Abstract
The number of international students seeking educational opportunities at Ontario colleges of applied arts and technology (CAATs) has grown at an unprecedented rate in the past 10 years. It appears that as the number of the international college students has increased, colleges have also been relying more heavily on educational agents to recruit such students. To
explore this assertion, the author examined institutional data provided by an Ontario college of applied arts and technology. The findings show that the proportion of international students who use an agent has indeed risen dramatically in recent years. The paper also identifies and examines various factors contributing to CAATs’ increasing use of educational agents.
Keywords: International, international students,
international recruitment, recruitment agencies
So much of the work that goes into teaching is necessarily invisible. Nobody sees your best teaching days — when everything clicks, when you get your class to truly see the world differently — except for the students in the room. Most of us don’t teach for plaudits, but it’s a shame that our best work in the classroom is usually unseen by our peers and superiors. It’s also a shame that those of us who want to improve as teachers don’t get the benefit of learning directly from excellent teachers in our fields.
Consider how you learned about your research discipline in graduate school. Sure, you got ideas, advice, and information from your adviser and from other professors, but you also had the benefit of reading other people’s work to see how scholarship in your field was done. When it comes to developing as teachers, however, most of us haven’t been able to learn by watching others. We can hark back to our own teachers, but that’s a pretty limited sample.
A monumental shift is steadily occurring in America’s workforce, as an ever-increasing percentage of jobs require some form of postsecondary education and training. In the Recovery 2020 report, Georgetown University Center for Education and the Workforce projects that by 2020, 65 percent of all jobs will require some form of postsecondary education. However, this may be a conservative estimate, according to the center, considering that of the 11.6 million jobs created in the 2010 to 2016 recovery, 11.5 million of them, or 99 percent, were filled by workers with postsecondary training.
While higher education has seen a plethora of initiatives designed to increase educational attainment and alternative delivery methods intended to expand educational opportunities, large numbers of students still do not have access to higher education while still in high school. In particular, offering academically advanced high school students the chance to take college courses (dual enrollment) is widely seen as a way to help them make better use of their senior year. And even less advanced students can participate in dual enrollment courses with support, through approaches such as the Early College model.
Professors have long been political targets. But a spate of recent threats against scholars -- including two that have led to campus closures -- is raising fresh concerns about safety and academic freedom.
The American Associations of University Professors “is definitely concerned about this trend, which I think is a fair description of what is happening,” said Hans-Joerg Tiede, senior program officer for academic freedom and tenure at AAUP . “We will continue to monitor it and consider what other actions we can take.”
Last week, a student named Mary visited me during my office hours and presented me with an interesting dilemma. In one of her classes, a professor had distributed a study guide with a series of questions to help the students prepare for an upcoming exam. Mary, being the millennial student that she is, decided to upload the study guide into Google Docs and invite the rest of the class to contribute to the document. Students answered the study guide questions from each of their individual notes and then refined the answers from their peers.
In the online class environment, students enjoy many advantages, such as increased scheduling flexibility, ability to balance work and school, classroom portability, and convenience. But there are potential shortcomings as well, including the lack of student-instructor interaction and a student not understanding the instructor’s expectations. A key mechanism to convey expectations while increasing student-instructor communication is relevant, timely, constructive, and balanced instructor feedback.
Last month , I opened up about one of the side effects of doctoral study that I hadn’t anticipated: the Ph.D. identity crisis.
With the date of my dissertation defense looming in four months, I’d begun to realize that I couldn’t answer two rather important questions:
Who am I outside of "Ph.D. Candidate"?
What do I want out of life and this degree?
When you first joined the faculty, chances are your orientation included an overview of your responsibilities as a member of your new academic community. You were probably informed that you had an obligation to support the success of your students and colleagues, were expected to be an exemplar in terms of your scholarship and contributions to your discipline, and were required to devote a percentage of your time to departmental, college, or university service.
For 25 years, I have diligently, thoughtfully, and fastidiously written comments on my students’ essays. In my neatest hand, I’ve inscribed a running commentary down the margin of page after page, and at an essay’s conclusion I’ve summarized my thoughts in a paragraph or more. I’ve pointed out problems in the argument and explained basic mistakes of grammar and style. I’ve demonstrated my enthusiasm for a sharp idea and a well-hewn sentence. I’ve carefully moderated my tone, combining praise with correction. I’ve read papers that moved me to tears, literally, and others that left me frustrated — and tried to be sensitive in letting my students know that in either case.
Recruiting and hiring are duties that face almost all academic leaders, and they take a large bite out of their time and resources. It makes sense, then, to make every attempt to retain these new professionals. At the 2016 Leadership in Higher Education Conference, Kenneth Alford led a preconference workshop about the development and use of a mentoring program
to help develop and retain new faculty.
The free, non-credit courses aim to break down barriers and reduce social isolation.
Maurice Vernier, 52, has just finished six months in an addictions recovery program at the Ottawa Mission, a shelter for homeless men. Now living in a group home, he still has to undergo weekly breathalyser, blood and urine testing, but if he stays clean for one year he can move into his own apartment. And he’s almost there.
“I’ve been sober nine months now,” he says, ducking his head but smiling shyly. “I quit smoking four months ago, too. I really want to change everything.”
He says Discovery University is helping him do that. On this day, Mr. Vernier is sitting in the back row of a classroom in the University of Ottawa’s Tabaret Hall, where he is taking a course called Social Conflicts and Movements. A former pastor, he hasn’t set foot in a classroom since 1996 after graduating with a degree in theology from the University of Indiana.
In the early 2000s, anyone learning about pedagogy might have encountered “learning styles,” a collection of theories that assert people learn differently, coupled with the advice to teach in ways that include visual, auditory, and/or kinesthetic learning.
