The recontextualizing of the campus chaplaincy – both as a non-denominational spirituality and as a form of mental health care – can be a problem even as it has helped to renew attention to the office.
In the Fall of 1999, after serving 14 years as a United Church minister, Reverend Tom Sherwood figured it was time for a change. He left his suburban Ottawa congregation for Carleton University to become campus chaplain. “At the time, I was the school’s only full-time religious professional working with 20,000 students,” he says. “But I was prepared for it.”
While the ethos of providing counselling and spiritual guidance proved to be similar to his work in his previous congregation, a number of things were specific to the student population. “Everything’s hard to do the first time, and lot of those firsts happen in university. Your first grandparent dies, your first friend dies, you attend your first funeral. People very successful in high school may for the first time experience failure or perhaps not being the smartest in the class.” Drawing on his experiences as a pastor and a former graduate school residential fellow, Dr. Sherwood settled into campus life.
Canada’s universities are committed to working with all parliamentarians to build a more prosperous, innovative and competitive nation. We do this through research that drives economic growth and addresses pressing social problems, and education that provides students with the advanced skills needed to thrive in a dynamic, global job market.
Budget 2014 included important investments in research and innovation, as well as support for internships. The Finance Committee is to be commended for its role in promoting them.
The university community’s recommendations for Budget 2015 focus in three areas: enhanced funding for research and innovation; an opportunities strategy for young Canadians; and initiatives to attract more Aboriginal Canadians to postsecondary education. Together, these recommendations contribute to three themes outlined in the Committee’s request for submissions.
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.
An expat explains how a temporary leave to study in the U.K. turned into a life abroad – and what the government could do to bring him back.
Growing up in small-town Ontario, I always had a nagging feeling that Canadians who moved abroad were traitors. They had shunned our country for monetary gain, or sunshine or fame. But I’ve become one of those people – part of the nation’s brain drain – and I can assure you that it was entirely accidental.
Like me, every year hundreds of Canadians head abroad to do PhDs or postdocs, intent on gathering international experience, and every year a few of them don’t come back. In my case, I was drawn to the U.K. to do a PhD in history and, two years after finishing, I am still there, now working as an academic historian. I’d like to share how that happens and what Canada might do to prevent it from happening again and again.
I did not go abroad to get a “better” education. This is what the British think draws international
students, but this is a patronizing assumption and not a reflection of reality for most. For me, the
move was part quest for adventure and
part practical desire to get my PhD completed quickly so that I could get on with a career.
Immigrants will represent nearly 100 per cent of net labour market growth in Canada by the year 2011.1 More than ever, employers recognize the need to effectively integrate immigrants into the workplace and they seek solutions to leverage the talents and contributions immigrants bring to the Canadian economy.
University campuses across Canada are struggling with a mental health tsunami that is reordering priorities in every
community and educational institution. Dealing with crises and the potential for suicide has altered the lives and agendas of people working in schools, hospitals, municipalities and service agencies, as well as parents and students. If mental health is the problem, suicide and suicide attempts are the outcome that tells us that we have to do better.
“Look to your left and look to your right. The odds are one of you is not going to graduate.”
Many of us who attended college in years past will recall receiving some such an admonition from a professor or adviser. The message was simple: our job is to give you an opportunity; your job is to take advantage of it. If you don’t, oh, well.
PANEL MANDATE, SCOPE
OF REVIEW, AND PRINCIPLES
ABSTRACT
Canadian accomplishments in science and scholarly inquiry have long been a source of national pride. However, by various measures, Canada’s research competitiveness has eroded in recent years when compared with international peers. The change coincided with a period of flat-lining of federal spending through the four core funding agencies that support researchers in universities, colleges, institutes, and research hospitals. In those years funds were also directed preferentially to priority-driven and partnership oriented research, reducing available support for independent, investigator-led research by frontline scientists and scholars.
The proportion of federally derived funding for research has also declined. Canada ranks well globally n higher education expenditures on research and development as a percentage of GDP, but is an outlier in that funding from federal government sources accounts for less than 25 per cent of that total, while institutions now underwrite 50 per cent of these costs with adverse effects on both research and education.
A study released Monday suggests that hundreds of thousands of students a year may have SAT scores that predict they will receive either better or worse grades than they are actually likely to receive. While the SAT may predict accurately for many others, the scholars who have produced the new study say it raises questions about the fairness and reliability of the SAT (including the new version about to be unveiled), which remains a key part of the admissions process at many colleges and universities.
I have a PhD in the Humanities and I'm employed.
Gainfully employed, in fact - in every sense of the word, for myself, my employer, my communitym and those I work on behalf of. And I' no employed as a professor, thought I confess that's what I wanted todo when I started my graduate work, and I;ve swum in academic waters since earning my doctorate.
