In this ongoing series focused on flipped and active-learning classrooms, we’re taking a deeper look into how to create successful learning experiences for students. We’ve examined how to encourage students to complete preclass work, how to hold students accountable for pre-class work, and how to connect pre-class work to in-class activities. Now let’s focus on the challenge of managing the in-person learning environment
As a minority group on university campuses, the unique needs of mature students can be easily overlooked. It is important that the term “mature students” does not disguise the heterogeneity of this group: “…it is erroneous to speak of ‘the adult learner’ as if there is a generic adult that can represent all adults.” 1 However, amongst this varied group of students, there are common concerns that they share. Mature students need more recognition of the different hurdles they face in achieving success. These can include situational barriers like a lack of time, lack of money, health issues, or dependant care,2 as well as attitudinal or dispositional barriers, including the fear of failure or alienation. Lastly, they also face systemic barriers such as restrictive course offerings and availability of instructors or support services outside of regular business hours. 3 Our Mature Student Policy sets out students’ priorities in increasing the visibility of mature students on campus as well as optimizing their educational experience.
The not-for-profit (NFP) and charitable sector in Canada represents an average of 8.1 percent Gross Domestic Product (GDP), employs over 2,000,000 people and boasts over 170,000 NFP organizations, of which 85,000 are registered charities (Imagine Canada, 2012-2013). While from a donor perspective, Canadians gave approximately $10.6 billion in 2010 (Turcotte, 2012). In Ontario, there are over 46,000 NFPs, contributing over $50 billion to the GDP and engages over 5 million volunteers annually (The Partnership Project: Strengthening Ontario’s Not-For-Profit Sector, 2011). From a post-secondary education perspective, Canadians donated $117 million to “Universities and Colleges” and $309 million to “Education and Research” in 2010, totaling $426 million dollars. This represents 4 percent of the $10.6 billion donated (Turcotte, 2012). These two categories were combined in order to account for higher education institutions that teach, research and provide other educational services such as continuing education and vocational training. While the distribution of these funds between all individual institutions is not readily available, the author’s analysis of tax return information between universities and colleges in the Greater Toronto
Area (GTA) reveals the universities dwarf the colleges in acquiring these private dollars. The author has compiled a chart, based on 2010 CRA returns for universities and colleges in the GTA which further illustrates the disparity between these institutions. The following chart compares university and college fundraising results (Appendix A).
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.
Instruction of team skills is quickly emerging as an important and missing dimension of engineering education. This project evaluated a new framework for guiding students in providing self- and peer assessments of their effectiveness in teamwork. This framework is the foundation for a new web-based tool that offers students structured feedback from teammates, along with personalized exercises and actionable strategies that guide targeted learning in the areas thereby identified. Specifically, the study documented in this report investigated whether the feedback framework, when used for intra-team self and peer feedback, increased students’ abilities to learn about and improve their team-effectiveness in executing design projects.
In our second annual student survey, Maclean’s reached more than 17,000 students at almost every university campus across the country. They told us how often they’ve cheated as well as how much time they spend studying, partying, working and on extracurricular activities. It is one of the largest surveys of its kind and provides a wideranging snapshot of student life on university campuses across the country in real time.
Respondents also told us whether they feel their school has prepared them for the workplace, offering insight into which universities—and which programs—are doing the best job preparing students for the real world. St. Francis Xavier came out on top for this one measure, with 53% of students strongly agreeing they had the skills and knowledge needed for employment. For some programs, the results were even better, with 71% of St. FX nursing students saying they’d been well prepared. We also asked whether the schools helped with writing ability, with St. Thomas ranking first on that front. In addition, we surveyed professors to see whether incoming university students had the academic skills needed for success.
Several years ago, I served as the acting dean of Michigan State University’s College of Arts and Letters -- one of
our institution’s three core colleges with 20 departments, programs and centers, 250 faculty members, and a mix of
graduate and undergraduate offerings. It was a wonderful opportunity to get to know another part of the university
and experiment with running a college with a very different structure. At the same time, knowing the appointment
was for just a single year made me approach it rather differently than my usual (and concurrent) gig as the dean of
Lyman Briggs College, a residential undergraduate science college with 2,000 students and no formal sub-units.
This article examines the differences in the location of study of immigrant adults aged 25 to 64 with a university education (i.e., with at least a bachelor’s degree). It provides results by period of immigration (pre-1990, the 1990s, and the 2000s) and provides a more in-depth analysis of factors that are linked to the location of study for the most recent cohort of immigrants (i.e., those who immigrated in 2000 or later).
