TORONTO -- Ontario's minister of post-secondary education says he's concerned that two publicly-funded Ontario colleges have opened campuses in Saudi Arabia that don't allow women.
On Wednesday, Colleges and Universities Minister Reza Moridi said decisions on the operation of a campus, including student composition, are up to each college's board of governors.
But late Thursday, after a lot of criticism on social media about the male-only campuses, the minister had a change of heart about Ontario colleges teaching courses that deliberately exclude women.
Our students live in an online world. They’re emotionally and physically attached to their devices and many of their relationships exist within technology. As educators, there are many ways that we have had to adapt to this changing landscape of communication within our teaching, and when I look around my institution, I think we’re doing a remarkable job at keeping up with the rapid pace of change.
This research explores how the connections between qualifications and work can be improved to help strengthen educational pathways and occupational outcomes. This working paper is an initial examination of what is known about pathways in tertiary education as well as the loose associations between vocational qualifications and the jobs graduates do. The next stage of the research will explore these pathways in more detail through interviews with tertiary students, graduates, teaching staff and managers.
This paper is part of a wider three-year program of research, ‘Vocations: the link between post-compulsory education and the labour market’, which is investigating both the educational and occupational paths that people take and how their study relates to their work. This particular paper looks at these pathways within and between VET and higher education.
Ken Coates is a Munk Senior Fellow with the Macdonald-Laurier Institute and co-author of What to Consider If
You’re Considering University. Douglas Auld is a professor of economics at the University of Guelph.
As students at colleges and universities across the country head back to class, the nation’s media have been filled with familiar debates about tuition fees, student debt, careers and government funding. As the debate goes on, universities, colleges and polytechnical institutes will defend their work, governments will laud the contributions of postsecondary institutes to Canada’s so-called innovation agenda, and student organizations will demand lower fees. This is all predictable, producing more heat than light in the process.
Mental health is a pressing concern for post-secondary students in Canada. The 2016 National College Health Association survey of Canadian post-secondary students demon-strates that a significant number of students are experiencing mental health problems and illnesses: 44.4% of surveyed students reported that at some point in the previous twelve months they felt “so depressed it was difficult to function”; 13% had seriously considered suicide; 2.1% had attempted suicide, and 18.4% reported being “diagnosed or treated by a professional” for anxiety. 1 The growing prominence of mental health issues among post-secondary students is not limited to Canada – it has been noted by practitioners
Pendant que presque tous les pays du monde s’occupent, de façon tout à fait justifiée, de la récession actuelle, une crise démographiquetouchant le marché du travail menace d’ébranler les fondements mêmes de notre société et denotre économie.
Canada is one of the most highly-educated countries in the world.
Fifty one per cent of 25- to 64-year-olds have a tertiary (university or college) qualification, up from 41 per cent in 2001 -- the highest proportion among developed countries. That translates to almost 4 million people with a college diploma and five million with a university degree. The number holding doctorates has especially soared, doubling to more than 160,000 over the past ten years. Immigrants hold half of these degrees.
Suzanne Fortier is principal and vice-chancellor of McGill University, and a member of the World Economic Forum's Global University Leaders Forum and Canada's Advisory Council on Economic Growth.
The change in the workplace is of such magnitude that many have likened it to a tsunami. At Davos this year, participants will be discussing technology-driven disruptions that are upending the marketplace: Uberization and the sharing economy, blockchain and cryptocurrencies, fintech and artificial intelligence. Equally important, we will also focus, under the theme of "Creating a Shared Future in a Fractured World", on the social disruptions that are creating an uncertain future for many people across the world.
This report assesses the University of Ottawa’s economic, social, and community impact.
As a leading research-intensive institution with a unique bilingual education mandate in Ontario, the university is currently, and is positioned to continue to be, an important generator of ideas, an innovation leader, a national top-10 research facility, a magnet for domestic and international talent, a collaborative learning network for graduates and faculty, an expert advisor to companies and governments, and a force in provincial and national innovation.
I write this from my office in a department of philosophy somewhere in the northern hemisphere. Beside my computer, the unshorn mug of Harvey Weinstein stares out from the cover of the 23 October edition of Time magazine. Beside his unpleasant mien are three words: Producer, Predator, Pariah.
