Ten months after it was first announced, the Commission on the Reform of Ontario’s Public Services has finally published its report. The Commission, chaired by former bank vice-president Don Drummond, has made 362 separate recommendations. If implemented, Drummond’s plans would permanently change not only our public services, but our province itself. With very few exceptions, the changes Drummond suggests would not be for the better. This paper is called “Out of Step With Ontario” because that is what Drummond’s report is. In December 2011, the Angus Reid polling company conducted a survey of 2,000 Ontarians. What the survey found was that 71 per cent of Ontarians want to see spending on public services either stay the same or go up; 81 per cent support higher income taxes on corporations; 82 per cent support higher income taxes on individuals earning over $300,000 a year; and a whopping 87 per cent chose “job creation” as their preferred method of paying down the provincial deficit. In contrast, Don Drummond wants to take an axe to public services, cutting spending more deeply and for more years than the Mike Harris government did in the 1990s. He wants more privatization, which would drive down wages for workers and increase profits for investors but not provide better services or lower costs to the public. With very few exceptions, Drummond ignores options for generating revenue to pay for public services.
Lastly, Drummond forecasts a weak economy for years to come but proposes no ideas to make that economy stronger. Indeed, his “austerity” measures will slow down our economy, thereby cutting jobs and making the provincial budget deficit worse.
Drummond’s plan won’t work.
This document is a first look at what Drummond has in mind. It is not a comprehensive analysis. Instead, it provides a quick overview that looks at Drummond’s proposals from the perspective of OPSEU members. Some key points have, without a doubt, been overlooked; if so, they will be added to future editions of this document, available on the OPSEU web site.
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
Many recent immigrant adult students (RIAS) are highly trained in their source countries and anticipate finding suitable employment upon arriving in Canada. (In this study, RIAS are defined as individuals over 24 years of age who have been living in Canada as permanent residents or citizens for less than 10 years.) There is mounting evidence, however, that in recent years the process of obtaining meaningful employment has become significantly more difficult for RIAS in particular. As a consequence, increasing numbers are turning to the Canadian postsecondary education (PSE) system to obtain more credentials and work experience as a means of gaining better access to employment. However, current research suggests that after entering universities and colleges, newcomers such as recent immigrants face a number of unexpected barriers to educational success, including lack of proficiency in either of Canada’s official languages; non-recognition of foreign transcripts and prior work experience; financial constraints; and insufficient knowledge concerning how the Canadian PSE system operates.
With increasing numbers of RIAS attending Ontario PSE institutions, there is growing concern that their learning needs may not be met, leading to decreased academic and employment success. Unfortunately, it appears that most PSE institutions have not identified RIAS as a group with unique learning needs. Academic success in PSE requires that students be fully
engaged and that they have access to resources that enhance engagement. There is a paucity of research concerning the degree to which RIAS are engaged in both academic and nonacademic components of Canadian PSE. Although all PSE institutions provide a variety of student services, there is no evidence that RIAS utilize them or that any particular benefits accrue in terms of promoting academic and social integration to even those RIAS who do use student services. This multi-institutional research study was conducted with the financial support of the Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario (HEQCO). The study objectives included the following:
• developing a preliminary scale to measure RIAS engagement, consisting of academic and non-academic involvement in PSE,
• describing the demographic and institutional factors that influence RIAS engagement within their academic environment,
• identifying the unique immigration challenges of RIAS in PSE programs,
• identifying service needs and utilization patterns of RIAS, and
• developing recommendations for educational policy and service delivery changes within the Ontario PSE system.
The study also included exploration of the following research questions:
1. To what extent do RIAS become engaged with the academic community at the PSE institutions that they choose to attend?
2. What demographic and institutional factors influence their degree of academic engagement of RIAS?
In a knowledge economy, it is almost certain that those without a base level of skills will be left behind. We are seeing that now. Martin Prosperity Institute, November 2008 Every developed country is racing to keep up with profound and fundamental changes in the 21st century. The new knowledge economy is creating unprecedented demands for higher levels of expertise and skills, while, at the same time, changing demographics will significantly reduce the numbers of qualified people available in the economy.
