Enrolments in Canadian public postsecondary institutions (colleges and universities) reached more
than 2 million in the 2013/2014 academic year, up 1.2% from a year earlier.
Over the past two decades, and across the nation, the university has been undergoing profound changes. These
structural changes underpin an emergent philosophy of the new university today -- one that should give pause to anyone concerned about the direction of higher education.
For much of the 20th century, and especially after World War II, the university served as the vehicle of upward mobility, the principal pathway to securing a middle-class and eventually upper-middle-class life. Yet that prevailing 20th-century model of the university began to give way in the late 1980s, slowly at first and then more dramatically and visibly with the onset of the new millennium.
The Ontario Undergraduate Student Alliance (OUSA) is proud to release the 2018 edition of Habitats: Students in Their Municipalities. This annual publication is comprised of a series of case studies on municipal-level topics and issues affecting undergraduate students. Written by students from OUSA’s member institutions, these submissions aim to highlight both successes and challenges in municipalities across Ontario, providing insight into how students feel about issues within their communities.
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.
This report critically reviews the literature on learning styles and examines in detail 13 of the most influential models. The report concludes that it matters fundamentally which instrument is chosen. The implications for teaching and learning in post-16 learning
are serious and should be of concern to learners, teachers and trainers, managers, researchers and inspectors.
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. This policy sets out students’ priorities in increasing the visibility of mature students on campus as well as optimizing their educational experience.
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
In Canada, international students working on their PhD are given funding for four years. After that, they are on their own.
Canadian society and the Canadian academy are proud of their openness and diversity. Every year, thousands of international students are encouraged to embark upon undergraduate and graduate studies at Canadian institutes of higher education. Indeed, the drive amongst Canadian universities to attract top-quality international students in greater numbers is
intensifying. And yet, there is a significant systemic problem for those international students in the arts and humanities who
undertake doctoral studies in Canada.
This article examines regional differences in the math and reading skills of immigrant children aged 15 based on data from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). It also examines regional differences in high-school and university completion rates among young immigrants who came to Canada before the age of 15 using National Household Survey (NHS) data. Throughout the article, comparisons are made with the children of the Canadian-born (third- or higher-generation Canadians).
This article presents findings from a case study related to the risks associated with the choice of traditional,tenure track faculty to teach online. Education offered at a distance via the World Wide Web is on the rise; so too is the demand for university faculty members who will teach those courses. While traditional academic and professional expectations remain unchanged, the new medium presents a new context in which these faculty members live, work, and balance personal and professional decisions. This study provided a multi-dimensional perspective on one college of education’s faculty and administrators as they seek to negotiate this emerging environment. Interviews with faculty, administrators, and faculty peer reviewers were conducted to provide amore complete, triangulated picture of the case.
Over the past 30 years, more and more faculty members and institutions have embraced undergraduate research
as a way to further faculty research and to enhance student learning. It has been used to attract and retain talented
students, to improve the educational experience of minorities, and to prepare more students for graduate school.
Engaging students in original scholarship is a time-intensive and expensive activity, but the outcomes are almost
always powerful and positive. Perhaps most important, research keeps students and the faculty connected and
engaged in high-level intellectual collaborations. Studies have shown that student learning depends strongly on
faculty involvement, and that when faculty members who have a strong research focus don’t include students in that
research, it has a negative impact.
Douglas Mulford worried when his lab course moved to remote instruction this past spring. Mulford, a senior lecturer of chemistry at Emory University, had worked out a system for giving in-person exams in large classes. But with his 440 students taking their final online, he feared, it would be much easier for them to cheat.
So Mulford set out to protect his test. He looked into lockdown browsers, which limit what students can do on their computers during a test, but concluded they were pointless: Most of his students had a smartphone, too, he figured, and could simply consult it instead. He thought about using a proctoring service, but wasn’t convinced it could handle this volume
of tests on such short notice. So he settled on what he calls “Zoom proctoring,” having students take their final in a Zoom room, with videos turned on, while a TA watched them and recorded the session.
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.
