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).
With the rise in online and hybrid courses at the post-secondary level, many institutions are offering various online learning readiness assessments to students who are considering these instructional formats. Following a discussion of the characteristics often attributed to successful online learners, as well as a review of a sample of the publicly available online readiness surveys, an application of one representative tool is described. Specifically, the Distance Education Aptitude and Readiness Scale was administered in both hybrid and face-to-face sections of beginning post-secondary French across a two-year span. Differences in scores between groups, as well as the relationship between scores and grades are examined.
A fraternity member from the University of Oklahoma is otaped chanting a racist sont. At the University of Missouri, a slow response to racial slurs and graffiti fueld protests and led to the resignation of top administrators.
Americans are obsessed with narcissistic leaders, or at least they have an ambivalence between the ones they like and the ones they promote. A case in point is Real Estate baron and presidential candidate Donald Trump. Not that he is alone. At various times, similar attention and popularity have been heaped by the public and especially by the media for leaders such as Steve Jobs, Lee Iacocca and Larry Ellison.
Education Pays 2013: The Benefits of Higher Education for Individuals and Society documents differences in the earnings and employment patterns of U.S. adults with different levels of education. It also compares health-related behaviors, reliance on
public assistance programs, civic participation, and indicators of the well-being of the next generation. Financial benefits are easier to document than nonpecuniary benefits, but the latter may be as important to students themselves, as well as to the society in which they participate. Our goal is to call attention to ways in which both individuals and society as a whole benefit
from increased levels of education.
There has been an increase in the number of universities relying on graduate students to teach undergraduate coursework in recent years. In some universities, such as Purdue and University of South Florida, up to 26 percent of undergraduate courses are taught by graduate instructors (U.S. News and World Report, 2017). According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics
(2018), there were over 135,000 graduate teaching assistants (GTAs) in 2017.
Students at the University of Waterloo know Chase Graham took his own life.
They may never have met him. They may not know he was a brilliant student or that he had a sharp sense of humour under a shy, quiet exterior.
But they know he died by suicide at school on March 20.
It’s not surprising that the science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields are capturing the imagination of university students. The tech sector has enjoyed a long boom — its social media platforms and digital disruptors have made mouth-watering profits, overtaken century-old companies, and revolutionized our daily lives, whether it be ride-hailing apps or disease-diagnosing smartphones. The science and engineering fields, for their part, are
pushing the boundaries of human knowledge, developing neural implants, electric vehicles and super-materials like graphene, which could help everything from water purification to spinal regeneration.
Students see in the STEM educational track the chance to solve social challenges, make money, or both. Preferential visa access for STEM graduates in many countries, including the United States, along with fears of rising automation in a growing number of professional jobs, add further gloss to technical degrees.
Premier Kathleen Wynne met with Grade 12 students at Central Technical School in Toronto today to talk about reforms to the Ontario Student Assistance Program (OSAP). Students in Grade 12 will be among the first to benefit from Ontario's single largest modernization of student financial assistance when the Ontario Student Grant launches as part of the reformed OSAP in September 2017.
Today, more Ontario students are graduating from postsecondary programs than ever before. But some youth hesitate to aspire to a college or university education because they worry about the costs or graduating with debt from student loans. The Ontario Student Grant will help OSAP empower more students to seek an advanced education based on their abilities and potential, not their family's income.
Paid Parental Leave LESSONS FROM OECD COUNTRIES AND SELECTED U.S. STATES
The United States is at a crossroads in its policies towards the family and gender equality. Currently America provides basic support for children, fathers, and mothers in the form of unpaid parental leave, child-related tax breaks, and limited public childcare. Alternatively, the United States’ OECD peers empower families through paid parental leave and comprehensive investments in infants and children.
The Ontario provincial government is spending $4 million on a marketing program aiming to draw students from southern Ontario to colleges in the north.
Sault College president Ron Common says the goal of the program, called Study North, is to attract youth who wouldn't otherwise consider Ontario's six northern colleges as a primary destination.
The Northern Ontario Heritage Fund Corporation funds the program.
Sexual violence is an ongoing concern in post-secondary educational environments. It is “any violence, physical or psychological, carried out through sexual means or targeting sexuality” and includes sexual abuse, assault, rape and harassment (Ontario Women’s Directorate, 2013, p. 3).
