When teachers think the best, most important way to improve their teaching is by developing their content knowledge, they end up with sophisticated levels of knowledge, but they have only simplistic instructional methods to convey that material. To imagine that content matters more than process is to imagine that the car is more important than the road. Both are essential. What we teach and how we teach it are inextricably linked and very much dependent on one another.
This special report features 11 articles pulled from the pages of The Teaching Professor to help you discover new ways to build connections between what you teach and how you teach it. The report offers tips on how to engage students, give feedback, create a climate for learning, and more. It also provides fresh perspectives on how faculty should approach
their development as teachers.
It’s been said that few things can enhance student learning more than an instructor’s commitment to ongoing professional development. Here’s a sample of the articles you will find in Effective Strategies for Improving College Teaching and Learning:
• Faculty Self-Disclosures in the College Classroom
• A Tree Falling in the Forest: Helping Students ‘Hear’ and Use Your Comments
• Understanding What You See Happening in Class
• Can Training Make You a Better Teacher?
• Striving for Academic Excellence
Although there is no single best teaching method, approach, or style, this special report
will give you a variety of strategies to try. Those that work effectively with your students
you should make your own.
Maryellen Weimer
Editor
The Teaching Professor
The community college field is evolving dramatically. It has been 10 years since the Center for Community College Student Engagement presented results from the first national administration of its flagship survey. Over the past decade, institutions enrolling more than 80% of U.S. community college students have used Center surveys to assess their students’ engagement so they can improve institutional practice and student outcomes. This focus on engagement is one of many changes in the ways community colleges are using data to understand and improve the educational experiences of their students.
Now, as colleges increasingly understand the importance of intentionally engaging students, the field must turn to the game-changing challenge: bringing high-impact practices to scale as part of a concerted effort to increase college completion rates. In an era of growing demand, shrinking budgets, and greater accountability, meeting this challenge requires singular focus. Colleges must make decisions—about every hour spent, every dollar allocated, every policy set, and every practice implemented—based on whether those decisions will make engagement inescapable for large numbers of their students.
What is the evolutionary process of leadership theories?
The overall goal of the ARUCC PCCAT National Transcript Standards and Transfer Credit Nomenclature Project is to contribute to enhanced student mobility by creating standards and tools that facilitate the efforts of registrarial and pathway practitioners and policy developers at Canadian postsecondary institutions and allied organizations. A core component of Phase 2 is to further engage the national community in a discussion about what the future transcript standards and transfer credit nomenclature should look like. To quote the 2003 ARUCC Transcript Guide, the main transcript issues remain “’what information to record’ on the transcript and ‘how to record’ the needed information, so that the transcript accurately and equitably reflects educational achievements, and the information it conveys is clear and unambiguous for present and future users” (ARUCC, 2003, p. 10).1 For transfer credit nomenclature, the primary goal is to seek agreement on what terms and definitions to adopt in a database that are
reflective of common and promising practice.
Most, if not all, faculty and graduate students will agree with Dr. Joli Jensen’s statement that “academic writing is a perplexing burden, a source of constant anxiety, self-doubt, and confusion” (p. 4). When we and our colleagues discuss our own writing struggles or those of our graduate students, we recognize that there are many potential issues underlying writing problems: research design issues, lack of knowledge of other scholarly literature, underdeveloped academic writing skills, an
emerging identity as an academic writer, and ineffective writing processes and practices. Jensen, the author of Write No Matter What: Advice for Academics, claims that her book focuses solely on “offering academic colleagues process-oriented strategies for overcoming writing obstacles” (p. 88). In fact, we find that Jensen offers more than just process strategies in that she also details the affective and psychological barriers to writing; the things that happen in writers’ heads when they have carved out time for writing but still struggle.
Public colleges are the only academic institutions in Canada that deliver a robust range of career-focused programs and training to all segments of the population. The colleges’ labour-market programs, such as Second Career, employment counselling, academic upgrading and apprenticeship training serve more than 160,000 students
each year.
Ontario’s public college programs are affordable and reach students in all socioeconomic groups – from people who need upgrading in order to qualify for full-time college programs, to university graduates seeking marketable skills.
Graduates of Ontario’s 24 public colleges earn credentials that have met the province’s rigorous standards for post-secondary education and are valued by employers. College graduates continue to be in high demand.
