Ontario firms and organizations are being challenged to increase productivity through innovation in order to compete on the fiercely competitive world stage and improve the quality of life of Ontarians. Yet, Ontario suffers from innovation gaps
that place its productivity and prosperity goals at risk.
Ontario’s 24 Colleges of Applied Arts and Technology have long been recognized for their contributions to career-oriented education and training programs that have strengthened the Ontario economy throughout the latter part of the 20th century.
Poised on the threshold of the 21st century, college-based applied research and development (R&D) and business and industry innovation activities are of ever increasing importance to the achievement of Ontario’s productivity and prosperity
goals.
Colleges recommend that, beginning in 2006/07, the Government of Ontario establish a new, forward-looking provincial research and innovation policy framework and launch three strategic programs to bolster college capacity to support
business and industry through applied R&D, innovation and commercialization activities over the next decade, at a cost of $50 million over first five years.
New research at the University of Warwick demonstrates two shortcomings with the current benchmarking of internationalisation: they are based purely on structural measures and they use a simple bi-polar distinction between home and international students. There are several dangers in relying on these measures: Structural internationalisation ≠ Student satisfaction: Latest research shows that in the UK, the lower the proportion of UK students, the less satisfied students of all backgrounds are. This does not mean that structural internationalisation should be avoided; on the contrary, students appreciate the value of an 'internationalisation' experience, so what we need is an agenda for integration.
ABSTRACT
This paper examines relationships between the resources available to immigrant families and the amount parents are willing and able to save for their children's post-secondary education (PSE). We use data from Statistics Canada's 2002 Survey of Approaches to Educational Planning to compare immigrant and native-born PSE saving. The results indicate that income and asset wealth constrain PSE savings in some immigrant families. However, immigrants share with non-immigrants a set of parenting beliefs and practices that encourage both groups to invest in their children’s educational futures.
RÉSUMÉ
Cet article examine les relations entre les ressources disponibles aux familles immigrantes et le montant que les parents veulent et peuvent épargner pour les études postsecondaires (EPS) de leurs enfants. Afi n de comparer les épargnes pour les EPS des immigrants et des non-immigrants, nous avons eu recours aux données de l’Enquête sur les approches en matière de planifi cation des études, effectuée en 2002 par Statistique Canada. Les résultats révèlent que l’état de l’actif et des revenus freine l’épargne pour les EPS chez certaines familles immigrantes. Toutefois, les immigrants et non-immigrants partagent un ensemble de croyances et de pratiques parentales communes qui encouragent les deux différents groupes à investir dans l’avenir éducationnel de leurs enfants.
As more students choose online or hybrid models of learning, challenges are rising as well. Too many
instructors remain untrained in the use of online pedagogy. Administrators similarly lack training in the unique complexities of managing online
courses, programs and institutions.
Public policy sometimes works against successful online learning, such as government seat-time restrictions that limit reimbursement to the hours a student sits in a classroom rather than what a student learns. Entrenched bureaucracies, regulations and attitudes all stand in the way of needed reform.
This Special Report examines the
new blended and virtual learning
frontier, taking an in-depth look at
its challenges and its promise.
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.
By enhancing communication with students, ONCAT both increases their awareness of transfer opportunities and facilitates their ability to transfer. ONCAT works with students, through its advisory board, by engaging with student leaders and participating in student fairs, to ensure that there is a better understanding of the transfer and mobility opportunities afforded by our system.
For most educators, writing a philosophy of teaching statement is a daunting task. Sure they can motivate the most lackadaisical of students, juggle a seemingly endless list of responsibilities, make theory and applications of gas chromatography come alive for students, all the while finding time to offer a few words of encouragement to a homesick
freshman. But articulating their teaching philosophy? It’s enough to give even English professors
a case of writer's block.
Traditionally part of the teaching portfolio in the tenure review process, an increasing number of higher education institutions are now requiring a philosophy of teaching statement from job applicants as well. For beginning instructors, putting their philosophy into words is particularly challenging. For one thing they aren’t even sure they have a philosophy yet. Then there's the added pressure of writing one that’s good enough to help them land their first teaching job.
This Faculty Focus special report is designed to take the mystery out of writing teaching philosophy statements, and includes both examples and how-to articles written by educators from various disciplines and at various stages of their professional careers.
