Executive Summary
The NSSE National Data Project is an element of ongoing engagement research and implementation practice in Canada. It has two primary objectives. The first is the construction of detailed NSSE reports (items means and frequencies, benchmarks and learning scales) at the academic program- and student subgroup-level for individual institutions rather than for peer
groups. The second is the development of statistical (regression) models to measure the relative contribution to engagement variation of student characteristics, program mix andinstitutional character at both the student record- and institution-level. Both objectives address the broader goals of providing greater focus to engagement improvement efforts, identifying clusters of promising practices and best engagement results, supporting improved interpretation and use of institutional engagement scores, and informing the development of institutional accountability procedures and metrics. The core of the project is a record-level data file containing the approximately 69,000 2008 or2009 NSSE responses and additional student records system data representing 44 Canadianuniversities. Student responses were classified into 10 general academic programs (e.g., Social
Sciences) and over 75 specific academic programs (e.g., History, Biology) and over 30 student subgroups (including first generation, First Nations and international).
The detailed NSSE reports indicate a considerable level of variation in student characteristics and program mix across Canadian universities; large differences in engagement item scores and benchmarks across academic program clusters and specific programs within clusters, and across student subgroups; and wide engagement variability across institutions of differing size.
A summary of the results from these detailed reports is presented below. The program- and student subgroup-level NSSE reports provide a more focused basis for comparing engagement university by university, and strongly suggest that institution-level engagement comparisons should take account of student, program and size variation and should not be presented without context in ranked format.
The regression models provide a more formal basis for identifying and quantifying the role of student, program and size variation in engagement, and permit a number of conclusions. First, student characteristics, program mix and institutional character all contribute to a comprehensive statistical explanation of engagement variation. Second, the wide variation in
institutional engagement scores is reduced considerably when student characteristics, program mix and institutional size are controlled. Third, each engagement benchmark requires a distinct statistical explanation: factors important to one benchmark are often quite different from those important to another. Fourth, Francophone and Anglophone institutions differ with respect to
certain key engagement dynamics. And finally, the models suggest several approaches to defining the institutional contribution to engagement and the scope of institutional potential to modify engagement level.
Over the past decade, the Ontario postsecondary sector has experienced pressure from a number of societal forces (Clark, Moran, Skolnik & Trick, 2009). The demand for increased access to postsecondary education (PSE), which is moving higher education from an elite model to one of near universal participation, has resulted in undergraduate enrolment increases
of close to 50 per cent over the past decade1. These increases are taking place in an environment where demands in other areas are also being made on institutions and faculty.Demands for increased accountability, demonstrated quality assurance and increased research and development responsibilities have placed higher burdens on institutions and faculty, which are intensified by tight budgets and limited resources. Institutions have responded to these pressures in part, by increasing average class sizes. In 2009, about two thirds of Ontario universities reported that 30 per cent or more of first year courses had more than 100 students.
The average number of FTE students per full time faculty has increased from 17 in 1987 to 25 in 2007 (Clark, Moran, Skolnik & Trick, 2009, page 99). The consequences of this and other adjustments on educational quality are unknown. Undoubtedly, these pressures will continue and intensify in coming years given projections of demand for PSE in Ontario, particularly for undergraduate degrees. As a result, there is a need for the higher education sector in Ontario to identify the challenges and opportunities that are unique to large class teaching environments, as well as strategies to approach these issues, in
order to maintain the quality of student learning in the face of rising class sizes.
A major problem in identifying trends with large classes is in defining what constitutes a large class. This will differ according to the discipline, the level and nature of the class (such as introductory or upper year, lecture, tutorial or laboratory), and the perceptions of lecturers and individual students. For the purposes of this study, a large class is defined as one in which a change in traditional teaching methods is deemed appropriate or necessary, so it may include an introductory class of 700 students or an upper year seminar with fifty.
61% of parents have more than one type of debt, with a mean number of debt types at 2.25
▪ 28% of parents have either type of student loan debt (for parents’ or kids’ education), and 5%
have student loan debt for both parents’ and kids’ education
▪ Parents with student loan debt (from parents’ education) are significantly more likely to have
credit card debt (67% vs. 54%) and payday loan debt (19% vs. 7%)
▪ Parents with student loan debt (from kid’s education) are significantly more likely to have
credit card debt (75% vs. 54%) and payday loan debt (38% vs. 5%)
▪ Parents with student loan debt (from parents’ education) are significantly more likely to say
they lose sleep worrying about college costs for their kids (49% vs. 40%)
In 2008, the OECD launched the AHELO feasibility study, an initiative with the objective to assess whether it is possible to develop international measures of learning outcomes in higher education.
