THE ENVIRONICS INSTITUTE FOR SURVEY RESEARCH was established by Michael Adams in 2006 to promote relevant and original public opinion and social research on important issues of public policy and social change. It is through such research that organizations and individuals can better understand Canada today, how it has been changing, and where it may be heading.
Technology’s potential to transform education has become a mantra of the 21st century. Much has been said about the tools and solutions that can provide opportunities for enhanced student learning. Frequent discussions have focused on the need for schools to have a robust infrastructure that supports continually evolving educational models. However, not as much has been written about the teacher’s role in this dynamic environment and the fundamentally new and different functions teachers
may have. The days of teachers covering a defined number of pages in a textbook and assigning work at the end of a chapter are quickly disappearing. Instructors are leveraging technologies that give students access to interactive content from myriad sources. In this digital classroom, the teacher is more than a static oracle of information who delivers lectures. Instead, he or she is an active participant and facilitator in each student’s path of discovery and exploration.
Immigrant families come to Canada with high education levels, with the Greater Toronto Area a primary destination. Despite high education levels, their economic and social integration into Canada is often difficult, due in part to lack of recognition of foreign credentials and work experience, weak official-language skills, and insufficient cultural competencies. For the children in these families, the young immigrants, successful education outcomes set the stage for success in adulthood, both in the workplace and in further education, enabling them to better integrate into Canadian society and contribute to the Canadian economy. This study examined the pathways of immigrant youth, and the role of English-language proficiency and region of origin in these pathways, using a recently created database containing a number of linked data sources from Seneca College, a large multicultural college in Toronto. This longitudinal dataset enables us to track individual students from the beginning of high school through to graduation from college, and their eventual transition into the labour market or to further education.
The past few years have ushered in more strident calls for accountability across institutions of higher learning. Various internal and external stakeholders are asking questions like "Are students learning what we want them to learn?" and "How do the students' scores from one institution compare to its peers?" As a result, more institutions are looking for new, more far-reaching ways to assess student learning and then use assessment findings to improve students' educational experiences.
However, as Trudy Banta notes in her article An Accountability Program Primer for Administrators, “just as simply weighing a pig will not make it fatter, spending millions simply to test college students is not likely to help them learn more.†(p. 6)
While assessing institutional effectiveness is a noble pursuit, measuring student learning is not always easy, and like so many things we try to quantify, there’s much more to learning than a number in a datasheet. As Roxanne Cullen and Michael Harris note in their article The Dash to Dashboards, “The difficulty we have in higher education in defining and measuring our outcomes lies in the complexity of our business: the business of learning. A widget company or a fast-food chain has clearly defined goals and can usually pinpoint with fine accuracy where and how to address loss in sales or glitches in production or service. Higher education is being called on to be able to perform similar feats, but creating a graduate for the 21st century workforce is a very different kind of operation.†(p. 10) This special report Educational Assessment: Designing a System for Mo re Meaningful Results features articles from Academic Leader, and looks at the assessment issue from a variety of
different angles. Articles in the result include:
.The Faculty and Program-Wide Learning Outcome Assessment
. Assessing the Degree of Learner-Centeredness in a Department or Unit
. Keys to Effective Program-Level Assessment
. Counting Something Leads to Change in an Office or in a Classroom
. An Accountability Program Primer for Administrators
Whether you're looking to completely change your approach to assessment, or simply improve the efficacy of your current assessment processes, we hope this report will help guide your discussions and eventual decisions.
The connection between classroom learning and practical experience in the workplace has been recognized as a significant aspect of student development in postsecondary institutions (Kuh, 2008). Internships have been associated with many benefits for each party involved, including the student, postsecondary institution and industry professional. Internships provide opportunities for students to transfer theoretical knowledge to a practical setting; they serve as recruitment avenues for postsecondary institutions and provide industry professionals with access to high-quality students with current academic knowledge. Despite the perceived importance of internships for student development, researchers and practitioners have a limited understanding of what constitutes an “internship” and of how to deliver these experiences effectively. Therefore, the purpose of this research was to examine the internship opportunities currently offered by direct-entry programmes (e.g., undergraduate degree or diploma) in Ontario postsecondary institutions.
What is a typical budget and staff size for admissions and recruitment for private vs. public and small vs. large institutions? To answer this question and provide up-to-date benchmarks, Noel-Levitz conducted a brief, web-based poll of enrollment and admissions officers across the United States in the fall of 2013. The poll was part of the firm’s ongoing series of benchmark polls for higher education.
This report documents the central role of the college-educated workforce in improving labour productivity across the economy and supporting an innovation culture in the workplace. It describes critical “enabling occupations” that play a key role in allowing companies to build a culture of innovation in the workplace which they need if they are to continually restructure for success. It develops a “Prosperity Cycle” model and demonstrates the importance of college graduates in building a culture of innovation in a dozen key Ontario industries.
The members of the Principal’s Commission on Mental Health are pleased to submit their
final report to Principal Daniel Woolf.