Watching the crackdown on protestors in Turkey four years ago, Ayca Koseoglu, then a recent MA graduate from a university in Ankara, had two thoughts.
“I thought there was no life in Turkey for people like me any more, for academics,” said Ms. Koseoglu, who decided she had to go abroad to continue her education.
Her second thought was that she wanted to research how political movements used public space to stand up to repressive regimes, whether in Turkey, the Middle East or the United States.
Student pathways increasingly rely on transfer between postsecondary institutions as greater numbers of students move between institutions, pursue multiple credentials, or return to postsecondary education. In a 2011 survey of Ontario college students, 41% reported having some post-secondary experience; the same survey also found that 19% of respondents said their main goal in applying for their current program was to “prepare for further university or college study.” Transfer of credit for prior learning is clearly an increasingly mainstream educational activity, and institutions are under increasing pressure to improve the processes by which this occurs.
This paper provides a broad discussion of the future structure and function of Ontario’s post-secondary system. It addresses six topics in particular that influence the shape and direction of the sector: differentiation, satellite campuses,
instructional quality and capacity, campus infrastructure, cost inflation, and funding.
Intellectual property is important in our universities but it sometimes raises thorny issues. Unlike the United States, which has the Bayh-Dole Act – legislation governing intellectual property generated by federally funded research – Canadian universities are free to have their own individual IP arrangements. The Bayh-Dole act permits 50 percent of the IP to be assigned to the researcher and another 50 percent to the university. This act presumes that the universities will play a role in the protection and commercialization of the IP. Certain institutions, such as MIT, contribute a certain portion of their share back to the researcher.
The first initiative of its kind in an Ontario University
The Nipissing University Promise Program will support you through all aspects of the University journey. Newly admitted and transfer students with less than 30 transfer credits enrolled in the Promise Program will have an advisor to help navigate each step of your academic and co-curricular involvement at Nipissing — the transition into academic studies, life on campus as a Laker, and career development.
What is the NU Promise?
Nipissing invites you to return, tuition free, for up to 30 additional credits* if 6 months after completing your 4-year undergraduate degree program with a 70% GPA and all required elements of the program, you have not secured career-related employment.
This report provides a systems perspective on the state of skills and higher education in Canada and identifies areas where the sector could improve in producing highly skilled graduates. I
Dominique Oliver-Dares remembers being a first-year undergraduate student at Dalhousie University, looking around at the other students in her “humongous” introductory classes and seeing only a handful of Black students like her spread out around the room. “It was very isolating,” she recalls. “Sometimes your fellow students either know each other from somewhere else, or they might just feel more comfortable to make friends with the other students that look like them. I couldn’t engage in conversations as easily.”
A total of 61,696 full-time applicants to Ontario colleges opted-in to participate in the 2015
UCAS™:
59,568 English-speaking applicants and 2,128 French-speaking applicants at the time of survey
administration.
• Academica Group provided unique web links as well as the invitation email text to the Ontario
College Application Service (OCAS). OCAS then sent the survey invitation email to college
applicants. Applicant contact information was not shared with Academica Group at any point in the
process.
• The survey was in-field from March 12 to April 21, 2015. Reminder emails were sent on March
24 and April 8 to those who had not yet responded. Respondents who completed the survey were
entered into a draw to win over $5,000 in prizes.
• 14,331 college respondents completed the survey (13,661 English and 670 French) providing an
overall
response rate of 23%.
• This sample size provides results at the 95% confidence level of plus or minus 0.39
percentage points.
• Respondent data was weighted by gender and language to reflect the original population
invited to
participate.
The majority of university staff feel that they are overworked and underpaid, and that their careers have a detrimental impact on their relationships with their friends, families and partners.
These are some of the conclusions that can be drawn from Times Higher Education’s first major global survey of university staff’s views on their work-life balance.
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.
When Harvard University announced Lawrence S. Bacow as its president-in-waiting on Sunday, the institution focused heavily on his illustrious academic history, past presidential experience at Tufts University and family story as the son of immigrants.
Less discussed was Bacow’s age. He’s 66, about four years older than the average college president. If he stays at Harvard for 10 years -- the tenure he has previously said is about right for a president -- he will be stepping down in his mid-70s.