In the two months since I chronicled my grief over abandoning my tenure-track dreams, I have been the recipient of all sorts of career advice — solicited and unsolicited. Lots of well-meaning people who’ve never worked outside of academe seem to have thoughts on my transition to nonacademic life.
The ever-unfolding crisis of the academic job market means The Chronicle has offered plenty of advice for Ph.D.s like me on life beyond the ivory tower. There are columns on how to transform a CV into a résumé; how to write a cover letter that doesn’t spend two single-spaced pages discussing our dissertation research; and how to show potential employers the value of
all those skills we’ve been honing in doctoral programs.
Generation Z is destined to be the most researched of all generations in history. We understand consumer habits, how Generation Z communicates, even the exact details of how the media influences them. Living under a digital microscope, todays 15- to 18-year-olds are savvy. They have a comprehensive understanding of what they want an
es to technology and education. And with this comes great expectations.
performance throughout the course, especially for those students who do poorly on the first test. Faculty and institutions provide an array of supports for these students, including review sessions, time with tutors, more practice problems, and extra office hours, but it always seems it’s the students who are doing well who take advantage of these extra learning opportunities. How to help the students who need the help is a challenging proposition.
A requirement for quality assurance is becoming more prevalent in higher education today as institutions are being asked to demonstrate that they are providing robust, meaningful learning experiences for students. Many institutions are adopting curriculum review frameworks as part of their overall quality assurance strategy. Three leaders at various levels who were engaged in a year-long curriculum review process share reflections about their experiences and challenges while conducting an undergraduate program review. Their theoretical framework for an effective curriculum review process is shared in
this paper. The leaders offer institutional, faculty, and course level insights, and make five recommendations for a collaborative curriculum review process: (1) setting clear expectations; (2) maintaining open, consistent communication; (3) incorporating multiple levels of leadership; (4) engaging various groups of stakeholders; and (5) implementing through actionable items.
When I recently returned to my department after a decade in administration, I looked forward to reconnecting with former colleagues, getting to know the grad students, going to lectures and colloquia, teaching undergrads, and yes, even serving on departmental committees. But when I moved into my faculty office and began my work schedule, I had only one question as I looked around my department: Where did everybody go?
OUSA’s policy on system growth is a broad based look at the future structure and function of Ontario’s post-secondary system. Throughout the past decade, Ontario has seen unprecedented growth in undergraduate enrolment across universities and colleges, successfully achieving the highest provincial post-secondary attainment in Canada. OUSA is supportive of the
Ontario government’s work towards the goal of a more prosperous society and workforce.
However, these commitments have come at a price to students within the postsecondary system. While per-student operating grants have kept pace with increasing enrolment, provincial funding into postsecondary still falls dramatically behind all other provinces, both in terms of real dollars and percentage of GDP. Meanwhile, universities are experiencing unsustainable rising costs, particularly salaries and pensions, which threaten universities’ and students’ collective futures.
This paper exploits data from the Survey of Adult Skills (PIAAC) to shed light on the link between measured cognitive skills (proficiency), (formal) educational attainment and labour market outcomes. After presenting descriptive statistics on the degree of dispersion in the distributions of proficiency and wages, the paper shows that the cross-country correlation between these two dimensions of inequality is very low and, if anything, negative. As a next step, the paper provides estimates of the impact of both proficiency and formal education at different parts of the distribution of earnings. Formal education is found to have a larger impact on inequality, given that returns to education are in general much higher at the top than at the bottom of the distribution. The profile of returns to proficiency, by contrary, is much flatter. This is consistent with the idea that PIAAC measures rather general skills, while at the top end of the distribution the labour market rewards specialised knowledge that is necessarily acquired through tertiary and graduate education. Finally, a decomposition exercise shows that composition effects are able to explain a very limited amount of the observed cross-country differences in wage inequality. This suggests that economic institutions, by shaping the way personal characteristics are rewarded in the labour market, are the main
determinants of wage inequality.
As professors are consistently reminded, in a student's world of class rank, graduate school admissions and a highly competitive job market, grades rule. Given that, fairness and accuracy in the testing by which we measure student performance and assign grades is one of the foremost commandments of the professoriate.
Over time, the labour market has shifted from one characterized by stable or permanent employment to a “gig economy” of temporary or contracted employment, where an on-demand, freelance or contingent workforce is becoming the norm. A gig can be defined as “any job, especially one of short or uncertain duration.”
