One of the core principles of the Ontario Undergraduate Student Alliance (OUSA) is that all willing and qualified students should be able to attend post-secondary regardless of their ability to pay. However, students in Ontario face the highest tuition fees in the country and the cost and perceived costs of post-secondary education are consistently identified as barriers to post-secondary education. These barriers are contributing factors to the persistently high attainment gaps for various vulnerable groups
in pursuing an undergraduate degree.
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During the last third of the twentieth century, college sectors in many countries took on the role of expanding opportunities for baccalaureate degree attainment in applied fields of study. In many European countries, colleges came to constitute a parallel higher education sector that offered degree programs of an applied nature in contrast to the more academically oriented programs of the traditional university sector. Other jurisdictions, including some Canadian ones, followed the American approach, in which colleges facilitate degree attainment for students in occupational programs through transfer
arrangements with universities. This article offers some possible reasons why the Ontario Government has chosen not to fully embrace the European model, even though the original vision for Ontario’s colleges was closer to that model to than to the American one.
This article reviews the developments in significant pedagogical and research domains in TESOL during the 50-year history of TESOL Quarterly. It situates these developments in the shift from a modernist to postmodern orientation in disciplinary discourses. The article also considers the changes in modes of knowledge dissemination in the journal by examining the changes in locations of research, author- ship, article genres, and research methods. While there is an evolving diversity in the disciplinary discourses of TESOL that can appear to be a threat to the field’s coherence, the article argues that this diver- sity can contribute to a more plural knowledge base and constructive disciplinary growth for TESOL.
Teacher evaluation is a major policy initiative intended to improve the quality of classroom instruction. This study documents a fundamental challenge to using teacher evaluation to improve teaching and learning.
Presidential terminations and resignations are nothing new, even in the staid world of academia. Yet, rarely have they played out in so public a manner as the abrupt departure of president Arvind Gupta at the University of British Columbia in the summer of 2015 or the messy dismissal of Ilene Busch-Vishniac as president of the University of Saskatchewan a year earlier. Quebec had its own drama in May 2015, with the resignation of Nadia Ghazzali, rector at Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières, following a critical report by Quebec’s auditor general. All three leaders left before completing their first mandates.
Amidst the turmoil, Peter Stoicheff was named the 11th president of U of S, a position he took up in late October 2015. A former English professor and a classical guitar composer with two recordings to his name, Dr. Stoicheff had served as dean of the college of arts and science at U of S for four years and knew the internal workings of the institution and its culture well. But there was a lot he didn’t know, he readily admits, and that weighed on him.
If there’s a perfect grading system, it has yet to be discovered. This post is about point systems—not because they’re the best or the worst but because they’re widely used. It is precisely because they are so prevalent that we need to think about how they affect learning.
This article outlines a framework of creativity based on functional neuroanatomy. Recent advances in the field of cognitive neuroscience have identified distinct brain circuits that are involved in specific higher brain functions. To date, these findings have not been applied to research on creativity. It is pro- posed that there are four basic types of creative insights, each mediated by a distinctive neural circuit. By definition, creative insights occur in consciousness. Given the view that the working memory buffer of the prefrontal cortex holds the content of consciousness, each of the four distinctive neural loops terminates there. When creativity is the result of deliberate control, as opposed to spontaneous gener- ation, the prefrontal cortex also instigates the creative process. Both processing modes, deliberate and spontaneous, can guide neural
computation in structures that contribute emotional content and in structures that provide cognitive analysis, yielding the four basic types of creativity. Supportive evi- dence from psychological, cognitive, and neuroscientific studies is presented and integrated in this article. The new theoretical framework systematizes the interaction between knowledge and creative
thinking, and how the nature of this relationship changes as a function of domain and age.
Implications for the arts and sciences are briefly discussed.
Ontario’s colleges share the provincial government’s belief that apprenticeship must play a greater role in addressing skills shortages and contributing to innovative, high-performance workplaces that enhance Ontario’s competitiveness.
Just starting out? Worried about your lectures, your students, your time-management skills and more? Eight academics offer up their advice.
There are plenty of mistakes to go around early in one’s academic career. Whether they happen in front of a class or
behind the scenes, hindsight shows us how to do better. Here you’ll find a mix of experience and advice from eight
professors who’ve been there, done that and lived to share some lessons.