The cumulative impact presents great opportunities and great challenges to Ontario. The province has an opportunity to implement meaningful and transformational changes that exploit the potential for growth in the new economy and drive Ontario’s prosperity to unprecedented levels.
But the threats to Ontario’s future are just as great. Failing to move forward now with significant measures could leave Ontario unprepared for the challenges ahead, and strand thousands of people as permanently unemployable.
All developed countries face this challenge. And the jurisdictions that are best prepared to meet these challenges recognize the solution is in their people. A highly educated population that can develop new ideas, master new technologies, and continue to innovate will be the nucleus to new growth and greater prosperity for all.
Ontario is fortunate. There is a solid foundation in place and the province is well-served by its large number of universities and colleges. Ontario has one of the highest postsecondary attainment rates in the world.
The province’s postsecondary system was also strengthened by the Ontario government’s Reaching Higher plan, which was announced in 2005 and will end this fiscal year. The investments made through Reaching Higher, along with subsequent investments in capital improvements and expansions, have helped Ontario’s colleges and universities to better serve a greater number of students.
Indeed, enrolment at Ontario’s public colleges continues to increase and the success rates among Ontario’s college graduates continue to improve.
But Ontario cannot rest on its laurels. Other jurisdictions are making significant investments in higher education and present a serious challenge to surpass the achievements made in Ontario.
Developing countries now have 94 million postsecondary students, which represents 70 per cent of the world’s total. In 2007, Bloomberg News reported that India was planning to set up 30 universities and 6,000 model schools, and was considering ways to establish a college in each of its 340 districts.
In China, the number of graduates at all levels of higher education has approximately quadrupled in the last six years. The skilled labour supply in China equals about 40 per cent of all OECD Countries.
Looking out at our students in classrooms today, with their texting, Facebook updates, Instagram messages, e-mail checking, Google searches, and tweeting, it’s hard to imagine what was so distracting for college students more than 100 years ago when James made this statement. Yet, even then, he recognized the propensity of the mind to constantly seek novel material, to leap from thought to image to belief to fear to desire to judgment and back again — all following one’s own quirky train of thought resembling the chaotic movements of a swarm of bees around a hive. Time passes through a warped dimension when the student finally returns to some semblance of attention, unaware of all the cognitive detours taken between points A and B. And that’s just the internal process, prompted by nothing in particular. How much more distraction is invited by today’s mobile technology?
How many Ontario high school students applied to the province’s colleges and universities during the last decade? How many enrolled? How many graduated? Find the answers to these and other good
questions in Quick Facts, a compendium of current and authoritative data on Ontario’s postsecondary
system.
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.
When Emzhei Chen moved into residence at the University of Waterloo about 10 years ago, she found the experience nerve-wracking. Her parents supported her, but her dad was a machinist who had never gone to university and her mom hadn’t finished high school, so they were as unfamiliar with universities as she was. She saw a reference to “first generation” on the application form (a term that meant your parents hadn’t attended a postsecondary education institution or had done so abroad), but she doesn’t remember checking the box. “It didn’t seem to be a pressing characteristic,” she says. “I didn’t think it was important.”
Before the emergence of Internet-based technologies, the classroom was still a room. It featured a teacher at the front delivering learning content to a group of students. Much of today’s teaching and learning is stillconducted within the four walls of the classroom. However, the ubiquity of the Internet, mobile devices, wireless networks and other technologies has torn down the walls of the classroom, enabling a variety of unconventional, location-independent learning environments. By allowing students fl exible learning options, schools can provide more individualized instruction. If implemented properly, online and hybrid learning engage students of all ages, ensure equal access to underserved areas, provide learning opportunities for students with family and job responsibilities, and give older learners a second chance at a college degree. This Special Report will focus on the evolution of learning settings from traditional, instructor-led classrooms to completely virtual, student-centric classes and schools. We will describe and illustrate myriad K-12, college and university learning environments, give examples of how evolving classroom models impact students and teachers, and highlight the technologies that make it possible.