Learning outcomes are indeed key to a meaningful education, and focusing on learning outcomes is essential to inform diagnosis and improve teaching processes and student learning. While there is a long tradition of learning outcomes’ assessment within institutions’ courses and programmes, emphasis on learning outcomes has become more important in
recent years. Interest in developing comparative measures of learning outcomes has increased in response to a range of higher education trends, challenges and paradigm shifts.
David Cooperrider, the originator of a relatively new approach to organizational or institutional change called Appreciative Inquiry, tells the story of a conversation he had with the father of modern management, Peter Drucker, before his recent death. He asked Drucker, then 93, to distill the essence of what he knew about leadership. Drucker told Cooperrider, “The task of leadership is to create an alignment of strengths, making our weaknesses irrelevant.” Appreciative Inquiry (AI) is a way of helping organizations discover their strengths so they can create an alignment of those strengths, making their weaknesses and problems irrelevant. Since the mid-1980s, thousands of organizations in more than 100 countries – corporations, businesses, nonprofits, churches, educational and governmental organizations – have used this strengths-based approach to
organizational or institutional change and development.
Immigrant families come to Canada with high education levels, with the Greater Toronto Area a primary destination. Despite high education levels, their economic and social integration into Canada is often difficult, due in part to lack of recognition of foreign credentials and work experience, weak official-language skills, and insufficient cultural competencies. For the children in these families, the young immigrants, successful education outcomes set the stage for success in adulthood, both in the workplace and in further education, enabling them to better integrate into Canadian society and contribute to the Canadian economy. This study examined the pathways of immigrant youth, and the role of English-language proficiency and region of origin in these pathways, using a recently created database containing a number of linked data sources from Seneca College, a large multicultural college in Toronto. This longitudinal dataset enables us to track individual students from the beginning of high school through to graduation from college, and their eventual transition into the labour market or to further education.
On a typical day in 2014, more than 22 million cyberattacks threatened to infiltrate Penn State. Two
attacks targeting the university’s College of Engineering managed to slip past security systems. Thanks to an alert from the FBI, the university investigated the attacks and disconnected the college’s computer network from the Internet for three days while it beefed up security.
In K-12, school districts are constantly launching digital learning initiatives that require large amounts of bandwidth and mobile devices. But many of them don’t address the IT infrastructure beforehand. And that leads to horror stories of the network
slowing to a crawl with students and teachers unable to connect their devices to the Internet due to lack of wireless coverage.
“Infrastructure is one of those things that is not sexy and is not glamorous,” says Susan M. Bearden, director of information technology at Holy Trinity Episcopal Academy in Melbourne, Fla. “I mean, who really wants to hear about switches or bandwidth or choke points in a network? But if you don’t have that infrastructure in place, then you are setting yourself up for failure.”
Unfortunately, education institutions don’t always recognize the tenuous situation they’re in until they fall prey to successful cyberattacks and show-stopping network failures. But it doesn’t have to be that way.
This Center for Digital Education (CDE) Special Report guides education IT leaders through the trends, technologies and tips that will help them build a future-ready infrastructure to carry their institutions through the challenges of life
in the digital age.
In the past few decades, those of us working in institutions of higher education have seen an instructional paradigm shift. Given the growth in research on learning, our views of how people learn best have developed over the last few decades; from behaviorist perspectives of learning, we have also come to understand learning from cognitive and social perspectives. (For a more in-depth discussion of these issues, see Barkley, Major, and Cross, 2014, as well as articles in this special issue). This development has caused higher education instructors to modify their instructional practices as a result. Many instructors have moved away from a sole diet of traditional lecture, with the occasional short-answer question to the class in which students listen, repeat, and occasionally apply, toward a modified menu of pedagogical platforms in which, much of the time, students are active participants in the learning process. Higher education faculty, then, have gone about this task of engaging students actively in learning in a number of important ways by adopting a range of instructional approaches.
The field of student attrition has grown tremen dously over the past two decades. The demographic characteristics of the population have induced us to consider how our institutions can more effectively serve their students and hopefully retain more of them until degree completion. As a result, studies of dropout and policy-oriented workshops concerned with prevention of attrition have become commonplace.