Some of the articles you will find in the report include:
• How to Write a Philosophy of Teaching and Learning Statement
• A Teaching Philosophy Built on Knowledge, Critical Thinking and Curiosity
• My Teaching Philosophy: A Dynamic Interaction Between Pedagogy and Personality
• Writing the “Syllabus Version†of Your Philosophy of Teaching
• My Philosophy of Teaching: Make Learning Fun
As contributor Adam Chapnick writes, “There is no style that suits everyone, but there is almost certainly one that will make you more comfortable. And while there is no measurable
way to know when you have got it ‘right,’ in my experience, you will know it when you see it!â€
WHAT IS THE COMPOSITE LEARNING INDEX?
A product of the Canadian Council on Learning (CCL), the Composite
Learning Index (CLI) is Canada’s annual measure of progress in lifelong learning. It is based on a combination of statistical indicators that reflect the many ways Canadians learn, whether in school, in the home, at work or within the community.
The only index of its kind in the world, the CLI is an unprecedented measurement tool that expresses how learning in all aspects of life is critical to the success of individuals, communities and the country as a whole. On an individual level, Canadians stand to benefit from lifelong learning through higher wages, better job prospects, improved health and more fulfilling lives.
Accordingly, Canada stands to gain through a more resilient economy and stronger bonds within and between communities.
Although most Canadians are aware of the potential benefits of lifelong learning, until CCL launched the CLI in 2006 there was no way of measuring how Canadians were performing across the full spectrum of learning. To reflect this broad perspective, the CLI uses a wide range of learning indicators to generate numeric scores for more than 4,500 communities across Canada. A high CLI score means that a particular city, town or rural community possesses the kinds of learning conditions that foster social and economic well-being. A low CLI score means that a community is under-performing in certain aspects that are key to lifelong learning.
It is important to note that these scores are not meant to single out “winners” and “losers,” but rather to help Canadians understand the state of lifelong learning in their communities and to encourage them to think of concrete ways that they can improve on these conditions. With new results published on CCL’s website every spring, the CLI is an objective and reliable measurement tool that can help communities make the best possible decisions about learning—decisions that will strengthen
social ties, bolster the economy and hopefully improve people’s lives.
Explore the effects of lifelong learning
The structure of the Composite Learning Index echoes the interconnectedness and complexity of lifelong learning in the community. To help understand this relationship, CCL developed the CLI Simulator, an online tool that allows individuals to adjust and compare a selection of indicators and witness the effects those decisions can have on a community.
Looking out at our students in classrooms today, with their texting, Facebook updates, Instagram messages, e-mail checking, Google searches, and tweeting, it’s hard to imagine what was so distracting for college students more than 100 years ago when James made this statement. Yet, even then, he recognized the propensity of the mind to constantly seek novel material, to leap from thought to image to belief to fear to desire to judgment and back again — all following one’s own quirky train of thought resembling the chaotic movements of a swarm of bees around a hive. Time passes through a warped dimension when the student finally returns to some semblance of attention, unaware of all the cognitive detours taken between points A and B. And that’s just the internal process, prompted by nothing in particular. How much more distraction is invited by today’s mobile technology?
Welcome to our fi rst issue of IQ – McMaster’s research newsmagazine. We’re excited to share a few research highlights and tell you about some of the country’s most dynamic, creative and innovative research that’s happening right here in your community.
In this issue, our focus is on clean technologies – whether they are related to water, automotive or solar research. Our researchers are doing their part to develop the technologies and innovations that will lead to a greener and cleaner Canada for future generations. They are indeed on an Innovation Quest to see that this happens.
I hope you enjoy the fi rst issue and I welcome your comments on what you’ve read here and what you’d like to see in future issues.
The iconic image of the Baby Boom generation is a 1960s-era snapshot of an exuberant, long-haired, rebellious young adult. That portrait wasn’t entirely accurate even then, but it’s hopelessly out of date now. This famously huge cohort of Americans finds itself in a funk as it approaches old age. On January 1, 2011, the oldest Baby Boomers will turn 65. Every day for the next 19 years, about 10,000 more will cross that threshold. By 2030, when all Baby Boomers will have turned 65, fully 18% of the nation’s population will be at least that age, according to Pew Research Center population projections. Today, just 13% of Americans are ages 65 and older.
Perched on the front stoop of old age, Baby Boomers are more downbeat than other age groups about the trajectory of their own lives and about the direction of the nation as a whole.