One of us, Karen Gross, recently wrote an article about how co-presidencies could improve higher education, and it received no shortage of concern and criticism. To be clear, the article didn’t suggest that this type of governance was the ultimate solution for all that ails our educational institutions and their governance. It did not even hint at the idea that copresidencies are optimal or ever workable for many colleges and universities.
College and university leaders have been consumed since last summer with trying to understand public attitudes about them, as surveys and studies -- like this and this and this and this -- have delivered evidence of growing skepticism and doubts about the value of what consumers and society get from higher education.
Gallup injected yet more data into the mix Friday, with a new survey that both reinforces the idea that higher education has seriously alienated white male Americans without a degree and underscores that people think very differently about the topic depending on the words you use.
As Director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, Dr. Vannevar Bush has coordinated the activities of some six thousand leading American scientists in the application of science to warfare. In this significant article he holds up an incentive for scientists when the fighting has ceased. He urges that men of science should then turn to the massive task of making more accessible our bewildering store of knowledge. For years inventions have extended man's physical powers rather than the powers of his mind. Trip hammers that multiply the fists, microscopes that sharpen the eye, and engines of destruction and detection are new results, but not the end results, of modern science. Now, says Dr. Bush, instruments are at hand which, if properly developed, will give man access to and command over the inherited knowledge of the ages. The perfection of these pacific instruments should be the first objective of our scientists as they emerge from their war work. Like Emerson's famous address of 1837 on "The American Scholar," this paper by Dr. Bush calls for a new relationship between thinking man and
the sum of our knowledge. — THE EDITOR
As we approach the midpoint of the academic year, surges of campus activism will continue to unfold. Some of the issues that will pique students' interest will be obvious, while others will surprise us. No matter the issue or side of the political or philosophical spectrum, it is the commonly understood role of administrators to work with students to support activism in a way that students get their message heard and also optimizes safety and civility.
Graduates themselves are often unsure of where to look for opportunities outside academe.
Valerie Walker admits it wasn’t so long ago that she was “that grad student” wondering what the heck she was going
to do if she didn’t stay in academia. After graduating in 2009 with a PhD in physiology from McGill University, she
said she was “open to options.” She just didn’t know what those options were.
Higher education enrolment rates across the world have soared in recent years, but there is little evidence of celebration.
In the UK, September’s news that nearly 50 per cent of English under-30s are now entering higher education for the first time in the £9,000 fee era was quickly overshadowed by figures obtained by the MP David Lammy revealing that 13 University of Oxford colleges made no offers at all to black students between 2010 and 2015. Days earlier, the sector’s higher education watchdog, the Office for Fair Access (Offa), had called for universities to make “fundamental changes” in pursuit of the “further, faster progress we badly need to see”.
To form a truly educated opinion on a scientific subject, you need to become familiar with current research in that field. And to be able to distinguish between good and bad interpretations of research, you have to be willing and able to read the primary research
literature for yourself. Reading and understanding research papers is a skill that every single doctor and scientist has had to learn during graduate school. You can learn it too, but like any skill it takes patience and practice.
One-third of Ontario students in Grades 7 to 12 reported elevated levels of psychological distress, according to a new survey released by the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, a substantial spike since 2013.
The rate jumped from 24 per cent in 2013 to 34 per cent – approximately 328,000 adolescents – in 2015, an increase called very “surprising” by Robert Mann, senior scientist at CAMH and co-lead investigator of the Ontario Student Drug Use and Health Survey.
Hundreds of thousands of American families across all income levels are spending billions each year in extra college costs because our high schools are graduating too many students unprepared for college. That’s a fact most may not realize, because current discussions around postsecondary remedial education – prerequisite courses that carry zero credit toward a college degree and represent content and skills students should have learned in high school already – are often segregated to low-income students and community colleges. But in truth, many middle-class and upper-income families bear the brunt of extra costs that come with required remedial classes in all college sectors for students from all income levels. In fact, at private nonprofit four-year colleges and universities, the children of upper-income families are taking more remedial classes than students from low-income families. Out-of-pocket tuition and additional living expense costs for these courses represent an expansive failure of our K-12 education system to prepare students to be ready academically for college on day one.
For university of British Columbia English professor Miranda Burgess, the advantages of interdisciplinary studies
might be summed up in the career path of just one of her Arts One program students. After completing a double
major degree in English literature and engineering, she said, "he went on into the startup world, helping design an
app that optimizes user experience while walking through a city. The possibilities are really wonderful."
Prospective university students not yet sure which profession, vocation, or field of study is right for them, could
consider interdisciplinary studies programs.