Today’s students use technology to make decisions, manage information and engage socially. They require new ways of learning, communicating, thinking, finding information and problem-solving. To continue to keep students engaged in learning in an environment of ever changing technology, the classroom — be it a familiar on-campus environment or a student’s home or even acoffee shop — must evolve.
A New Model for Effective Teaching
How might education change if classrooms become places of active learning, not just passive listening? Higher education students are already active learners, using e-books, Web content, and social media to explore and discover in their daily lives. But what happens when these students go to the classroom, especially for high-enrollment courses? They sometimes experience the curiosity-stifling thud of having to listen to and take notes on a lecture, with its mostly one-way communication format. And with limited opportunities for Q&A during the class session and no ability to review the lecture content later to study a difficult concept, it’s no wonder students may become discouraged and disengaged.
This traditional learning model won’t cut it with students who are accustomed to active learning, either on their own or in small groups of classmates. Students increasingly expect a classroom experience that helps them develop knowledge for themselves, not just passively receive one-dimensional information. Students want to do something meaningful with content instead of just listening to a lecture. They also expect to meet with discussion groups and project teams and
do much of their assigned work during class time instead of meeting separately.
Another factor that is playing a role in student perceptions: the value gained from education in a tough economy. Instructors need to make education worth a student’s investment of time and money by ensuring the classroom experience is productive and meaningful. These expectations are leading higher education toward “flipped” classrooms and a learning model that blends online and in-class learning. Respondents to the Center for Digital Education’s 2011 Community Colleges Survey indicated the majority of their students enroll in online or blended courses and that more than two-thirds of online courses used some type of online collaboration tools to promote learning.
Insight into Impressive Practices in Career Services: A Reference Guide is the second of two reports summarizing the findings of a CERIC-funded study that sought to establish the importance publicly funded universities and colleges place on the provision of career development services and to highlight particularly impressive models of career service provision across the country.
Specifically, CERIC’s interest in conducting this study was two-fold:
1. To understand the landscape of career service models across Canada
2. To examine the level of institutional commitment to the provision of career services
In recent years, there has been a great and growing interest in measuring educational quality in the Ontario postsecondary education sector (PSE). Colleges and universities are interested in quality measures for academic planning purposes. Reliable indicators would allow them to identify effective educational practices as well as areas for improvement and to develop strategies in the hopes of improving educational experiences for students. The government is interested for accountability reasons. Quality has become an increasingly prominent focus of the McGuinty government, which seeks not only to increase the number of PSE graduates in the province but also to ensure the quality of degrees being awarded. Robust quality measures could be used to monitor individual institutional performance and to address issues at the sector level. Reliable and comparable provincial-level quality indicators could provide answers to questions such as how the Ontario PSE system is doing compared to other jurisdictions. The problem, however, is that educational quality cannot be easily defined, measured or assessed. Traditional quality indicators consist of two types: input measures (e.g., student-faculty ratio, class size, operating revenue per student) and outcome measures (e.g., retention rate, graduation rate, employment rate). Many researchers have argued that the focus on input measures and the oversimplified use of output measures may create a misleading picture of the quality of PSE in Ontario. Using input measures as quality indicators ignores the substantial differences in the effectiveness with which
institutions use available resources. Using output measures as quality indicators ignores the fact that universities differ from one another in terms of mission, size, location and student composition.