Some of this pessimism is related to life cycle – for most people, middle age is the most demanding and stressful time of life. 1 Some of the gloominess, however, appears to be particular to Boomers, who bounded onto the national stage in the 1960s with high hopes for remaking society, but who’ve spent most of their adulthood trailing other age cohorts in overall life satisfaction.
At the moment, the Baby Boomers are pretty glum. Fully 80% say they are dissatisfied with the way things are going in the country today, compared with 60% of those ages 18 to 29 (Millennials); 69% of those ages 30 to 45 (Generation Xers) and 76% of those 65 and older (the Silent and Greatest Generations), according to a Pew Research Center survey taken earlier this month.
Many higher education institutions use student satisfaction surveys given at the end of a course to measure course and instructor quality. But is that really a true measure of quality? All things being equal, an instructor who teaches a rigorous course will likely score much lower than an instructor whose course is a little less demanding. Then there’s the whole timing of the satisfaction surveys. For the most part, students are simply glad the course is over (even if they liked it) and put little thought or time into completing the survey. Unless of course they know they failed, in which case you will get a detailed assessment of how you are boring, inflexible, out of touch, or otherwise unfit to teach.
No wonder surveys get such a bad rap. If end-of-course evaluations are the only surveys you use, there’s a lot more you can, and should, be doing. Done correctly, surveys can deliver tremendous insight into what’s working, what’s not, and why. This special report features 10 articles from Online Classroom, including a three-part and a five-part series that provides stepby-
step guidance on how to use surveys and evaluations to improve online courses, programs, and instruction. You’ll learn when to use surveys, how to design effective survey questions, why it’s important to ensure anonymity, and the advantages and disadvantages of Web-based surveys.
Articles in Online Course Quality Assurance: Using Evaluations and Surveys to Improve Online Teaching and Learning include:
• Online Teaching Fundamentals: What to Evaluate, parts 1-3
• Course and Instructor Evaluation: If It’s So Good, Why Does It Feel So Bad?
• Getting Evaluation Data through Surveys: What to Consider before Getting Started
• Using Surveys to Improve Courses, Programs, and Instruction, parts 1-5
If you’re dedicated to continuous improvement, this special report is loaded with practical advice that will help you create more effective surveys before, during, and after your course ends.
Motivating students to participate in classroom discussions is a subject unto itself. The words “excruciating,” “agonizing,” and “mentally draining” may come to mind. There are some students who seem to assume that as long as the assigned work is completed on time, test scores are good, and attendance is satisfactory, they shouldn’t be forced to participate. It’s not that they don’t think participation improves the classroom experience, they just prefer that other students do the participating.
Of course we all have a few over-participators who are eager to volunteer every answer (sometimes to the point of dominating the discussion, which creates its own problems for educators and fellow students alike) but a good number of students prefer to listen,observe, or daydream rather than engage in the class discussion. Whether they’re shy, unprepared, or simply reluctant to share their ideas, getting students to participate is a constant struggle.
This special report features 11 articles from The Teaching Professor that highlight effective strategies for establishing the expectation of participation, facilitating meaningful discussion, using questions appropriately, and creating a supportive learning environment.
Articles you will find in this report include:
• Putting the Participation Puzzle Together
• Student Recommendations for Encouraging Participation
• To Call on or Not to Call on: That Continues to Be the Question
• Creating a Class Participation Rubric
• Those Students Who Participate Too Much There is some debate in the literature as to whether students have the right to remain silent in a class, but if you’re looking for ways to facilitate more effective discussions,
Tips for Encouraging Student Participation in Classroom Discussions will help.
Ensuring access to postsecondary education (PSE) for all qualified individuals is key to Ontario’s future competitiveness and equally critical from an equity perspective. This paper provides an empirical analysis of access to PSE among a number of under-represented (and minority) groups in Ontario, including comparisons to other regions. Having parents that did
not attend PSE is the most important factor across the country, and the effects are even greater in Ontario than in some other regions. Being from a low-income household is considerably less important than parental education, and the income effects are even smaller in Ontario than in certain other regions. Aboriginal and disabled youth are also strongly under-represented groups in PSE in Ontario, driven entirely by their lower university participation rates, offset to different degrees by higher college participation rates . Rural students are also significantly under-represented (though to a lesser degree) in university, but again go to college at somewhat higher rates. Furthermore, for these latter groups, Ontario does not compare favourably to other regions. The children of immigrants are much more likely to go to university but somewhat less likely to attend college almost everywhere.
