The Government of Ontario’s Reaching Higher plan was a visionary document that provided needed funding to Ontario’s postsecondary system. However, it was not sufficient to overcome the long history of university under-funding in our province. Its impact was also eroded by unanticipated increases in enrolment and the current economic downturn.
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.
Over the last quarter century, as public education has made a hard shift towards “accountability” and increased standardized testing, the trend towards the use of research-based instruction in classrooms has become nearly as ubiquitous as the Scantron sheets students are asked to bubble in multiple times each semester. For those of us in the field of educational psychology, this would seem like a golden opportunity to capitalize on empirical evidence to improve the educational outcomes for millions of school children. Yet there are legitimate questions about whether empirical research findings have made their way into classrooms during this time or if the term “research-based instruction” has simply become a catch phrase for the latest anecdotal trends in education. Is there a disconnect between “research-based” practices employed in schools and the actual research compiled on human learning?
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.
Mount Royal University (MRU) has a long-standing history of student-centered leadership and learning. We are known to be an institution that cares about the success and the health of our students, and we have strong services that support mental health promotion and respond well to mental health issues and concerns. In addition to excellent service providers, MRU has many positive practices and policies in place to support students. Recent trends suggest that the prevalence of mental health issues is on the rise among young adults. More students are entering into university with pre-existing mental health conditions, more are seeking help, and often issues are complex and multifaceted. Given that rates of mental illness are on the rise, and given that our student population has reported stress levels higher than other students at post-secondary institutions in North American, a review of our student mental health practices and procedures was warranted.
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.
“Faculty need to be equal partners in order to meet the challenges facing college education today, and to ensure that the CAATs continue to fulfill their original mandate of access, quality, and service to diverse communities. Being equal partners with college administration and the provincial government means faculty having a strong voice within the classroom, within the governance of each institution, and when setting priorities for the system as a whole.”
In Quebec, a new law calls for universities to adopt a code of conduct covering faculty-student relationships.
On December 8, the Quebec government passed Bill 151, an act aimed at preventing and combatting sexual violence on the province’s university and college campuses. Among other things, the new law mandates that universities and CEGEPs (Quebec’s colleges) develop standalone sexual violence policies. British Columbia, Manitoba and Ontario all passed similar legislation that came into effect during the past year.
However, Quebec’s new law has generated much discussion because it has a provision requiring postsecondary institutions to adopt policies governing intimate relationships between students and university personnel, including professors and lecturers. Quebec’s minister responsible for higher education and the status of women, Hélène David, said during public hearings on the bill that the government can’t ban such relationships. But, she said universities and CEGEPs would have the authority to do so.
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.
What annoys me about the teaching profession, more than anything else, is the constant grousing about students. A certain slice of the faculty seems to enjoy complaining about how bad their students are — especially, of course, today’s students, who are clearly worse than any other generation in history. I’ve been hearing the same gripe for my entire 33 years of college teaching.
Gender disparities appear to be decreasing in academia according to a number of metrics, such as grant funding, hiring,
acceptance at scholarly journals, and productivity, and it might be tempting to think that gender inequity will soon be a problem of the past. However, a large-scale analysis based on over eight million papers across the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities reveals a number of understated and persistent ways in which gender inequities remain. For instance, even where raw publication counts seem to be equal between genders, close inspection reveals that, in certain fields, men predominate in the prestigious first and last author positions. Moreover, women are significantly underrepresented as authors of single-authored papers. Academics should be aware of the subtle ways that gender disparities can occur in scholarly authorship.
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
Campaign co-chair describes ideas being prepared for fall campaign. Among them: getting government out of student lending, requiring colleges to share in risk of loans, discouraging borrowing by liberal arts majors and moving OCR to Justice Department.
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.
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”.
Essential ingredients to gaining buy-in. The obstacles? Where does accountability for student retention rest?
By the 1930's the federal government had come to the internal conclusion that iling to meet its goals. In 1936, R. A. Hoey,
ted as Indian Affairs’ an assessment of the residential schools. He noted that in 1935–36, spending on residen- tial
schools was $1,511,153.76. This amounted to 77.8% of the entire Indian Affairs edu- cation budget of $1,943,645. Enrolment was increasing at a rate of 250 pupils a year. To provide these students with residential school schooling would require an additional expenditure of $40,000 a year—a figure that did not include the cost of building new schools or paying interest on the capital outlay. However, day school education for an additional 250 students would cost only $7,000 a year. Not surprisingly, he opposed any further expansion of the residential school system, observing, “To continue to build educational institutions, particularly residential schools, while the money at our disposal is insufficient to keep the schools already erected in a proper state of repair, is, to me, very unsound and a practice difficult to justify.”
Faculty everywhere are flipping their classes, but can we flip faculty development? That’s the question I asked myself when I flipped the pre-conference workshop at the 2016 Teaching Professor Technology Conference. What I discovered is that we can “practice what we teach” and design faculty-centered learning experiences much the same way we design studentcentered
learning experiences.
Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology tasked with examining the future of online
education have
returned with a simple recommendation for colleges and universities: focus on people and process,
not technology.
Back in 2013, an MIT task force presented a vision of undergraduate education at the institute in which students spend half as much time on campus as they do today. Freshman year would be fully online, and instead of a senior year, students would take online continuing education courses to refresh their knowledge and add new skills. That vision leaned heavily on MIT’s work with edX, the massive open online course provider it founded with Harvard University.
Many colleges and universities want to attract a more diverse work force and foster greater inclusivity in their faculty and administrative ranks, but don't know how. The Chronicle wants to help, so we've recast the weekly On Hiring newsletter and we're sharing stories, news, and data from around the web aimed at helping hiring managers and recruiters make better, more informed decisions about diversity hiring at their institutions and across higher education generally. Here are some highlights from this week's newsletter. If you'd like to receive the new and improved On Hiring and Diversity newsletter, sign up here.