This report is the result of a year-long process embedded in comprehensive input from the Queen’s and broader communities. Commissioners Lynann Clapham, Roy Jahchan, Jennifer Medves, Ann Tierney and David Walker (Chair) heard from students, faculty, staff, parents, alumni, mental health professionals and community members, all of whom generously gave their time to provide valuable insight and expertise.
Following the release of a discussion paper in June "&!", extensive feedback was received, for which commission members were most grateful. This input has been integrated into this final report.
In the area of developing and maintaining their talent supply chain—how employees are hired, developed and deployed to optimally support business strategy—too many companies are neglecting the all-important entry-level positions from which many of their top-performing employees will emerge.
That’s one of the important implications of the Accenture 2014 College Graduate Employment Survey, which compares the expectations and attitudes of this year’s university graduates with the realities of the working world according to 2012 and 2013 grads. When it comes to talent development, to jobs that match an employee’s education, and even the quest for full-time work, the slightly older peers of today’s graduates tell a cautionary tale about what the job world is really like.
It’s a story that is cautionary for companies, too. If organizations are to attract and retain top talent, as well as ensure their talent supply chain is developing and deploying the people with the right skills, their management of entry-level positions needs to improve.
Residential schooling in Canada’s North deserves its own consideration for a number of reasons.
First, its history is more recent than that of residential schooling in the rest of the country. As late as 1900 there were only two residential schools north of the sixtieth parallel. By 1950 there were only six residential schools and one hostel in the North. This slow growth reflects the fact that while the overall goals of the Canadian govern-ment’s Aboriginal policy were to assimilate, civilize, and Christianize, this policy was not applied in a uniform manner. Where there was no pressing demand for Aboriginal lands, the federal government delayed taking on the obligations that Treaties created. This was particularly true in the North. As long as there was no prospect of economic development or of the arrival of large numbers of non-Aboriginal settlers, the federal government was not prepared to negotiate with northern Aboriginal peoples. Nor was it interested in establishing reserves or residential schools—or any sort of school, for that matter. Were it not for the work of Roman Catholic and Anglican missionaries, residential schooling would have no history north of the sixtieth parallel before 1950.
A second distinct feature of the situation in the North was the fact that, in the years after 1950, the Canadian government did not simply extend the existing southern res-idential school system into northern Canada. Instead the federal government created a system of day schools and hostels under the direction of Northern Affairs rather than Indian Affairs. This system was intended from the start to be integrated into, not separate from, the public school system of the day. Unlike the southern schools, the northern schools made no attempt to restrict admission to First Nations students, so Métis and Inuit, along with a number of non-Aboriginal students, also attended them. At the end of the 1960s, these schools were transferred from the federal government to the governments of the Northwest Territories and the Yukon.
This sixth annual Going Greener report demonstrates those results through campus case studies about food sustainability, conservation efforts, and partnerships that are building a greener community. The report details how university communities are becoming more sustainable in their operations and policies, developing academic programming that seeks to create knowledge leaders in emerging fields, and broadening their understanding of environmental issues so that partners can work together to develop solutions to one of society’s most pressing problems.
A New Model for Effective Teaching
How might education change if classrooms become places of active learning, not just passive listening? Higher education students are already active learners, using e-books, Web content, and social media to explore and discover in their daily lives. But what happens when these students go to the classroom, especially for high-enrollment courses? They sometimes experience the curiosity-stifling thud of having to listen to and take notes on a lecture, with its mostly one-way communication format. And with limited opportunities for Q&A during the class session and no ability to review the lecture content later to study a difficult concept, it’s no wonder students may become discouraged and disengaged.
This traditional learning model won’t cut it with students who are accustomed to active learning, either on their own or in small groups of classmates. Students increasingly expect a classroom experience that helps them develop knowledge for themselves, not just passively receive one-dimensional information. Students want to do something meaningful with content instead of just listening to a lecture. They also expect to meet with discussion groups and project teams and
do much of their assigned work during class time instead of meeting separately.
Another factor that is playing a role in student perceptions: the value gained from education in a tough economy. Instructors need to make education worth a student’s investment of time and money by ensuring the classroom experience is productive and meaningful. These expectations are leading higher education toward “flipped” classrooms and a learning model that blends online and in-class learning. Respondents to the Center for Digital Education’s 2011 Community Colleges Survey indicated the majority of their students enroll in online or blended courses and that more than two-thirds of online courses used some type of online collaboration tools to promote learning.
Leadership Development:
An Annotated Bibliography
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. Su-Ting 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.
Launched in 2005, the SFD program enabled university students to enrich their learning experience and contribute to international development, while strengthening links between institutions in Canada and overseas. SFD interns not only grew personally and professionally, they also contributed to the key development challenges of improving the lives of children and youth, ensuring food security and strengthening sustainable economies.