In a recent Chronicle Review essay with the clickbait headline (which the authors did not write) "Why the University’s Insatiable Appetite Will Be Its Undoing," Adam Daniel and Chad Wellmon, respectively an administrator and a professor at the University of Virginia, argue that the university should be more focused on what it does best — teaching and research — and less responsive to broad social pressures: "To save itself and to better serve its democratic purpose, the university needs to be not more but less reactive to public demands."
There are serious problems with arguments like this, much in the air right now, that blame universities for everything: overbuilding, high tuition, teaching too many subjects, incurring too much debt. Universities, according to Daniel and Wellmon, are simply doing too much all around.
Interprofessional education (IPE) is a growing focus for educators in health professional academic programs. Recommendations to successfully imple-ment IPE are emerging in the literature, but there remains a dearth of evidence informing the bigger challenges of sustainability and scalability. Transforma-tion to interprofessional education for collaborative person-centred practice (IECPCP) is complex and requires “harmonization of motivations” within and between academia, governments, healthcare delivery sectors, and consumers. The main lesson learned at the University of Manitoba was the value of using a formal implementation framework to guide its work. This framework identi-fies key factors that must be addressed at the micro, meso, and macro levels and emphasizes that interventions occurring only at any single level will likely not lead to sustainable change. This paper describes lessons learned when us-ing the framework and offers recommendations to support other institutions in their efforts to enable the roll out and integration of IECPCP.
I have been wanting to write about tired teaching for some time now. Concerns about burnout are what’s motivating me. Teachers can reach a place where teaching does nothing for them or their students. They don’t just wake up one morning and find themselves burned out; they’ve moved there gradually, and it’s a journey that often starts with tired teaching.
There’s nothing on the subject in my big file of articles and resources. I can’t remember having read about it, and I’m not sure how much we even talk about it. We do talk about being tired. Teaching is relentless. It happens every day, several times a week—or potentially 24/7 if it’s online. And it’s demanding. There’s so much more than the actual teaching. There’s considerable planning involved before each class. Plus, we need to spend time with students—those who want to talk, those needing
help, and those with questions or, sometimes, complaints. There are assignments to grade and feedback to provide—
all carrying the expectation of a quick turnaround. With multiple courses to teach, we do get tired, but I think we regularly confuse physical fatigue with the more serious emotional tiredness that comes from a heavy workload of always being there, always giving, and always juggling multiple balls in the air.
Abstract
Since the 1980s, research on employment conditions in post-secondary institutions has focused on the growth of contingent academic workers, or what the Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario (HEQCO) has labelled “nonfull-time instructors” (Field, Jones, Stephenson, & Khoyetsyan, 2014). Very little attention, however, has been paid to administrative, physical plant, and other operational staff employed within universities and colleges. Using data from a study of University of Regina students and employees, academic and support staff, this paper confronts the broader conditions of labour around the ivory tower. Employment at a post-secondary institution is analyzed through the lens of living wage research advanced by the Canadian Centre of Policy Alternatives (CCPA) (Ivanova & Klein, 2015). The study reframes the notion of a living wage in a post-secondary institution to include work-life balance, job security, and the realities of dignity and respect in the university workplace.
Stupid.
This word was spoken triumphantly and repeatedly as self-speak by a talented pre-service, k-12 special education teacher during my course Library Resources for Children. Until I heard her say it several times through the semester, I hadn’t seen how one word can hold an entire teaching philosophy. I hadn’t considered how the power of that word multiplies when it takes
the form of self-speak. I hadn’t realized how much it scared me to think that that word might follow her into a k-12 classroom.
When I learned that my own teaching philosophy existed on the pinhead of a single word whenever I’ve thought it at myself, I needed to send this email to that amazing up-and-coming teacher:
In spring 2018, overall postsecondary enrollments decreased1.3 percent from the previous spring. Figure1 shows the
12-month percentage change (fall-to-fall and spring-to-spring) for each term over the last three years. Enrollments decreased
among four-year for-profit institutions (-6.8 percent), two-year public institutions (-2.0 percent), four-year private nonprofit
institutions (-0.4 percent), and four-year public institutions (-0.2 percent). Taken as a whole, public sector enrollments (twoyear
and four-year combined) declined by 0.9 percent this spring.
Current Term Enrollment Estimates, published every December and May by the National Student Clearinghouse Research
Center, include national enrollment estimates by institutional sector, state, enrollment intensity, age group, and gender.
Enrollment estimates are adjusted for Clearinghouse data coverage rates by institutional sector, state, and year. As of
spring 2018, postsecondary institutions actively submitting enrollment data to the Clearinghouse account for 97 percent of
enrollments at U.S. Title IV, degree-granting institutions. Most institutions submit enrollment data to the Clearinghouse several
times per term, resulting in highly current data. Moreover, since the Clearinghouse collects data at the student level, it is
possible to report an unduplicated headcount, which avoids double-counting students who are simultaneously enrolled at
multiple institutions
National and international statistics show that across disciplines there are many more PhD graduates than academic positions. In fact, more than half of graduates find their careers outside the academy—though the kinds of positions they accept, their work satisfaction, and the relevance of their PhDs is much less clear. As regards scholarly studies on post-PhD careers, most
have examined social scientists and scientists with little attention to humanities doctoral graduates. This study addresses this gap by exploring the career experiences of Canadian PhD humanities graduates through descriptive statistics and narrative analysis. Specifically, it highlights the PhD experiences and post-graduation career trajectories of 212 Canadian humanists from 24 universities who graduated between 2004 and 2014. The study offers insight into humanities career challenges, including during the PhD, the range of non-academic careers that humanists find, as well as their work satisfaction and the perceived relevance of the PhD.
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