Based on its 50 years of experience serving developing countries through education, capacity-building, training and mentoring in a range of fields, CBIE respectfully offers the following input and recommendations.
In the emerging knowledge-based economy, employers are requiring new levels of skill from labour market entrants. As employers’ expectations of postsecondary graduates increase, Ontario’s publicly funded colleges and universities are working to provide students with much of the knowledge, skills, and training needed for success in the community and in the changing workplace. As a result, there has been a movement within the postsecondary education (PSE) sector to provide a closer integration of learning and work as a strategy for workforce skills development (Fisher, Rubenson, Jones, & Shanahan, 2009).
In particular, work-integrated learning (WIL) programs such as co-operative education, internship, and apprenticeship are frequently endorsed as educational modes of delivery to support such integration. Offering work-integrated learning experiences for students requires a significant investment of human and financial resources to be effective. Faculty in particular play an important role in designing, supporting, and implementing WIL opportunities for students. Despite a growing recognition of the essential role played by faculty, very little is known about their perceptions of and experiences with WIL. To shed light on this issue, this report provides the results of the WIL Faculty Survey conducted by the Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario (HEQCO) in partnership with 13 Ontario postsecondary institutions.
The report is part of a broader multi-phase project being undertaken by HEQCO on WIL in Ontario’s PSE sector.
The WIL Faculty Survey was designed to better understand faculty experiences with and perceptions of WIL as an element of postsecondary curriculum. Guided by a Working Group comprised of representatives from the 13 participating postsecondary institutions, the study sought to address four primary research questions:
1) How do faculty perceive the value and benefits of WIL to students, faculty members, and postsecondary institutions?
2) Do faculty views about WIL differ by employment status, program, gender, years of teaching, previous employment experience, or their own past WIL experience?
3) How do faculty integrate students’ work experiences into the classroom?
4) What concerns do faculty have about introducing or expanding WIL opportunities in postsecondary institutions?
The survey instrument was developed in consultation with the Working Group and was pre-tested with 25 faculty members. The survey was administered online from March to May, 2011, with e-mail invitations to participate sent to 18,232 faculty from the 13 partner institutions (6,257 college faculty and 11,975 university faculty). In total, 1,707 college faculty and 1,917 university faculty completed the survey to an acceptable cut-off point, for an overall response rate of 19.9%. Close to two-thirds of college faculty and roughly half of university faculty respondents reported having experience teaching in a program in which students participate in a co-op or apprenticeship. Fewer faculty had experience personally teaching a course with a WIL component, with 47.5% of college faculty and 28.9% of university faculty currently or previously having taught a course involving WIL. Among those who had taught a course with a WIL component, field placements were the most common type of WIL among college faculty, followed by mandatory professional practice (student placements required for licensure or professional designation). For university respondents, mandatory professional practice was the most common type of WIL taught, followed by applied research projects.
Years ago, the process of faculty evaluation carried few or none of the sudden-death implications that characterize contemporary evaluation practices. But now, as the few to be chosen for promotion and tenure become fewer and faculty
mobility decreases, the decision to promote or grant tenure can have an enormous impact on a professor’s career. At the same time, academic administrators are under growing pressure to render sound decisions in the face of higher operating costs, funding shortfalls, and the mounting threat posed by giant corporations that have moved into higher education. Worsening economic conditions have focused sharper attention on evaluation of faculty performance, with the result that faculty members are assessed through formalized, systematic methods.
As with any provider of products and services to be sold, the value proposition for community colleges depends on who’s buying. Community colleges are confronted with a diverse collection of potential buyers with different needs and their own valuation of what the services are worth. The local community, businesses, state and federal governments, donors, and individual students are potential buyers and community colleges are uniquely poised to fulfill their needs.
Demographic change, economic globalization, and the emergence of an increasingly knowledge-based economy have triggered rapid and unprecedented change in the Ontario labour market and in the skills required by employers. Since colleges and universities provide the largest inflow of workers into the labour market – generating four out of five new labour market entrants (Lapointe et al., 2006) – an effective, flexible, and responsive system of postsecondary education and training has been recognized as an essential investment in human capital. In an interconnected global economy, a diverse, well-educated, and highly skilled workforce is critical not only to innovation, productivity, and economic growth, but also to maximizing the human potential of all Ontario citizens.