This paper presents an empirical analysis of the Ontario-led strategic man-date agreement (SMA) planning exercise. Focusing on the self-generated stra-tegic mandates of five universities (McMaster, Ottawa, Queen’s, Toronto, and Western), we asked how universities responded to this exercise of strategic visioning? The answer to this question is important because the SMA process is unique in Ontario, and universities’ responses revealed aspects of their self-understanding. We adopted an organizational theory approach to understand the structure and nature of universities as organizations and explored how they might confront pressures for change. Analysis of the universities’ own proposed strategic mandates found elements of both conformity and striking differentiation, even within this sample of five research-intensive university SMAs. Directions for further work on this planning exercise and on higher education reform more generally are discussed.
Conversations with 14 sitting college and university presidents reveal a belief that the “busines s model” of higher education today is irrevocably altered, and that presidents and their senior staff leaders must take bold, creative
approaches to secure their schools’ futures. The following report summarizes seven key themes we heard during candid one-on-one interviews with these leaders about how leadership is changing in higher education; it also presents concrete suggestions for how presidents and their administrative peers can reshape their roles and strategies to help their institutions thrive in a dramatically different academic
International students are being warned they may be the target of scammers who run elaborate virtual kidnapping schemes. (Darryl Dyck/Canadian Press) International students in Calgary are at risk of falling victim to an elaborate "virtual kidnapping"
scam that forced one man into hiding and terrified his family in China, police say.
There have been two such cases reported by Chinese students in the city since the start of May, following reports of the scam elsewhere in the country, the Calgary Police Service said.
As spring semester winds down on college and university campuses across the country, faculty thoughts often turn to what we’re doing over the summer — research, course redesign, family vacations, recharging, perhaps teaching a course or two. But then academic reality rears its head and our thoughts are forced from their Summer Happy Place to somewhere far more mundane: The Assessment Mire.
If where you teach is anything like my university, in addition to the assessment work we do for our own courses (grading piles of student essays, projects, and tests) there is often a layer of institutional assessment on top of that. We use various assignments to assess the outcomes in our institution’s core curriculum, for example, and then we aggregate the data to see how students across the university are doing with the core’s various dimensions.
This report provides a systems perspective on the state of skills and higher education in Canada and identifies areas where the sector could improve in producing highly skilled graduates. I
Christopher Manfredi, provost and vice-principal, academic, at McGill University, stood before a room of his peers and made a bold statement: “Social sciences and humanities cured cancer.” To the 50 university presidents, vicepresidents and deans gathered at the workshop hosted by Universities Canada in Montreal last March, it was an example of how administrators might pitch the ongoing value of the liberal arts to a Canadian public facing rapid economic, digital, environmental and social change.
In his opening remarks at the two-day event, Universities Canada president Paul Davidson made reference to “ongoing and misguided assaults on the value of a liberal arts degree in popular media.” Dr. Manfredi, a political scientist and former dean of McGill’s faculty of arts, picked up this thread in his panel talk. He suggested reports on declining program enrolment in the humanities and social sciences, and the supposedly dire employment prospects of graduates in these fields, have created a false crisis. Instead of approaching the situation as though they’re putting out a fire, university administrators and faculty should focus instead on crafting “a good story.”
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.
The first “teaching machine” was invented nearly a century ago by Sydney Pressey, a psychologist at Ohio University, out of spare typewriter parts. The device was simple, presenting the user with a multiple-choice question and a set of answers. In “teach mode,” the machine would advance to the next question only once the user chose the correct answer. Pressey declared that his invention marked the beginning of “the industrial revolution in education”—but despite his grand claims, the teaching machine failed to gain much attention, and soon faded into obscurity.
This study aimed to identify and rank the personal, family-related, social, and academic correlates of depressive symptoms in first-year college students. A questionnaire that included the Beck Depression Inventory-II (BDI-II) was administered to 389 first-year college students (mean age = 18.9; SD = 3.38; 59.4% female). Eight variables contributed uniquely to the variance of depressive symptoms and were, in decreasing order of importance: (1) the absence of personal goals, (2) a high level of anxiety and (3) of dysfunctional thoughts regarding success, (4) a lack of emotional adjustment to college, (5) being female, (6) receiving little warmth and encouragement of autonomy from one’s mother and (7) from one’s father, and (8) being attracted to members of the same or both sexes. These results suggest that a multimodal intervention is required to support students’ mental health.
Ontario is reviewing its university funding model, an enrolment-based formula through which the Ministry of Training, Colleges and Universities distributes a $3.5B annual provincial operating grant to the province’s 20 publicly assisted universities.
We examined the existing model in our June 2015 paper The Ontario University Funding Model in Context. We observed that the model is a relatively small (27 %) component of total university system revenues. We concluded that this small slice of funding must be managed in a focussed and strategic way if it is to be effective in shaping behaviour towards desired provincial objectives (HEQCO, 2015).