To do justice to students and as a matter of professional duty, faculty members should be at the center of defining and measuring undergraduate learning outcomes, argue Josipa Roksa and Richard Arum.
At age 18, Kimberly could no longer come up with a reason to live.
The Toronto university student locked the door to her parents’ garage, stepped onto a stool in the middle of the room and looped an electrical cord around her neck.
“It’s something I couldn’t explain,” recalls Kimberly, who asked that her last name not be published. “I didn’t understand what was going on in my head . . . You want to give up.”
Within seconds, she heard a faint scratching on the garage door. It was her cat.
“He knew something was wrong,” she says. “I took the cord that I wrapped around my neck off and I went inside.”
Two years later, the now third-year student at Ryerson University has been diagnosed with anxiety disorder and depression.
She’s part of what some experts are calling an emerging phenomenon.
TheEffective Classroom Interactions (ECI) online courses were designed to provide an engaging, effective and scalable approach to enhancing early childhood teachers’ use of classroom practices that impact children’s school readiness. The created courses included several versions aimed at testing whether or not certain design aspects could increase participation and subsequent learning outcomes. The purpose of this study was to examine the extent to which early childhood teachers accessed the courses and varied in their (a) participation in the core course content and (b) optional discussion board as a result of the course experience they were assigned to as well as individual characteristics that may be associated with participation. As might be expected, findings indicated that early childhood teachers accessed the course often on nights and weekends, even though participating centers allowed their teachers to do coursework during work time. In addition, participants reported high levels of satisfaction with their experience. Both persistence in the ECI courses and overall completion of activities were higher than those reported in other studies of online learning. The participation of early childhood educator teachers was consistently predicted by comfort with technology, credit or non-credit status and assignment to the group that included regular conferences with the instructor. These relationships, however, did not always occur in expected ways. Implications for exploring online learning as a feasible option for early childhood educators are discussed.
Hosting international students has long been admired as one of the hallmarks of internationalization. The two major formative strands of internationalization in Canadian universities are development cooperation and international students. With reduced public funding for higher education, institutions are aggressively recruiting international students to generate additional revenue. Canada is equally interested in offering incentives for international students to stay in the country as immigrants after completing their studies. In its 2011 budget, the Canadian federal government earmarked funding for an international
education strategy and, in 2010, funded Edu-Canada—the marketing unit within the Department of Education and Foreign Affairs (DFAIT)—to develop an official Canadian brand to boost educational marketing, IMAGINE: Education in/au Canada. This model emulates the Australian one, which rapidly capitalized on the recruitment of international students and became an
international success story. Given current Canadian higher education policy trends, this paper will address the cautionary lessons that can be drawn from the Australian case.
How international university students think about home significantly influences their migration plans upon graduation, according to a new study from the University of British Columbia.
“A lot of research focuses on where international students go to study, but few focus on where they go after graduation,” said study author Cary Wu, a PhD candidate in UBC’s department of sociology and an international student from China. “Our study shows that migration plans for international students are far more complex than this binary of stay or return.”
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.
Students cheat. Educators struggle to respond, sometimes blaming themselves for not making courses sufficiently interesting or relevant and sometimes engaging in a battle of wits or technologies with their students to prevent cheating. Sometimes we in higher education try to address cheating as a moral problem and sometimes as a pedagogical one. Another way to understand cheating, however, is to borrow an insight from Bill Clinton's 1992 presidential campaign, namely, “It’s the economy, stupid.”
One day this past March, a middle school student placed a new Air Jordan on his desk at school in Montgomery County, Maryland. The boy, who is Latino, became fixated on the shoe, rubbing the leather and fingering the laces. His teacher, who is white, asked him to put it away, but the boy refused. He became “combative,” according to the teacher, and a tug-of-war ensued. Security was called to remove the shoe.
In schools, a tussle over a shoe or a phone can quickly escalate—sometimes to a suspension or worse—leaving educators, parents, and students wondering what went wrong. As research is finding, these pervasive misunderstandings can be rooted in assumptions and biases about race and culture, and have the potential to alter
the course of students’ lives.