This research uses the Youth in Transition Survey, Reading Cohort (“YITS-A”) to compare participation in postsecondary education (PSE) in Ontario to other Canadian regions. We begin by presenting access rates by region, which reveals some substantial differences. University participation rates in Ontario are in about the middle of the pack, while college rates are relatively high. We then undertake an econometric analysis, which reveals that the effects of parental income are quite strong in the Atlantic provinces but much weaker elsewhere, including within Ontario. We also find that the relationship between high school grades and Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) test scores (measures of academic “performance” and ability”) differ by region and are generally strongest in Ontario. From this perspective, Ontario would appear to have a relatively “meritocratic” system, where those who are more qualified are more likely to go to university and where attendance rates are less affected by family income. Interestingly, the effects of parental education, which are generally much stronger than those of family income, are similar across regions. Understanding the reasons underlying these patterns might warrant further investigation.
This guide outlines a framework for addressing student mental health in post-secondary institutions. It is the result of a commitment undertaken by the Canadian Association of College and University Student Services (CACUSS) and the Canadian
Mental Health Association (CMHA) to strengthen student mental health. Another product of that commitment, Mental health and well being in postsecondary education settings: A literature and environmental scan to support planning and action in Canada (MacKean, 2011) outlines the current status of post-secondary student mental health and recommends a more system wide approach that extends the focus from “treating individuals... to promoting positive mental health at a population level...” (page 10). The framework presented in this guide continues this work by outlining a systemic approach that focuses on the creation of campus communities that foster mental well-being and learning.
Mental Health
The authors address three questions: (1) What are the foundational practices of team-based learning (TBL)? (2) What are the fundamental principles underlying TBL’s foundational practices? and (3) In what ways are TBL’s foundational practices similar to and/or different from the practices employed by problem-based learning (PBL) and cooperative learning (CL)? Most of the TBL vs. CL and PBL comparisons are organized in relation to the size of and strategies for forming groups/teams, the strategies for ensuring that students are familiar with the course content, the nature of the group/team assignments, the role of peer assessment, and the role of the instructor.
Getting students to take their reading assignments seriously is a constant battle. Even syllabus language just short of death threats, firmly stated admonitions regularly delivered in class, and the unannounced pop quiz slapped on desks when nobody answers questions about the reading don’t necessarily change student behaviors or attitudes. Despite the correlation between reading and course success, many students remain committed to trying to get by without doing the reading, or only doing it very superficially, or only doing it just prior to exam dates. In return, some exasperated instructors fall into the trap of using
valuable class time to summarize key points of the readings. It’s not a new problem, and clearly we can’t simply bemoan the fact that students don’t read. Furthermore, doing what we’ve been doing — the threats, the endless quizzes, the chapter summaries — has failed to solve the problem. The better solution involves designing courses so that students can’t do well without reading, and creating assignments that require students to do more than just passively read.
Featuring 11 articles from The Teaching Professor, this special report was created to give faculty new ways of attacking an age-old problem. Articles in the report include:
• Enhancing Students’ Readiness to Learn
• What Textbook Reading Teaches Students
• Helping Students Use Their Textbooks More Effectively
• Text Highlighting: Helping Students Understand What They Read
• When Students Don’t Do the Reading
• Pre-Reading Strategies: Connecting Expert Understanding and Novice Learning
Whether your students struggle with the material or simply lack the motivation to read what’s
assigned, this report will help ensure your students read and understand their assignments.
Maryellen Weimer
Editor
The Teaching Professor
The Task Force on Competitiveness, Productivity and Economic Progress and its research arm, the Institute for Competitiveness and Prosperity, were established by the Government of Ontario in 2001 to “measure and monitor Ontario’s productivity, competitiveness and economic progress compared to other provinces and the U.S. states and to report to the public on a regular basis.” The Task Force has issued two annual reports, Closing the Prosperity Gap (November 2002) and Investing for Prosperity (November 2003), and the Institute four working papers: A View of Ontario: Ontario’s Clusters of Innovations (April 2002), Measuring Ontario’s Prosperity: Developing an Economic Indicator System (August 2002), Missing Opportunities: Ontario’s Urban Prosperity Gap (June 2003), and Striking Similarities: Attitudes and Ontario’s Prosperity
Gap (September 2003).
