the active-learning courses were a half-grade higher (i.e., a B rather than a B-) compared with those taught by lecture. Moreover, students in lecture courses were one and a half times more likely to fail than their counterparts who engaged in active learning. Considering how many studies were looked at, those were remarkably consistent results.
A partnership between the Mastercard Foundation, Rideau Hall Foundation, Vancouver Island University and Yukon College has ambitious aims.
Tasha Brooks likes to have an open-door policy. As one of Vancouver Island University’s four new “education navigators,” her job is to help First Nations students to transition into university and complete their education. “I’m very open about my own struggles through university,” says Ms. Brooks, who earned two degrees in business administration at VIU. “They can look at my past and say, she was also like me, very close to dropping out at some point. … I’m there to not only support them but I can empathize with them.”
National training packages have become the mandated framework for course delivery in Australia’s vocational education and training sector. Each training package contains: qualifications that can be issued, industry-derive d competencies , and assessment guidelines but do not contain an endorsed curriculum component or learning outcomes. All public and private vocational education and training providers must use training packages, or industryendorsed competencies in cases where they do not exist, if they are to receive public funding for their programs. This article describes the operation of Australia’s national training packages and considers some of their strengths and weaknesses, many of which may be shared by similar
systems elsewhere. Argues that training packages may result in poorer student learning outcomes, and that they may threaten the end of effective credit transfer between the vocational education and training and higher education sectors. Suggests that national training packages are not a good model for other countries and that Australia’s current vocational education and training policy needs to be reviewed.
Lessons learned from the presidential transition committee at the University of Saskatchewan.
In 2015, the University of Saskatchewan undertook an extensive presidential transition process to welcome Peter Stoicheff to the role. As two individuals closely linked to this process, here are some lessons we learned that may be of value to colleagues undertaking a similar presidential transition.
The title of this piece notwithstanding, there are really only two main keys to a successful presidential transition: choose the right individual for the office and provide them with the right supports to be successful. Put another way, if you don’t have the right person and supports, the challenges you will face are likely insurmountable and the process will be unpleasant for all involved. If your incoming president tells you that no transition or mentorship is required, that is a signal that they are the wrong choice. Getting the right person is a necessary condition for success. It isn’t, however, sufficient.
Research is reviewed in a rigorous manner, by expert peers. Yet teaching is often reviewed only or mostly by pedagogical non-experts: students. There’s also mounting evidence of bias in student evaluations of teaching, or SETs -- against female and minority instructors in particular. And teacher ratings aren’t necessarily correlated with learning outcomes.
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.
College completion is on the agenda — from the White House to the statehouse to the family house. Improving college completion is essential, but increased degree and certificate completion, in and of itself, is not a sufficient measure of improvement. Genuine progress depends on making sure that degree completion is a proxy for real learning — for developing thinking and reasoning abilities, content knowledge, and the high-level skills needed for 21st-century jobs and citizenship.
While nearly every day brings news of someone banished from the entertainment industry — Harvey Weinstein, Garrison Keillor, Louis C.K. — the situation in the academy is very different. Only a small number of tenured faculty members have lost their jobs in the wake of allegations of sexual harassment and assault. Of course, this isn’t a result of any lack of allegations. A crowdsourced survey on instances of sexual harassment organized by Karen L. Kelsky is at 1,900 responses and counting.
The ways in which university quality assessments are developed reveal a great deal about value constructs surrounding higher education. Measures devel- oped and consumed by external stakeholders, in particular, indicate which elements of academia are broadly perceived to be most reflective of quality. This paper examines the historical context of library quality assessment and
reviews the literature related to how library value is framed in three forms of external evaluation: accreditation, university rankings, and student surveys. The review finds that the library’s contribution to university quality, when it is considered at all, continues to be measured in terms of collections, spaces, and expenditures, despite significant expansion of library services into non- traditional arenas, including teaching and research, scholarly communica- tions, and data management and visualization. These findings are contrasted with the frequently invoked notion of the library as the heart of the university.
Toronto, ON – With the end of Labour Day marking the unofficial end of summer, post-secondary students are setting their focus on school and their future after it. But according to an Ipsos poll conducted on behalf of RBC, many students are trying to please their parents through the process, and many parents under-estimate the degree to which this is happening.
In 2005, the report issued by the Rae review of college and university education in Ontario, Ontario: A Leader in Learning, re-stated an estimate that 11,000 new university faculty would be required by 2010. No source was cited, nor any of the assumptions that underlie the conclusion. OCUFA subsequently conducted an analysis that showed Ontario universities would have to hire nearly 11,000 full- time faculty between 2003 and 2010 to replace retiring professors and to reduce the student-faculty ratio to a level at comparable US institutions and at which Ontario could be a true leader in learning
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.
Political pollsters like to talk about the distinction between "hard support" and "soft support." Hard supporters will vote for a candidate no matter what. Soft supporters are known by another name: swing voters. They are the people who say they’ll vote for a certain candidate but often change their minds.
The idea of training Ph.D.s for diverse career tracks has hard and soft supporters, too, but some professors may not realize which group they’re in. They may believe they’re behind graduates who search for jobs beyond the professoriate. But the actions of these faculty members — or their inaction — can suggest otherwise.
Bill C-51, the federal government’s Anti-Terrorism Act, has sparked serious concerns about the potential impact on the basic civil liberties of all Canadians. The proposed legislation would establish criminal offences that infringe upon the right to free expression. Security agencies would be granted unprecedented and intrusive powers to monitor and share information about Canadians, with no commensurate increase in oversight or accountability
Work-integrated learning (WIL) has been identified as a key strategy for supporting Canada’s postsecondary education (PSE) system in responding to an increasingly dynamic, globalized, knowledge-based economy. Ontario in particular has been described as a “hot bed” of co-operative education (Ipsos Reid, 2010). However, while there is a common belief that WIL improves employment outcomes (see Gault, Redington & Schlager, 2000; Kramer & Usher, 2010), research on this topic has generally been specific to certain programs and types of WIL (Sattler, 2011).
In order to address this limited understanding of the impact of WIL on participants, employers and institutions, in 2009 the Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario (HEQCO) launched a multi-year project titled “Work-Integrated Learning in Ontario’s Postsecondary Education Sector.” This multi-stage study involved gathering qualitative and quantitative insights from faculty, employers and students on the perceived value and benefits of work and voluntary activities undertaken during a postsecondary program of study, both WIL and non-WIL, and examines the impact of these activities on learning, skills acquisition and labour market outcomes.