Being from a single parent family has little independent effect on access to PSE, as is also the case for being a Francophone outside of Quebec, the latter effect in some cases actually being positive. Intriguingly, although females generally have significantly higher PSE (especially university) attendance rates than males, females in under-represented groups are generally more disadvantaged than males. This research was funded by the Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario (HEQCO), which also provided useful feedback throughout the project. This work is based on earlier research carried out for the Canada Millennium Scholarship Foundation through the MESA project, including a series of papers involving Richard Mueller. The authors gratefully acknowledge the ongoing support provided for the MESA project by the University of Ottawa.
There has been substantial discussion, research, and debate about the role of academic freedom within higher education, primarily centered on the university model. Not as well documented or understood is the issue of academic freedom within colleges and institutes in Canada. In this paper, we exam- ine the current state of academic freedom in colleges and institutes using a historical analysis of two Canadian provinces, British Columbia and Ontario. Beginning with an overview of academic freedom within universities, we then examine the development and evolution of colleges and institutes and discuss how or if academic freedom applies to them. We consider issues of collegial- ity, faculty engagement, and governance as they impact the concept and practice of academic freedom within these institutions. We also discuss the different origins, intents, roles, and governance models of universities in contrast to colleges and institutes, which are generally representative of the broader Canadian higher education landscape.
Among faculty, student evaluations of teaching (SET) are a source of pride and satisfaction—and frustration and anxiety. High-stakes decisions including tenure and promotions rely on SET. Yet it is widely believed that they are primarily a popularity contest; that it’s easy to “game” ratings; that good teachers get bad ratings and vice versa; and that rating anxiety stifles pedagogical innovation and encourages faculty to water down course content. What’s the truth?
Abstract
Increasingly, students are seeking transfer from college to university educational programs. This challenges universities to assess the effectiveness of transfer policies and also challenges colleges to prepare students for continued education. This paper reviews the various transfer procedures used by Canadian universities, barriers experienced by students seeking
transfer, and strategies for improving the transfer process. The authors propose the use of learning outcomes, which identify student knowledge and skills following an educational experience, to develop block transfer strategies that ease student transfer between educational programs.
Résumé
Les étudiants cherchent de plus en plus à transférer leurs projets d’études collégiales vers un programme universitaire. Les universités doivent donc relever le défi d’évaluer l’efficacité de leurs politiques de transfert, tandis que les collèges doivent réfléchir sur la façon de mieux préparer leurs étudiants aux programmes de formation continue. Le présent article passe en revue les diverses procédures utilisées par les universités canadiennes, les obstacles que doivent surmonter les étudiants cherchant à effectuer un transfert et les stratégies d’amélioration du processus de transfert. Les auteurs proposent l’utilisation de résultats d’apprentissage, qui identifient les connaissances et les compétences acquises par les étudiants d’un
programme donné, afin d’élaborer des stratégies générales qui faciliteront le transfert d’étudiants entre programmes éducatifs.
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.
Social Media Usage Trends Among Higher Education Faculty
The numbers surrounding social media are simply mind boggling.
750 million. The number of active Facebook users, which means if Facebook was a country it would be the third-largest in the world.
90. Pieces of content created each month by the average Facebook user.
175 million. The Twitter accounts opened during Twitter's history.
140 million. The average number of Tweets people sent per day in February 2011.
460,000. Average number of new Twitter accounts created each day during February 2011.
120 million. LinkedIn members as of August 4, 2011.
More than two per second. The average rate at which professionals are signing up to join LinkedIn as of June 30, 2011.
All of these stats, which come from the respective companies’ own websites, serve as proof points to what we already knew: social media is growing at breakneck speed. Yet the story of social media is still being written as organizations and individuals alike continue to evaluate the benefits and drawbacks of social media in the workplace. When that workplace is a college or university, there’s a cacophony of opinions in terms of the most effective uses, if any.
For the past two years, Faculty Focus conducted a survey on Twitter usage in higher education, this year we expanded the survey to include Facebook and LinkedIn, while changing a number of the questions as well. Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn are considered "the big three" in social media, and we thank those who recommended we take a
broader look at the landscape.
All three platforms have their strengths and weaknesses, and are better used for some things than others. But how are the three being used in higher education today? It’s our hope that these survey results provide at least some of the answers while lending new data to the discussion.
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