Academia is no Hollywood, but it is also infected by a hidden epidemic of sexual misconduct. There is at least one sexual predator in every department I’ve studied in, or taught in, over 30 years. This is increasingly being acknowledged, but responses typically focus on teaching students about consent. This is hopelessly naive and dangerous.
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.
Many factors come into play in determining whether students pursue a postsecondary education. At a broad level, costs, parental and peer influences, and academic achievement all play important roles (Frenette 2007). From a policy perspective, however, family income is generally a key target in the student financial aid system. Many programs are in fact designed to make postsecondary education more affordable for youth from lower-income families.
Most of them won’t be celebrating.
Confederation has been described as a turning point for the worse in the lives of First Nations, Inuit and Métis peoples in Canada. Britain’s Royal Proclamation of 1763 recognized certain Indigenous rights. In 1982, Canada’s repatriated constitution “recognized and affirmed” the “aboriginal and treaty rights of the aboriginal peoples of Canada.” However the extent and content of those rights and what they mean to Canada continue to be disputed. Even rights recognized under treaty have not been respected in the post-Confederation era, it’s been well-argued.* There was a steep decline in the vitality of Indigenous cultures and languages, and in people’s well-being, particularly after the Indian Act of 1876. The country’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, looking into the legacy and abuses of the residential school system for Indigenous children, wrote in its 2015 report that “national reconciliation is the most suitable framework to guide commemoration” of Canada’s 150th anniversary, calling it “an opportunity for Canadians to take stock of the past, celebrating the country’s accomplishments without shirking responsibility for its failures.” The following are reflections from six Indigenous scholars at Canadian universities on their vision for a “reconciled Canada.”
I have been teaching for 20 years, and after a range of adjunct and visiting gigs and two tenure-track jobs (one of which ended because the institution was on the verge of financially collapsing after the economic crash in 2008), I am up for tenure and promotion this year. As virtually every tenure-track professor experiences, I, too, have had to make choices about when, where, how and why to speak out and about what, and have had to weigh issues of silence and voice against the hope and need for job security, health insurance, retirement benefits and the like.
I have had to decide what is worth it and what is not when I have been on the brink of making my viewpoints clear to the campus community and the larger community.
Being untenured is the ultimate manifestation of “You just have to know how and when to pick your battles.” If President Trump could have been an adjunct or tenure-track professor first, perhaps he would be less impulsive and reactive, thinking before tweeting, speaking, banning and dictating.
Think back to your first few years of teaching. If you’re like most educators, you probably made your share of mistakes. To be sure, we all do things differently now than we did when we were first starting out. Thank goodness for that!
When Faculty Focus put out a call for articles for this special report on teaching mistakes, we really didn’t know what to expect. Would faculty be willing to share their earlier missteps for all to see? Would the articles all talk about the same common mistakes, or would the range of mistakes discussed truly reflect the complexities of teaching today?
Question: What are the merits of a tenure-track job at a small college versus a term/clinical position at a major research university (R1 or R2)? I’m on the tenure track at a liberal-arts college, but on a very low salary. I have a possibility of a "clinical professorship" — a renewable term position — at an R1 university where I would earn a lot more money. But term/clinical positions are not guaranteed job security even at fancy institutions, right? Aren’t those jobs thought of as second class in the higher-education caste system? Any insights you can provide would be appreciated.
Transgender and gender-nonbinary students share what keeps them from feeling safe and thriving on campus.
The federal law known as Title IX is meant to protect students from discrimination based on their gender identity. But many gay, lesbian, and transgender students say they face an array of challenges and safety issues on their campuses. The Chronicle interviewed more than a dozen of them to hear more about what keeps them from thriving in college.
Doing something badly has become almost mandatory these days. TED talks, graduation speeches, and advice from some of the world’s most successful people regularly exhort us to fail. They offer no real consensus about why we should do that, but only present failure as, paradoxically, the path to greatness.
In last week’s post, we looked at a sample of the discipline-based evidence in support of quizzes with the goal of gaining a better understanding of what it means to say that an instructional practice is evidence-based. We are using quizzes as the example, but this type of exploration could and should be done with any number of instructional practices.
Throughout this summer article series, we’ve addressed some of the most frequently asked questions about the flipped classroom in higher education. We’ve shared ideas for student motivation, student engagement, time management, student resistance, and large classes. Since this is the final article in the series, I reviewed my notes and the findings from the Faculty Focus reader survey on flipped classroom trends (2015), and there’s one more topic we need to address: creativity.