The first phase of the NSSE National Data Project indicated the importance of student characteristics and academic discipline mix in explaining institution-level benchmark engagement variation. The institution-level benchmark regression results demonstrated, but did not formally measure, the existence of distinct “engagement dynamics” at the general discipline level. The question raised was whether sub-institutional engagement dynamics (i.e. engagement variation by student subgroup across specific programs, and engagement variation by specific program across student subgroups) were sufficiently different to warrant programand student subgroup-specific engagement strategies.
The approach in this second phase was to move from institution-level benchmark models to a series of program-level engagement item models. Nine academic programs met specified criteria and their senior-year students were selected for the analysis. Explanatory models were constructed for each of the nine programs and within each program, for the 42 individual engagement items comprising the five benchmarks. In addition, the engagement profiles for selected student subgroups were examined across programs.
The analysis revealed substantial differences in item-based senior-year student engagement patterns across specific academic programs. In one academic program, for example, first generation students showed consistently lower SFI (student-faculty interaction) item scores relative to non-first generation students while in another program, it was their ACL (active and collaborative learning) item scores that are lower. In one program, student composition explained a very high proportion of the variation in numerous engagement items while in another, student composition explained very little. Several dimensions of these contrasting engagement profiles are discussed in detail in the report.
Since the focus for many engagement improvement strategies lies within academic programs, the findings indicate the appropriateness of a program- and student subgroup-tailored approach to engagement improvement. The figures containing the detailed model results are summarized and reorganized to provide a template for a program- and student subgroup-specific implementation focus.
ABSTRACT
In analyses of higher education systems, many models and frameworks are based on governance, steering, or coordination models. Although much can be gained by such analyses, we argue that the language used in the present-day policy documents (knowledge economy, competitive position, etc.) calls for an analysis of higher education as an industry. In this paper, the university sector in Ontario’s higher education industry is analyzed by applying Michael Porter’s five forces framework defined by the following forces: the threat of new entrants, supplier power, buyer power, the threat of substitutes, and industry rivalry. Our assessment revealed that competition in Ontario’s higher education industry (university sector) is currently mixed. The findings suggest that policy-makers, the sector, and individual institutions will need to consider more seriously the impact of technology and globalization when seeking a competitive position for the Ontarian higher education system.
RÉSUMÉ
En termes d’analyse des systèmes d’enseignement supérieur, de nombreux modèles et cadres de référence sont fondés sur des modèles de gouvernance, de pilotage ou de coordination. Malgré la pertinence de ces analyses, nous soutenons que la langue utilisée dans les documents de politique actuels
(économie du savoir, position concurrentielle, etc.), notamment, incite à une analyse de l’enseignement supérieur en tant qu’industrie. L’article revoit le secteur universitaire de l’industrie de l’enseignement supérieur de l’Ontario en appliquant le modèle des cinq formes de Michael Porter, définies en fonction des forces suivantes : la menace d’entrants potentiels, le pouvoir de négociation des fournisseurs, le pouvoir de négociation des clients, la menace des produits de substitution et l’intensité de la concurrence intrasectorielle. Notre évaluation a révélé que la concurrence au sein de l’industrie de l’enseignement supérieur en Ontario (secteur universitaire) est présentement mixte. Les résultats suggèrent que les décideurs politiques, le secteur et les institutions individuelles devront prendre en compte plus sérieusement les répercussions de la technologie et de la mondialisation pour positionner de manière concurrentielle le système d’enseignement supérieur de l’Ontario.
ALGONQUIN COLLEGE KEY AREAS OF DIFFERENTIATION
Algonquin College delivers a comprehensive range of applied education and training experiences to
serve the diverse learner choices and the breadth of employer labour demands across Eastern Ontario
and the province.
Algonquin College works with industry partners to:
• Develop labour-market informed programs and services;
• Provide opportunities for work-integrated learning, and experience inside and outside the
classroom; and
• Engage in applied research and commercialization activities that support student success,
employee growth, and social and economic development in the region and beyond.
Algonquin College employees are engaged in the strategic direction of the College to:
• Lead the transformation of Ontario’s postsecondary system;
• Deliver high-quality teaching methods and modalities that leverage technology to enhance the
educational experience; and
• Improve student learning outcomes for career and life success.
Algonquin College broadens learner access to applied postsecondary education and training in
Ontario, demonstrating leadership through:
• Alternative learning modalities and options to suit multiple learning styles and learner
preferences;
• New, targeted approaches to programs and services that improve pathways for learners of diverse
demographic characteristics; and
• Smart investments in technology that enhance the Algonquin learner experience.
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).
As the threat of MOOCs and for-profit education fades, so too does the sense of urgency that drives innovation.
Yet anyone who thinks that a decade from now higher education will look much as it does today is
sadly mistaken.
Higher education starts earlier than ever as students earn more early college/dual degree and AP credits. Students increasingly accumulate credits from multiple institutions. Undergraduate introductory survey courses lose enrollment, and, as they do, the cross-subsidies that helped support upper division courses decline. In the humanities, the loss of introductory course enrollment.
contributes to a decline in the number of majors.