This report summarizes the findings of an exploratory study commissioned by the Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario (HEQCO) on the impact of work-integrated learning (WIL) on the social and human capital of postsecondary education (PSE) graduates, with particular reference to the quality of student learning and labour market outcomes associated with WIL programs. The project was undertaken by HEQCO in collaboration with a working group of nine Ontario postsecondary institutions: Algonquin College, George Brown College, Georgian College, Laurentian University, Niagara College, University of Ottawa, University of Waterloo, University of Windsor, and Wilfrid Laurier University. The study had three overarching goals:
1. Develop a typology for understanding work-integrated learning in Ontario’s postsecondary sector;
2. Identify the learning, labour market and other benefits associated with WIL, as well as challenges and opportunities;
3. Recommend key issues and questions that would provide the focus for a second and larger phase of the project, including research with postsecondary students.
The research involved 39 key informants from Ontario colleges and universities, and 25 representatives of businesses and community organizations that provide WIL opportunities for students. Institutional key informants interviewed for the study expressed strong support for the overall project, including the goal of developing a shared framework and common language for WIL programs in order to minimize the potential for confusion between institutions, students, and employers. A typology of work-integrated learning was viewed as important to facilitating communication about WIL within and between institutions, and among institutions, students, employers, and community partners. Employers and community partners, meanwhile, valued
their participation in work-integrated learning programs, and appreciated the opportunity to share their perspectives on how WIL programs could be enhanced.
There are many Indigenous perspectives in Canada and a diverse Indigenous student body, enrolled every year in a range of post-secondary programs. Indspire asked a sample of recent recipients of its Building Brighter Futuresi financial awards what led to their educational choices. What resulted was a better understanding of trends and lessons Indigenous learners can teach policy makers and program service delivery agents about what is important to them.
Understanding the motivations and decisions that successful First Nation, Inuit, and Métis students make, contributes to building and supporting Indigenous student success. Do Indigenous students make the same choices about attending post-secondary institutions as other cohorts of students? What drives the choices Indigenous students make, what brought them to their college or university of choice, what keeps them there, and what is contributing to their graduation? Are there things that can be done differently to improve the recruitment, retention, and graduation rate of Indigenous learners?
The digital revolution is transforming our work, our organisations and our daily lives. Driverless cars are now legal in three American states. One third of payments in Kenya are made via mobile phones. Wearable computing will soon mean that your jacket will monitor your heart rate (should you want it to). I have seen a violin - played beautifully - that was 3-D printed.
This revolution is already in homes across the developed world and increasingly in the developing world too. And there, it is transforming the way children and young people play, access information, communicate with each other and learn. But, so far, this revolution has not transformed most schools or most teaching and learning in classrooms.
Stratosphere:
Integrating Technoloyg, Pedagogy and Change Knowledge
This report reflects the enthusiasm and commitment of students, staff and faculty in realizing the vision of environmental sustainability on Ontario’s university campuses.
The report is based on an annual survey of 20 Ontario universities conducted by the Council
of Ontario Universities (COU).
This article reviews notable rends in the leadership evelopment field. In the ast two decades, such luded the proliferation
of new leadership development meth- ods and a growing recognition of the importance of a leader’s emotional resonance with others. A growing recognition that leadership develop- ment involves more than just devel- oping individual leaders has now led to a greater focus on the context in which leadership is developed, thoughtful consideration about how to best use leadership competencies, and work/life balance issues. Future trends include exciting potential advances in globalization, technolo- gy, return on investment (ROI), and new ways of thinking about the nature of leadership and leader- ship development.
Gina Hernez-Broome, Richard L. Hughes, Center for Creative Leadership
One in five Canadians will experience a mental health [glossary] problem this year1 and the onset of the symptoms of mental ill health often occur between the ages of 15 and 24.2 These numbers tell us that many students in post-secondary education will experience mental health problems while they are attending college or university.
Ontario post-secondary institutions report a large increase in the number of students with mental health disabilities registered with their Offices for Students with Disabilities (OSD) [glossary]. Some students come to university or college with a diagnosed mental health condition such as depression or anxiety. Other students develop symptoms of mental ill health gradually while they are at school and may not realize that they need professional help.
If you are reading this Guide, you may be a student who has already been diagnosed with a mental health disability, be in the process of being diagnosed, or perhaps you are a parent/guardian of a student. Our goal is to help simplify the post-secondary experience for students with mental health disabilities by providing “need-to-know” information that is accessible and relevant. The Guide is written in a question-and-answer format and is addressed directly to students with mental health disabilities – so we use “you” throughout the text.