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.
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.
Best Practices in Measuring the Impact of Student Success Strategies
Overview of the Special Report
This Special Report’s prime objective is to help policy decision-makers and educational leaders understand what
today’s classroom technologies are evolving toward, and, more importantly, why. It is hoped that examining current
classroom technologies will spur conversation as to how the practice of teaching is evolving and why that evolution
makes sense.
The most difficult challenge in putting this report together was to adequately address all of the key technologies
deployed in classrooms today. Technologies range from tactile objects in Pre-K to hyper-dense 3D modeling programs in
graduate-level science classes at research universities. They involve devices, interactive software and assessment tools.
Ultimately we chose to group technologies by function as they would be used in the classroom, regardless of curriculum
subject or grade level.
Purpose of Study: This study investigates the association among two aspects of organizational culture (professional community and teacher collaboration), teacher control over school and classroom policy, and teacher job satisfaction. We use the term Collective Pedagogical Teacher Culture to refer to those schools with strong norms of professional community and teacher collaboration.
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.
Consider this scenario: as an editor of a scholarly journal, you are informed that an anonymous blogger has publicly accused your journal of publishing an article with allegedly numerous ethical violations and acts of misconduct from 20 years before you became editor. Your journal has no archives or records from that long ago, but you are being contacted by current authors and the media to respond. Who ya gonna call? If you are one of the approximately 11,500 members of a voluntary organization called COPE (the Committee on Publication Ethics), that’s probably who you’ll call.
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 first thing I do when I walk into a seminar room or lecture hall is to glance around and
register if the class is diverse. If, to the naked eye at least, there appears to be a good mix of
genders and races, and perhaps a headscarf or a turban, I’m satisfied.
But what exactly does this mean, and where does it lead?
When I was an undergraduate at the University of Illinois in the early/mid 1990s, I remember a professor saying that he maintained an online chat room for one of his courses because he found that Asian and Asian-American students who did not participate in class discussion asked questions and made comments online. He made it clear that organizing this online forum was an inconvenience to him (this was right at the start of the Internet era, when this practice was not yet de rigueur) but he wanted to be ethnically/racially sensitive.
The National Survey of College Counseling Centers (previously the National Survey of Counseling Center Directors) has been conducted since 1981 and includes data provided by the administrative heads of college and university counseling centers in the United States and Canada. The survey attempts to stay abreast of current trends in counseling centers and to provide ready access to the opinions and solutions of colleagues to problems and challenges in the field. The areas addressed cover a range of concerns including current concerns, innovative programming, and a number of other administrative, ethical and clinical issues. A directory of all participants is provided.
Six months after the Ontario government announced a new funding model for the province’s universities, questions are being raised about whether the framework is flexible enough to respond to the challenges facing both Ontario’s more remote regions as well as its booming Greater Toronto Area.
Currently, universities and colleges receive funds tied to their enrolment. Under the new plan, institutions will have to keep enrolment within several percentage points of a target that is now being negotiated between each school and the provincial government. Funding will not be available for enrolment growth beyond that target.
Post-Secondary Education in Ontario: Managing Challenges in an Age of Austerity 905 Region - January 2013
With a mandate to prepare students for the labour market, ‘communication’ figures prominently among the essential employability skills that Ontario’s colleges are expected to develop in students prior to graduation. As a result, many colleges have instituted measures to help shore up the skills of students who are admitted to college yet who do not possess the expected ‘college-level English’ proficiency. Several have addressed this challenge by admitting these students into developmental communication classes, which are designed to build their skills to the expected college level.
The aim of this paper is to describe the technical issues to be addressed in enhancing the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) contextual questionnaires instruments for the PISA for Development (PfD) study. We discuss the conceptual framework for the contextual questionnaires used in PISA, describe the evolution of the PISA contextual questionnaires, review the measures used in several other international studies, and consider how the PISA data have been used to address the policy questions relevant to the OECD member countries. This research, alongside discussions with
key stakeholders, including those from participating countries, enabled us to identify seven themes in which the PISA contextual questionnaires could be enhanced and made more relevant for low- and middle-income countries: early learning opportunities, language at home and at school, family and community support, quality of instruction, learning time, socioeconomic status, and school resources. We discuss various options for enhancing these measures.
Trust Matters: Distinction and Diversity in Undergraduate Science Education
Higher ed is an industry built on relationships. This is no more so than on a traditional residential campus.
Much of the work of moving projects and initiatives forward happens in conversation. There is a reason that a shared joke across higher ed is that nobody can get any work done during the day - as everybody is too busy in meetings.
On most campuses, these conversations are face-to-face. They involve going to each other’s offices, finding a meeting room, and sometimes grabbing a coffee. (My preferred one-on-one meeting venue is a walking meeting).
A face-to-face meeting culture accomplishes many important goals. There is a ritual to the face-to-face discussion, one that involves norms of social connections. Meetings are places to do work - but they are also places to learn about and make connections with our colleagues.
Ten years ago, I taught a literature unit on the Vietnam era. We read T.C. Boyle’s Drop City and Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, and I invited my colleague Bob to speak to my class. He brought his guitar and sang a song he’d written about serving in the Army. Then he looked at my students and said, "I’ve been asked to talk about my experiences in Vietnam maybe six times in my life. You’re the seventh." And he held us spellbound for an hour.
Given their unique pedagogical mandate and structure, Canadian public col- leges play a central role in serving groups traditionally under-represented in the post-secondary system. Yet as enrolment from these groups continues to rise, it is unclear to what extent the diversity of student bodies is reflected among faculty. In fact, while issues of faculty diversity and
employment eq- uity have gained increasing attention within Canadian universities, they have been largely overlooked within colleges. In an effort to address this gap, we have reviewed the employment equity related policies of Ontario’s five larg- est publicly funded colleges (otherwise known as Ontario Colleges of Applied Arts and Technology, or OCAATs). With a focus on personnel data collection and recruitment—two policy areas we will argue are particularly underdevel- oped in the sector—this paper provides recommendations for future research and priorities for organizational policy development.
Trust, fights, and child care. When I’m advising start-up teams nowadays, I ask a lot of questions around those three areas. Which makes it sounds more like a marriage counselor’s office, rather than a boardroom, right?
Quite often, the teams I’m talking with think culture is some woo-woo stuff that doesn’t make any difference in the end, or even if they think it does matter, they have an excruciatingly hard time describing what theirs is.
n 2014, StudentsNS welcomed its first non-university member: the Student Association of the Nova Scotia Community College Kingstec Campus in Kentville. This report explores fees, funding and accountability structures at the College, as well as student financial assistance to college students. We seek to identify opportunities to improve or expand access, affordability, student voice and quality of education, with an emphasis on the first three values in particular. We find that the Nova Scotia Community College has prioritized access and affordability and delivered important outcomes, attracting more students from communities that are traditionally underrepresented in post-secondary education, and notably mature learners. The College also has relatively low cost programs because of their shorter length and lower fees. However, College students’ debt levels remain higher than the national average, are leading to elevated default rates and have been neglected by the Province as compared with university students’ debt. In terms of student voice and accountability, the College and the Province need to work harder to ensure transparency to the public and meaningful student participation in decision-making. We identify a number of modest policy changes that the College and the Province could pursue to address these challenges and help the College better serve Nova Scotians and deliver on its mandate.