While much of the world is understandably focused on the current recession, there is a looming demographic and labour market
crisis which has the potential to shake the very foundations of our society and economy. Our population is aging; as the baby boomer generation advances into the age of normal retirement, there will be a significant decline in the proportion of our opulation in the prime working years (15 to 64). Using Ontario Ministry of Finance data, the projected shortfall in the availability of workers is shown to rise to at least 200,000, and to as high as 1.8 million by 2031,depending on our levels of population growth.
Even in the midst of a recession, we have to understand that a labour shortage looms. Unfortunately, this is only half of the bad news. At the same time as our population is aging, the requirements of the labour market are changing. With the emergence of our knowledge economy, the proportion of the labour force requiring some form of education or training beyond high school will increase dramatically.
Using a variety of Canadian and U. S. estimates,it is concluded that by 2031 we will need 77% of our workforce to have post-secondary credentials (apprenticeship, university, college, industry, professional). Overall, we now stand at about 60%, with our younger population (25 to 34 years of age) at just over 66%. So, we will need both a larger workforce and increased skills. For potential solutions, increasing the size of the population (immigration) with more skilled workers could help, but it will not solve the problem. Increasing the participation rates of those currently under-represented in the labour force is another option that needs to be explored, as do ways of accelerating graduations, increasing employer-provided training, improving literacy rates, and creating a more unified educational system. But what is most clearly needed is a change in our society’s attitude towards post-secondary education.
We have to accept attainment of post-secondary education or training as the expectation for all but a small minority of Ontarians. Without effective action, we face a future with large numbers of unskilled workers looking for jobs that require skills they do not possess, and a large number of jobs that will go unfilled. The time for action is now. It will take planning, hard work, cooperation, and difficult decisions to secure our future. An alternative outcome is simply unacceptable.
Rick Miner Report
As online education moves from the fringes to the mainstream, one question still persists: “How do I know what my online students have learned?” There are no simple answers, just as there aren’t in face-to-face courses, but with a little creativity and flexibility, you soon discover that the online learning environment opens up a host of new student assessment possibilities. And, just as with traditional courses, the trick is finding the right combination that works best for your particular course.
This special report features 12 articles from Online Classroom that will cause you to examine your current methods of online assessment, and perhaps add something new to your assessment toolbox. It even talks about some of the common assessment mistakes you’ll want to avoid.
Take a look at some of the articles you will find in Assessing Online Learning: Strategies, Challenges and Opportunities:
• Authentic Experiences, Assessment Develop Online Students’ Marketable Skills
• Four Typical Online Learning Assessment Mistakes
• Assessing Whether Online Learners Can DO: Aligning Learning Objectives with
Real-world Applications
• Strategies for Creating Better Multiple-Choice Tests
• Assessing Student Learning Online: It’s More Than Multiple Choice
• Using Self-Check Exercises to Assess Online Learning
• Measuring the Effectiveness of an Online Learning Community
• Ongoing Student Evaluation Essential to Course Improvement
Online courses enable a strong student-centered approach to learning and, as a result, assessment. We hope this report helps you design and develop online assessment strategies that take full advantage of the many formal and informal assessment tools now at your fingertips.
Key Findings
This report highlights the importance of college readiness for persisting in college to timely
degree completion. Primary findings suggest that:
• Being better prepared academically for college improves a student’s chances of completing a college degree.
• Using multiple measures of college readiness better informs the likelihood of a student persisting and succeeding in college.
• College readiness reduces gaps in persistence and degree completion among racial/ethnic and family income groups.
• Early monitoring of readiness is associated with increased college success.
The present system of academic credentials awarded by Ontario’s colleges was established nearly a half century ago. It is thus appropriate to consider how well some of those credential titles fit in the global lexicon of academic credentials as it has evolved over the last half century and whether they are still appropriate today.
Presently the term for the credential that is awarded by colleges in Ontario upon completion of a program of two years’ duration is diploma. In 1995, noted community college scholar John Dennison of the University of British Columbia observed that “there is not a clear appreciation of what a diploma means”, and this “results in an undervaluation of the diploma from a CAAT” (Dennison, 1995, p. 13).
Approaches to higher education have been evolving at an increasingly rapid pace over the past decade, and graduate education is a critical part of that evolution. In Ontario alone, the number of new programs offered at our institutions has increased dramatically since 2004, and between 1999 and 2009, the number of PhD students enrolled in Ontario universities has nearly doubled (Maldonado, Wiggers, & Arnold, 2013). Students are coming to graduate school at different stages of their lives (Wiggers, Lennon, & Frank, 2011) and, in today’s economy, many are leaving graduate schools with increased uncertainty and anxiety about their career prospects (Maldonado et al., 2013; Patton, 2012).
Whereas in the past it was considered the norm for graduate students to move on to careers in academia, recent studies have confirmed what is apparent to most casual observers: the standard path is no longer into academia. For example, a 2010 study estimated that about 50 per cent of US PhD graduates now take positions outside of academia (Wendler, Bridgeman, Cline, Millett, Rock, Bell, & McAllister, 2010), and those who end up in academia are less likely to hold full-time tenure-stream positions. From 1975 to 2009, the proportion of full-time tenured and tenure-track faculty positions decreased as a proportion of the total number of instructional staff at US universities from approximately 45 to 24 per cent (AAUC), with part-time faculty positions comprising the majority of instructional positions (41%) by 2009. Within the Canadian context, current estimates suggest that less than 25 per cent of PhD students will end up in full-time tenure-stream research and teaching positions (Charbonneau, 2011; Tamburri, 2010).
Over the past few decades, Canada’s labour requirements have changed drastically—from a need for physical labourers to a need for knowledge workers—as a result of changes in economic and social conditions that have included advances in information and communication technologies, globalization of economic activity and shifting demographics. Consequently, employers and firms are increasingly seeking skilled workers with a more sophisticated array of capabilities. Of recent concern, the current global recession has led to the deterioration of labour-market conditions in Canada and worldwide, profoundly affecting—through increased vulnerability to unemployment—the economic and social well-being of families and communities across Canada. Canada’s economic strength, as in other countries, depends on its ability to develop a skilled and flexible workforce, capable of adapting to continuous change. While Canada’s formal education is of a high standard, it alone cannot provide the conditions needed to secure the development of Canada’s talent—its human infrastructure*—which is a necessary element of our country’s future prosperity. Against this backdrop, Securing Prosperity through Canada’s Human Infrastructure, CCL’s second†report on the state of adult learning and workplace training in Canada, demonstrates that investments in human infrastructure—both in times of economic uncertainty and relative prosperity—are critical to securing a strong economy and greater social equity.
Ontario’s professors and academic librarians are on the front lines of Ontario’s universities. They are uniquely positioned to assess the performance of the sector, and to identify trends that affect the quality of university education.
To take advantage of this insight, the Ontario Confederation of University Faculty Associations (OCUFA) surveyed Ontario faculty to gauge their opinions on the quality of university education in our province. The survey was also designed to assess the priorities of university faculty, particularly in regards to the balance of teaching and research in their work.
The survey was conducted online between March 21, 2012 and April 16, 2012. Responses to the questionnaire were received from over 2,300 faculty members, with a total of 2,015 complete responses from professors and academic librarians from all Ontario universities and a full range of disciplines. The following report presents the survey findings and provides additional commentary about key results.
Grade 8 is a critical year for Ontario’s students. It is not only a pivotal point in a young person’s emotional, social, and physical development1, but also a time when students must choose between taking applied and academic courses in high school. These course selections largely determine students’ educational pathways throughout high school and have the poten-
tial to influence their post-secondary options and career opportunities2.
This report examines the gap between Ontario’s stated policy regarding students’ choices in high school and the reality on the ground. It looks at whether grade 8 students should be required to make decisions that have such important short and long term consequences in light of international evidence suggesting that it contributes to lower outcomes.
In 2011 Ontario joined the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s (OECD) Assessment of Higher Education Learning Outcomes (AHELO) feasibility study. The Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario (HEQCO) led the project on behalf of the Ministry of Training, Colleges and Universities (MTCU) and in cooperation with the Council of Ministers of Education, Canada (CMEC).
Initiated in 2006, AHELO was a feasibility study to determine if standard generic and discipline-specific tests could be used in different countries to measure what university students know and are able to do. Intending to contribute to the international conversation on establishing better indications of learning quality, the study aimed to develop common learning outcomes and assess student performance at the end of a bachelor’s degree (first cycle) in a variety of educational cultures, languages and institutions through standard tests. The feasibility study developed three assessments: one for generic skills and two for discipline-specific skills in economics and civil engineering.
About Ontario Centres of Excellence Inc.
The Ontario Centres of Excellence (OCE) not-for-profit program was formally established in 1987 with seven independent centres that evolved and amalgamated into Ontario Centres of Excellence Inc. in 2004.
Twenty-five years ago, the traditional economic foundation for the province, and for Canada, was shifting from a north american focused and commodities-based economy to one that is globally oriented and knowledge-based.
Prior to the creation of OCE, there was limited connection between universities, colleges, research hospitals and industry. Consensus was that these academic and research institutions were producing quality research that was not being utilized to its full potential by industry.
OCE was designed to bridge that gap and create productive working partnerships between university and college
research departments, research hospitals and Ontario industry.
The Canadian labour market suffered a severe blow during the last recession, with more than 430,000 persons losing their jobs and the unemployment rate reaching levels unseen since the latter half of the 1990s.
Subsequently, the labour market has shown great resilience, and there are now 900,000 more Canadians employed since the beginning of the recovery. Important weaknesses remain, however: long-term and youth unemploymentstill stand at obstinately high levels – despite a recent growth in job vacancies.
This E-Brief argues the best way to further support the Canadian labour market would be through policies that enhance labour mobility and emphasize skills training to help ensure unemployed Canadians have the right skill sets to
integrate into the workforce.
This paper reports the results of a study of provincial level arrangements for coordination of planning and operations between university and college sectors in Canada. The data are drawn from a survey of senior government and sector officials in which respondents were asked to describe existing arrangements for coordination and to comment upon the importance attached to, and priority issues for, coordination; characteristics of effective structures for coordination; and their satisfaction with existing arrangements. The findings indicate that inter-sector coordination is perceived as an important issue; that coordination structures are most developed in the provinces in which there is the strongest mandate for articulation between sectors; and that efforts are under way in most provinces to refine and improve structures for inter-sector coordination.
Cet article prisente Les risultats d'une itude sur Les modes de coordination, d l'ichelle provinciale, de la planification et du fonctionnement intersectoriels des universitis et des colleges au Canada. Les informations utilisies pour les fins de cette analyse ont iti obtenues d partir d'une enquete effectuie aupres des hauts fonctionnaires des gouvernements provinciaux et aupres des institutions d'enseignement postsecondaire. L'objet de cette enquete a porte sur Les modes de coordination en place, sur /'evaluation de /'importance attribuee a ces activites, sur Les questions prioritaires necessitant la coordination, sur Les caracteristiques des structures de coordination qui s'averent Les plus efficaces, et en.fin sur le niveau de satisfaction en regard des structures existantes. Les resultats de l'enquete indiquent qu 'on attache generalement une grande importance aux structures de coordination intersectorielles; que Les provinces possedant Les structures Les plus developpees sont celles ayant etabli un mandat clair de coordination; et en.fin, que toutes Les provinces sont deja engagees dans un processus qui vise a developper et d ameliorer Les structures existantes.
The Association of Registrars of the Universities and Colleges of Canada (ARUCC) and the Pan-Canadian Consortium on Admissions and Transfer (PCCAT) have collaborated to lead an extensive study to understand current transcript and transfer credit nomenclature practices in Canada. These findings will ultimately inform a comprehensive update and expansion of the 2003 ARUCC National Transcript Guide and potentially result in a searchable database of transcript practices and Canadian transfer credit nomenclature. The ultimate goal is to enhance the clarity, consistency and transparency of the academic transcript and transfer credit resources that support student mobility. The specific deliverable for this phase was to identify and summarize Canadian transcript and transfer credit nomenclature practices, review four international jurisdictions as a means to highlight promising practices related to these two areas and, finally, to provide both an overview of systems and an initial examination of emergent perspectives and themes. The report purposefully avoids suggesting prescriptive solutions or outcomes; however, the findings from this study will provide a solid foundation from which to move forward the standards and terminology discourse in Canada. This report collates the findings from the supporting research conducted from January through to April 2014.
In June 2016, the Ontario government launched its five-year Climate Change Action Plan, which builds on a bold strategy to reduce the province’s green-house gas (GHG) emissions by 15 per cent below 1990 levels by the year 2020. Universities are stepping up to the challenge by demonstrating leadership, reinforcing their role in helping meet these targets, and supporting campus-based initiatives to spark broader action.