One of the most challenging issues post-secondary campuses face today is mental health. Unlike most other health issues, mental illness still has a stigma attached to it, so the temptation is to cover up the problem—but this can lead to serious, and sometimes tragic, consequences.
Addressing this challenge is a priority for colleges and universities, whose leaders are committed to providing help for everyone who needs it. While much has been done to more effectively deliver these services, there is still more to do. This task is particularly important at post-secondary institutions, since young people age 15 to 24 are the least likely to seek assistance.
Ontario is Canada's largest provincial destination for immigrants. Language barriers, lack of recognition for foreign credentials and lack of work experience in Canada prevent many from gaining employment in their field of expertise. There is an urgent and growing need for occupation-specific language training in Ontario. Immigrants cannot apply their experience, skills and knowledge without the level of language proficiency needed in the workplace, but there are not enough language training opportunities to meet their needs. Shortages of skilled workers in many sectors will increasingly hinder Ontario’s economic prosperity. This report presents the results of a project undertaken by Colleges Ontario and funded by Citizenship and Immigration Canada to examine existing occupation-specific language training in Ontario colleges. It identifies gaps and opportunities for occupation-specific language training and provides input on guidelines for moving toward a province-wide framework for college delivery of occupation-specific language training.
Participants in college-delivered occupation-specific language training will have obtained language proficiency at Canadian Language Benchmark (CLB) levels 6 to 8 and need to acquire occupation-specific language skills and knowledge. These may include individuals who are employed or unemployed, who are pursuing career or vocational training, or who need to acquire the language levels required for higher-level occupation-related language programs.
Ontario’s colleges are experienced in meeting the language needs of immigrants, and are developing increasing expertise in designing and delivering occupation-specific language training. Ontario colleges are a visible first point of entry for new Canadians seeking information on pathways to employment, credential and skills assessment, language training in English and French, upgrading their skills and knowledge, and postsecondary education and training.
Ontario’s colleges currently serve many landed immigrants and refugees. The changing demographic of college enrolment has provided the impetus to examine the language needs of students who are newcomers. Colleges are actively engaged in immigrant-related initiatives, such as Colleges Integrating Immigrants to Employment (CIITE), that provide opportunities to
link with college-delivered language training.
Information for this report was collected from the 24 Ontario colleges through a comprehensive consultative process that included in-depth interviews, follow-up and a one-day workshop. Colleges Ontario worked closely with the Colleges of Ontario Network for Education and Training (CON*NECT) and CIITE. Supplementary information was gathered through online research into OSLT activity at other Canadian colleges and universities. Consultations were held with the Ontario Regional LINC Advisory Committee (ORLAC). A working group was convened to provide guidance to Colleges Ontario and helped shape the consultations and research. The college sector in Ontario is made up of 24 independent colleges. Colleges actively collaborate on a wide range of initiatives, but each college brings its unique perspective to the delivery of education and training in Ontario.
The government of Ontario has signalled the need for Ontario’s publicly funded universities to seek additional productivity gains while sustaining access and quality in light of fiscal constraints. It has identified differentiation as a key policy driver to achieve these goals.
Implementation of these provincial directions likely involves consideration of how universities deploy their faculty to meet their differentiated teaching and research mandates. In fact, a preliminary examination by HEQCO of productivity in the Ontario public postsecondary system suggested that how universities deploy their faculty resources may be one of the most promising
opportunities for universities to increase their productivity (HEQCO, 2012).
In the traditional college classroom today, faculty and students arrive with a certain set of expectations, shaped largely by past experiences. And although students may need the occa-sional (or perhaps frequent) reminder of what’s required of them, there’s usually something very familiar about the experience for both faculty and students alike.
In the online classroom, an entirely new set of variables enters the equation. It’s a little like trying to drive in a foreign country. You know how to drive, just like you know how to teach, but it sure is hard to get the hang of driving on the left side of the road, you’re not quite sure how far a kilometer is, and darn it if those road signs aren’t all in Japanese.