This type of staffing model allows an organization to fill skills gaps by hiring on a temporary, on-demand basis. These are not the “temps” of the past; instead, they are short- or long-term contracts for personnel ranging from blue-collar light-industrial
workers to highly skilled IT, engineering, accounting and HR professionals.
Student financial stability is a critically important facet of the improvement work in which so many community colleges around
the country are engaging. The financial stability data that the Center explores here go hand-in-hand with the guided pathways
reform that is sweeping the country and with Beyond Financial Aid,1 which I developed with Lumina Foundation. Taken together they give colleges a powerful opportunity to ensure that significantly more students complete their journeys with us and move directly into the workforce or transfer to a four-year institution.
Six Strategic Features that Foster Student Engagement and Persistence
The Wounded Leader: How Real Leadership Emerges in Times of Crisis (2002), a recently published book by Richard Ackerman and Pat Maslin-Ostrowski, asks educational leaders to reflect on personal and profound questions - ones they are not likely to have been asked in a formal interview or performance evaluation. Ackerman, co-director of the International Network of Principals’ Centers and Associate Professor of education at the University of Massachusetts Lowell Graduate School of Education, and Maslin- Ostrowski, an Associate Professor of educational
leadership at Florida Atlantic University, have spent the past seven years asking school leaders about “wounding” or “crisis” experiences in their leadership practice, and how they make sense of this wounding in terms of
their personal and professional lives.
This report examines time to degree completion for a cohort of students who earned an associate degree as their first and only postsecondary degree or a bachelor’s degree as their first four-year degree between July 1, 2014, and June 30, 2015. Overall, the average time enrolled for associate and bachelor’s degree earners was 3.3 years and 5.1 years, respectively. However, as the report shows, the time required for successful degree attainment could be influenced by the pathway the student followed as well as by factors, such as stop outs and less than full-time enrollment status.
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.
Interleaving is not a well-known term among those who teach, and it’s not a moniker whose meaning can be surmised, but it’s a well-researched study strategy with positive effects on learning. Interleaving involves incorporating material from multiple class
presentations, assigned readings, or problems in a single study session. It’s related to distributed practice—studying more often for shorter intervals (i.e., not cramming). But it is not the same thing. Typically, when students study and when teachers review, they go over what was most recently covered, or they deal with one kind of problem at a time.
In 2008, University of Manitoba professors Stephen Downes and George Siemens taught a course on learning theory that was attended by about 25 paying students in class and by another 2,300 students online for free. Colleague Dave Cormier at the University of Prince Edward Island dubbed the experiment a “massive open online course,” or MOOC.
A healthy university system is essential for Ontarians. University education leads to the best long-term career prospects for individuals and benefits the province as a whole by generating a more civically engaged population with the skills and tools needed to succeed in the knowledge economy of today.
To prepare for the future needs of the economy, the province has committed to foster a highly skilled workforce. To this end, the Premier’s office has assembled an expert panel to address this issue, and broad ranging consultations have already begun. In January 2016, the Ontario Talent and Skills Summit brought together leaders from the corporate sector, the public sector, the non-profit sector, and the post-secondary education sector to have meaningful discussions about developing future leaders and innovators; OUSA was proud to be a part of this initiative.
ew report on transfer of struggling students from universities to community colleges finds students benefit from moving in nontraditional direction.
Abstract
Our qualitative study explored transition in seven Canadian universities—early providers of distance education that transitioned to online learning between 2002 and 2017. We interviewed 16 individuals who were involved in the design, planning, r implementation of online learning. Participants reported their universities experienced significant impacts on organizational structure and roles. Many saw an increased focus on learning and teaching. Access, revenue generation, and technology were identified as drivers of online learning; traditional learning and teaching practices were shifting; challenges experienced included resistance to change and lack of dedicated resources; and effective, visionary leadership was seen to be critically important. We propose that the roots of today’s challenges and opportunities in online learning may be found in the experiences of distance educators who were early adopters.
Keywords: organizational change, distance education, online learning, Canadian universities
Background/Context: The assessment of students, along with teachers and school systems, has largely taken place within a context of positivist science. An enormous range of scholarship now challenges the positivist paradigm, offering a social espistemological alternative. This alternative invites a re-examination of assessment processes and their policy implications.