CHICAGO -- Community college leaders across the country are looking through the hundreds of courses in their catalogs and trying to find a way to streamline their offerings in order to get students to completion.
That's because the days of students taking courses without direction is no longer acceptable if colleges hope to get them to complete within a reasonable time, with a degree and minimal student debt.
Making work-integrated learning a fundamental part of the Canadian undergraduate experience is one of several commitments recently made by Canada’s Business/Higher Education Roundtable – a year-old organization representing some of the country’s leading companies and post-secondary institutions.
Most of the time, instructors use activities as a way for students to demonstrate their mastery. But activities can be used differently — to spark curiosity and get students thinking, before they know much of anything about a particular topic. That was the premise of “The Power of the ‘Naïve Task,’” one of the most interesting sessions I attended at the Designing Effective
Teaching conference in Bethesda, Md., last week.
Hosting international students has long been admired as one of the hallmarks of internationalization. The two major formative strands of internationalization in Canadian universities are development cooperation and international students. With reduced public funding for higher education, institutions are aggressively recruiting international students to generate additional revenue. Canada is equally interested in offering incentives for international students to stay in the country as immigrants after completing their studies. In its 2011 budget, the Canadian federal government earmarked funding for an international
education strategy and, in 2010, funded Edu-Canada—the marketing unit within the Department of Education and Foreign Affairs (DFAIT)—to develop an official Canadian brand to boost educational marketing, IMAGINE: Education in/au Canada. This model emulates the Australian one, which rapidly capitalized on the recruitment of international students and became an
international success story. Given current Canadian higher education policy trends, this paper will address the cautionary lessons that can be drawn from the Australian case.
From tracking the use of crack cocaine in Brazil to examining the effects of air pollution on children in Mexico to exploring
the impact of mining operations on local economies, the most recent phase of the Canada-Latin America and the Caribbean
Research Exchange Grants (LACREG) program supported more than 30 international research projects in a wide range of
disciplines and countries.
The practice of shared governance is contested terrain in American higher education. Despite consensus that shared governance is a collaborative approach to decision-making characterized by the distribution of authority across various institutional actors (e.g., faculty, senior administrators, trustees), models and norms of effective shared governance remain elusive. Indeed higher education critics within and beyond the academy often identify the practice of shared decision-making as a major barrier to innovation and fiscal efficiency, two organizational qualities deemed essential for survival in today’s rapidly changing global knowledge economy.
Ontario is taking a historic step in recognizing the unique role Indigenous Institutes have in the province's postsecondary education system with the introduction of new legislation that, if passed, would transfer key functions and oversight to Indigenous people.
Deb Matthews, Minister of Advanced Education and Skills Development, and David Zimmer, Minister of Indigenous Relations and Reconciliation, were joined by the Aboriginal Institutes Consortium, chiefs, leaders of Indigenous Institutes and students from across the province in Toronto today to mark this important step on the path to reconciliation with Indigenous peoples.
The time may have come for the Ontario government to take a closer look at the issue of part-time faculty at the province's public colleges, says Charles Pascal, a professor at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, at the University of Toronto.
Background/Context: Schools have attempted to address stratification in black and Latino students’ access to higher education through extensive reform initiatives, including those focused on social supports. A crucial focus has been missing from these efforts, essential to improving the effectiveness of support mechanisms and understanding why they have been insufficient: how students experience these reforms.
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.
OTTAWA — Federal officials believe the largest federal program aimed at helping aboriginal students pay for postsecondary
education faces numerous issues, including a financing cap which limits the fund's ability to keep up with rising tuition costs.
A federal review from summer 2015 suggests the support program needs more money, because a two-per-cent annual escalator is not in step with the increasing cost of tuition.
More than six months after the Harvey Weinstein scandal catapulted sexual harassment to the top of the cultural agenda, academia is among the industries still grappling with the extent of the problem that it faces, and what to do about it.
Mobile learning (mlearning) is an emerging trend in schools, utilizing mobile technologies that offer the greatest amount of flexibility in teaching and learning. Researchers have found that one of the main barriers to effective mlearning in schools is the lack of teacher professional development. Results from a needsassessment survey and a post-workshop evaluation survey describe the professional development needs of teachers, technology coaches and administrators implementing an mlearning initiative in K–12 schools across 21 US states. Generally, needs shifted from a focus on technology integration and pedagogical coaching to a focus on the needs for ongoing support and time, reflecting a growing confidence in teachers to develop and implement mlearning lessons.
Additionally, results from the needs assessment indicated that teachers and staff feel less confident about external areas such as support policies and community involvement – these areas may also offer areas for future growth in mlearning professional development.
Keywords: mobile learning; professional development; Essential Conditions
In this study, the authors examined the findings and implications of the research on trust in leadership that has been conducted during the past 4 decades. First, the study provides estimates of the primary relationships between trust in leadership and key outcomes, antecedents, and correlates (k 106). Second, the study explores how specifying the construct with alternative leadership referents (direct leaders vs. organizational leadership) and definitions (types of trust) results in systematically different relationships between trust in leadership and outcomes and antecedents. Direct leaders (e.g., supervisors) appear to be a particularly important referent of trust. Last, a theoretical framework is offered to provide parsimony to the expansive literature and to clarify the different perspectives on the construct of trust in leadership and its operation.
Addressing financial and psychosocial barriers to retirement can benefit both faculty and their institutions.
About a third of tenured faculty age 50 or older expect to retire by “normal” retirement age, while fully two-thirds anticipate working past that age or have already done so. This latter group is sometimes called “reluctant retirees,” and when their numbers swell on campus, it can lead to productivity declines, limited advancement opportunities for junior faculty, a lack of openings for new hires, and difficulty reallocating institutional resources. To address a reluctant retiree pheno- menon and better manage faculty retirement patterns, college and university leaders need to understand the thought process among senior faculty regarding whether and when to retire.
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
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.
PowerPoint Presentation
In a previous article, I wrote about the challenges and rewards of chairing an academic department and offered my postchair analysis of my performance. In this essay, I talk about the skill set needed for drama-free delivery of your curriculum and reasonably happy colleagues.
We all know the saying “the devil is in the details.” It means that sometimes the success or failure of projects, careers, parties or performances hinges on some detail that was either poorly planned or neglected. Once I took an exam to be hired by a large corporation that used bubble sheets. I brought with me, as instructed, two pencils for the task. I carefully selected them, and they were freshly sharpened and gleaming. If only I had thought to check whether they were No. 2 pencils. The proctors for the exam, who were also human resources executives, gave me that tsk-tsk look as they handed me the stubby in-house pencils. Ultimately, the wrong leads dashed my dreams of carrying a platinum card by American Express and cruising in a European luxury automobile.
Postsecondary education in Alberta is one sector that appears to be booming from the bust in energy prices.
Amid thousands of oil-patch layoffs and a wider economic slowdown, many professionals are exchanging their briefcases and welding sticks for knapsacks and pencils to head back to school.
Enrolment skyrocketed this fall at Bow Valley College in downtown Calgary, a city that has been hit hard by the wave of layoffs. Fall registrations are up by 11 per cent to their highest level in five years, said spokeswoman
Nicole McPhee.