Canadian institutions and governmental bodies have made efforts to address sexual violence on campus. For instance, the Ontario Women’s Directorate (2013) created Developing a Response to Sexual Violence: a Resource Guide for Ontario’s Colleges and Universities and the Canadian Federation of Students-Ontario (2013) released a Campus Toolkit for Combating Sexual Violence. Student groups, universities and colleges have implemented prevention programs such as US-based Bringing in the Bystander™ and Green Dot, as well as awareness campaigns such as Got Consent? and Draw The Line (Banyard, Plante, & Moynihan, 2005; University of New Hampshire, 2014; Senn & Forrest, 2013; University of Windsor, n.d.; Coker et al., 2011; Green Dot etc., 2010; Sexual Assault Support Centre at the University of British Columbia, n.d.; Ontario Coalition of Rape Crisis Centres, n.d.). Grassroots and community-directed efforts such as the It’s Time to End Violence Against Women on Campus Project have also made strides toward addressing and preventing campus sexual assault (Sexual Assault Centre of Hamilton & Area & YWCA Hamilton, 2014).
I remember the first time I tackled the controversial subject of students as customers. It was in an in-house newsletter, well before the advent of the Internet and e-mail. Even so, I had numerous phone calls, memos, encounters on campus, and discussions about it in every activity the teaching center sponsored for the next year. I hadn’t even taken a side; I had simply listed arguments for both sides. But, as far as the faculty were concerned then and pretty much since, there aren’t two sides. Students are not customers. Tuition dollars do not buy grades. Education does not come with a money-back guarantee. And students don’t get to choose what they learn—well, they do, but if they don’t choose to learn what we require, the consequences are costly.
If you had to pick a cliché that best describes completing a dissertation, "it ain’t over till it’s over" would work well. So far in this series we have discussed finishing a submittable draft and successfully defending the dissertation. But as every doctoral candidate knows, no matter how well the defense goes you are very likely not quite free and clear yet.
Yes, cellphones and laptops do affect students' grades, and no, students can't multitask as well as they say they can.
Arnold Glass, a psychology professor at Rutgers University at New Brunswick, and Mengxue Kang, a graduate student, recently published a study in Educational Psychology that they say reveals a causal link between cellphone and laptop use during class and poorer exam scores.
Abstract: The paper presents the results of the second stage of training academia in designing e-learning courses in a foreign language. An action research conducted during such staff development project showed high appreciation of continuous mutual support, need for established channels for sharing, and raised confidence in designing own electronic courses by young specialists.
Key words: Staff Development, e-Learning, Higher Education, Language Teaching.
At a recent academic conference, I attended a plenary session on active learning. While spouting the virtues of
student engagement, the presenter seemed to be admonishing cellphone use in class, labelling it as a sign of
distracted and bored learners.
I was feeling uncomfortable in the second row from the front because I was using my phone to take pictures, livetweet the lecture and engage with other conference attendees on social media. I wondered, “Is he talking about
me?” However, not only was I paying attention, but I was also completely engaged in and interacting with his
content in a self-directed way. If that’s not active learning, I don’t know what is.
In my own classes, I do not have a cell phone policy, and I generally encourage free use of devices of any kind.
However, many of my colleagues do not feel the same way and, in fact, discourage the use of phones in class. They
view them as a distraction rather than a supplement. It confuses me that these faculty members want their students
to be independent learners who engage with their content, yet they don’t want them to use devices (i.e., research
tools) during class. When do they expect students to engage with the content and research independently? After
class when they don’t have valuable access to the instructor?
More of this year’s freshman class expects to participate in at least one protest while they’re in college than at any other time in the last 50 years. The portion of all students who claim to be these prospective protesters? 10%. Among black students, the proportion rises to 16%.
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.
A couple of weeks after the end of my first semester of teaching as the instructor of record, I received "the packet" in my campus mailbox — an interoffice envelope stuffed with course evaluations from my students. Those evaluations mattered a lot to me at the time, as I was still figuring out this whole teaching thing. Was I doing a good job? Did my students like the class?
And, more selfishly, did they like me?
Well, in this particular batch, one student certainly did not like either the course or me. In the comments section, the student flatly declared: "He was a real ashole."
The spelling in that quote is sic. In that moment — as I wrestled with both the shame of being
deemed an "ashole" and the urge to laugh at the absurdity of that being the sum total of this
student’s assessment — I had my first experience with a question that faculty members
regularly confront: