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.
The third stream agenda is a critical strategy in the pursuit of enriched learning, enhancing student employability and much needed revenues. Voices of support of the third stream agenda resonate across political parties, the business community and universities. Academic journals have also reflected a scenario in which the academic community of practice have transformed its rational into ‘can do’ mission statements and strategic policies with a clear focus to source, convert and embed third stream activities. In return, universities seek quarries such as more marketable programmes of studies, committed and commercially
aware academics, improved business interchange and in light of the economic recession and subsequent austere measures, the replenishment of new revenue streams.
The internationally recognized series of Horizon Reports is part of the New Media Consortium’s Horizon Project, a comprehensive research venture established in 2002 that identifies and describes emerging technologies likely to have a large impact over the coming five years on a variety of sectorsaround the globe. This volume, the 2011 Horizon Report, examines emerging technologies for their potential impact on and use in teaching, learning, and creative inquiry. It is the eighth in the annual series of reports focused on emerging technology in the higher education environment.
The Council of Europe (since the mid-1960s), the European Commission (since the late 1980s) and many European states and civil society organisations (in the aftermath of the Second World War) have long fostered programmes and strategies to enhance the mobility of young people.
The prevailing notion of such programmes is that the process of economic and political integration in Europe will indeed remain fragmentary and unstable without accompanying social and educational measures. Instead of a Europe with non-transparent
bureaucratic institutions, a “Europe of Citizens” was meant to develop wherein people would get to know each other,
appreciate their mutual cultural differences and, at the same time, form a European identity by saying “yes” to core European values. As such, mobility is considered important for the personal development of young people, contributing as it does to their employability and thus their social inclusion.
In the past few decades, those of us working in institutions of higher education have seen an instructional paradigm shift. Given the growth in research on learning, our views of how people learn best have developed over the last few decades; from behaviorist perspectives of learning, we have also come to understand learning from cognitive and social perspectives. (For a more in-depth discussion of these issues, see Barkley, Major, and Cross, 2014, as well as articles in this special issue). This development has caused higher education instructors to modify their instructional practices as a result. Many instructors have moved away from a sole diet of traditional lecture, with the occasional short-answer question to the class in which students listen, repeat, and occasionally apply, toward a modified menu of pedagogical platforms in which, much of the time, students are active participants in the learning process. Higher education faculty, then, have gone about this task of engaging students actively in learning in a number of important ways by adopting a range of instructional approaches.
For many years now, people have been touting the arrival of the “digital native,” or students that were “born digital”. These terms were meant to describe members of a generation who, according to the more fevered sections of the technorati at least, actually have a different set of neural pathways – who, having been exposed since birth to the Internet and hypertext, “think and process information differently” from previous generations.1 In some quarters this has led to calls – on the basis of evidence that can sometimes be alarmingly thin – that curricula and instructional technologies be radically overhauled in order to cater to the “new learner.”
At the same time, much has been made about the quality-enhancing – and cost-reducing – potential of using the Internet for learning purposes in universities. The National Center for Academic Transformation in the United States, in particular, has been a leading voice in using course redesign as a means to improve both learning outcomes and resource allocation.2 This has not really been about moving whole courses online – the “disruptive technology” that some commentators suggest is about to change universities completely3 – but rather it has been about deploying e-learning resources in such a way as to complement and amplify what is being done in more traditional courses. The entwining of these kinds of resources into courses that
remain primarily physical and class-based is commonly referred to as “blended learning.”
Established in 2004, the Industry Training Authority (ITA) is the provincial Crown agency that governs and manages the industry training system. Working in close collaboration with industry, it keeps occupational standards current and relevant, assesses skills, manages the apprenticeship training pathway, and works to align the profile and number of newly credentialed workers with labour market needs. It provides career development opportunities for individuals and a skilled workforce for
industry.
An annual Government’s Letter of Expectation (GLE) is ITA’s primary source of guidance in setting its strategic direction. In 2008 – consistent with the relevant GLE’s emphasis on expanding access to training for groups that are traditionally under-represented or face barriers to labour force participation – ITA began to establish a distinct suite of Aboriginal Initiatives. The overarching objective was to increase the representation of Aboriginal participants in the trades.
Check the backpack of any higher education student and you’re likely to find a smartphone. The handy handheld tool has long been a favorite of on-the-go college kids to remain on task through the use of calendaring; up-to-date with e-mail and Internet access; and ‘in the know’ by way of social media, IM and text messaging.
Mobile computing is mainstream. But despite its ubiquity in the personal lives of students — and the efficiencies it brings — mobile computing has not been utilized by the higher education community to enhance student learning and deliver content and resources with greater efficiency. Until now.
Identified as the No. 1 technology to watch for out of more than 110 technologies considered, the Horizon Report predicts that mobile computing will enter mainstream use for teaching and learning within the next 12 months. The set of teaching and learning activities that are well-suited to mobile devices continues to evolve rapidly as mobile devices and networks improve, educators and instructional designers develop innovative uses for those devices and networks as applied to education, and courses and curriculum are redesigned to take advantage of mobile computing as a delivery medium for blended and online programs.
Business programs in particular are poised to take advantage of the benefits mobile computing has to offer, with the following uses becoming commonplace in undergraduate business concentrations and MBA programs:
• Course registration and scheduling
Students can register for courses via mobile devices and view class schedules and calendars once enrolled. In addition, mobile devices provide the perfect platform for communicating last-minute changes to meeting times or places, as well as accessing other timely alerts.
• Access to assignments and course materials Students can access course content via learning management
systems, cloud computing solutions and shared portals.
Information and data can be uploaded, downloaded and revised.
• Collaboration on group projects
Group work is a substantial and critical component of business
school curriculum, and mobile computing enables teams of students to communicate and collaborate on projects across space and time.
• In-class polling
Some mobile device platforms are capable of running applications to support in-class polling, effectively eliminating the
need for standalone clicker systems in lecture halls.
Pofessional development should be an ongoing endeavor for all faculty members because their growth as instructors has a profound impact on their students. There are always opportunities for improvement, new teaching techniques to learn and master, and experiences to share with colleagues.
This is why we have created this special report. Whether your institution has extensive, well-funded faculty development initiatives or you operate on a shoestring, I’m sure you will find some useful information in this special report to help with your faculty develop-ment efforts.
The articles, compiled from The Teaching Professor and Academic Leader, offer inspira-tion and practical (and often inexpensive) ways to accomplish the goal of improved teaching and learning.
The ACHA-NCHA II supports the health of the campus community by fulfilling the academic mission, supporting short- and long term healthy behaviours, and gaining a current profile of health trends within the campus community. Canadian Reference Group Data
The purpose of this study was to identify how entrepreneurship education is delivered in Ontario colleges and universities. In Ontario, as in the rest of Canada, the increase in the number of entrepreneurship courses at universities and colleges, and the concurrent popularization and maturation of entrepreneurship programming, contribute to fostering entrepreneurial skills and mindsets, and the creation of businesses. The overall aim of this report is to inform debate and decision-making on entrepreneurship education through a mapping and assessment of existing programs in the province.
When building an online program, there are certain big questions that need to be answered. Among them are: What kind of program you want it to be – high tech or low tech? Professor intensive or adjunct driven? Blended learning or fully online? What kind of technology will be used to deliver course content? What about opportunities for collaboration? Indeed, even though distance learning is no longer in its infancy, and there are a whole discipline- full of best practices learned by those who blazed the trail before you, it’s easy to get overwhelmed by the questions and the possibilities of what you want your program to look
like today and five years from now.
We created this special report to suggest some responses to the big questions about distance education: About pedagogy, technology, philosophy and administration of distance learning programs. In this report, you will find concise, informative articles on distance education administration and policy that have appeared in Distance Education Report. Titles include:
• Seeing Where the Distance Education Opportunities Lie
• Dumb is Smart: Learning from Our Worst Practices
• Building a Distance Education Program: Key Questions to Answer
• Eight Steps to On-Campus/Online Parity
• Creating a Business Continuity Plan for Your Distance Education Program
• Integrating Distance Education Programs into the Institution
• Solving the Problems of Faculty Ownership with Online Courses
The mass of program and policy issues confronting distance education administrators grows
every day. We hope this special report will help you conceptualize, manage and grow the
distance education program at your school.
Christopher Hill
Editor
Distance Education Report
Growing enrollments, shrinking budgets and unprecedented diversity in student populations are just a few of the challenges community colleges around the country are facing today. And there are no signs that the situation will change anytime soon.
The American Association of Community Colleges estimates that U.S. enrollment in two-year colleges increased 17 percent from 2007 to 2009, from 6.8 million students to 8 million. Anecdotal evidence says this trend will continue.
During an economic downturn, community colleges feel an even greater strain with enrollment. People go back to school to learn new skills or get certificates or degrees that help their careers. Many must learn new jobs because their previous ones have gone away. While it’s good to have more students, the growth has been so rapid that it has put pressure on the institutions. How do they handle more students every semester? How do they grow despite less funding from federal, state and county governments?
“Because community colleges are growing so fast, and because they’re relatively new as institutions, they don’t have
the infrastructure that the big universities have. And yet they are being asked to do more,” said John Halpin, Vice President of SLED Strategy and Programs at the Center for Digital Education (CDE), a national research and advisory institute focused on IT
policy and best practices in education.
A New Course Community colleges now have a terrific opportunity to evolve thanks to technology, Halpin said. Numerous technologies — wireless, broadband, cloud computing and others — have greatly matured in recent years. They’ve been proven in the real world, and they’ve become more efficient and less expensive.
At community colleges, whether it’s for teaching and learning or for financial aid or other back-end systems, technology is making a huge impact on productivity. Students are learning in exciting new ways. E-mentoring, e-advising, online tutoring and even educational gaming are effectively engaging students and enhancing the educational experience. Professors are incorporating audio/video content to deliver learning in a manner that grabs the student’s interest. Schools are processing incoming students more efficiently and less expensively by putting administrative functions, such as application, orientation and registration, online.
Online learning, or e-learning, is booming. “Students value distance learning,” said Wilton Agatstein, Senior Fellow with the CDE. “It is very convenient for them, as they can learn from any place and at any time. Schools value distance learning because they can serve more students and a larger student demographic without having to build new classrooms and campuses. Distance learning serves everyone well, which is why its adoption is accelerating.”
Technology expectations are sky high. Students step onto campus expecting to incorporate their own communications tools — phones, music players, e-book readers, laptops/netbooks and other devices — into the learning experience. They want wireless access from any point on campus. And they want the ability to connect to school resources even when off campus.
Teachers and staff want the best technology too, because the right tools help everyone.
Abstract
The HANDS (Helping Autism-diagnosed teenagers Navigate and Develop Socially) research project involves the creation of an e-learning toolset that can be used to develop individualized tools to support the social development of teenagers with an autism diagnosis. The e-learning toolset is based on ideas from persuasive technology. This paper addresses the system design of the HANDS toolset as seen from the user’s perspective. The results of the evaluation of prototype 1 of the toolset and the needs for further development are discussed. In addition, questions regarding credibility and reflections on ethical issues related to the project are considered.
Keywords: E-learning; autism; mobile learning; persuasive technology
Peter Øhrstrøm
Aalborg University, Denmark
Writing assignments, particularly for first- and second-year college students, are probably one of those items in the syllabus that some professors dread almost as much as their students do. Yet despite the fact that essays, research papers, and other types of writing assignments are time consuming and, at times, frustrating to grade, they also are vital to furthering student learning.
Of course part of the frustration comes when professors believe that students should arrive on campus knowing how to write research papers. Many do not. With as much content as professors have to cover, many feel they simply can’t take time to teach the research skills required to write a quality, college-level term paper. But as teaching professors who support the writing across the curriculum movement would tell you, improving students’ writing skills is everyone’s business, and carries with
it many short- and long-term benefits for teachers and students alike. Further, many instructors are finding ways to add relevance to writing assignments by aligning them with the type of writing required in a specific profession as an alternative to the traditional, semester-long research paper.
This special report was created to provide instructors with fresh perspectives and proven strategies for designing more effective writing assignments. It features 11 articles from The Teaching Professor, including:
• Revising the Freshman Research Assignment
• Writing an Analytical Paper in Chunks
• Designing Assignments to Minimize Cyber-Cheating
• Chapter Essays as a Teaching Tool
• Writing (Even a Little Bit) Facilitates Learning
• How to Conduct a ‘Paper Slam’
While not every approach discussed in this special report will work for every course, every
time, I invite you to identify a few that look appropriate for your courses, and implement
them next semester. You just might be surprised by the results.
Maryellen Weimer
Editor
The Teaching Professor
How many Ontario high school students applied to the province’s colleges and universities during the last decade? How many enrolled? How many graduated? Find the answers to these and other good
questions in Quick Facts, a compendium of current and authoritative data on Ontario’s postsecondary
system.
The Council of Ministers of Education, Canada (CMEC), affirmed their commitment to improving outcomes for Aboriginal students and identified the gaps in academic achievement and graduation rates between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal students as a key area for attention. One of the strategies articulated in the CMEC Aboriginal Education Action Plan for addressing these gaps in outcomes is “strengthening the capacity for evidence-based decision making.” Toward that goal, CMEC commissioned a report to consider how better data and evidence can be developed to support jurisdictions’ efforts to improve the academic achievement and attainment of Aboriginal students in provincial and territorial elementary and secondary schools.
As Canadaâ's youth consider their increasingly broad and complex array of post-secondary education (PSE) options, they are faced with potentially costly decisions. Moreover, they often do not have the information they need to make appropriate choices, which can negatively impact their participation and persistence in PSE. For many students, it is a challenge to choose, design and follow a post-secondary pathway to its conclusion without deviating from their original plan. Students are increasingly taking non-linear pathways through PSE. Some may need to relocate and attend a different institution. Many students may decide to change the focus of their study, while others may wish to change their program entirely. Some may shift their goals from academic to applied forms of study, or vice versa. However, the structures of post-secondary systems in our provinces, and the various mechanisms that bind them, do not always provide clearly apparent and unobstructed pathways for students, particularly for mobile students. These problems are exacerbated by shifting mandates, roles, and labels of institutions across the Canadian PSE sector.
Canada does not have a clear framework for understanding the many changes that have occurred within its PSE sector over the past 15 years. This monograph sets out to explain these changes, with a view to clarifying their potential effects on students’ comprehension of, and mobility through, the structures that comprise our current PSE landscape.
In the past, Canadian post-secondary education has been described as binary, a term that indicates the presence of two separate institutional sectors: public universities offering academic and professional programming at the degree-level; and public colleges providing diplomas and certificates in programs of a more technical or vocational nature. However, this conceptualization overlooks private post-secondary institutions and, as Marshall (2006) notes, significant growth in the number and types of degrees offered by a wider variety of Canadian post-secondary institutions over recent decades.1 As a result, the distinction between the university and college sectors has become increasingly blurred, and the nature of some Canadian post-secondary institutions is no longer made clear by their names. Canada's PSE sector is now characterized by a broad and complex mix of institutions for which a clear and comprehensive taxonomy has yet to be developed.
Evolutionary and legislative changes in many Canadian jurisdictions challenge the transparency of current Canadian post-secondary education vocabulary. Students’ ideas about which institutions offer which programs, and which programs lead to which opportunities, may not be aligned with these changes. It is arguable that Canadian PSE has become less transparent in recent years, exacerbating the potential that students make PSE decisions inappropriate to their aspirations. Issues of program choice and fit might be better addressed through the provision of a classification framework aimed at making Canadian PSE more transparent to its users.
University leaders are actively addressing the issue of mental health on campuses across Canada. No longer seen as simply a question of crisis management, mental health issues are being approached in more proactive and systematic ways, as universities increasingly appreciate the advantages of prevention over reaction. “We are exploring what we need as a sector to deal with mental health issues in the post-secondary setting,” says Dr. SuTing Teo, Director of Student Health and Wellness at Ryerson University. Dr. Teo is co-chair of a working group on mental health for the Canadian Association of College and
University Student Services (CACUSS), one of several inter-institutional organizations focusing on the issue. The key is to identify best practices and then put into action strategies and plans that work best for an individual institution
and its specific circumstances.
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.