Community college systems were established across North America from the early 1960s through the early 1970s. The new systems had two principal models: in one model, the college combined lower-division, university-level general
education with technical education programs; in the other, most or all of the colleges were intended to concentrate on technical education. Ontario was the largest of the provinces and states in North America that opted for the second model. Many of the issues that planners confronted when designing these college systems have either persisted or re-emerged in recent years. This
article re-examines the debate on the design of Ontario’s colleges that took place when they were founded and considers its implications for the present.
When teachers think the best, most important way to improve their teaching is by developing their content knowledge, they end up with sophisticated levels of knowledge, but they have only simplistic instructional methods to convey that material. To imagine that content matters more than process is to imagine that the car is more important than the road. Both are essential. What we teach and how we teach it are inextricably linked and very much dependent on one another.
This special report features 11 articles pulled from the pages of The Teaching Professor to help you discover new ways to build connections between what you teach and how you teach it. The report offers tips on how to engage students, give feedback, create a climate for learning, and more. It also provides fresh perspectives on how faculty should approach their development as teachers.
It’s been said that few things can enhance student learning more than an instructor’s commitment to ongoing professional development. Here’s a sample of the articles you will find in Effective Strategies for Improving College Teaching and Learning:
• Faculty Self-Disclosures in the College Classroom
• A Tree Falling in the Forest: Helping Students ‘Hear’ and Use Your Comments
• Understanding What You See Happening in Class
• Can Training Make You a Better Teacher?
• Striving for Academic Excellence
Although there is no single best teaching method, approach, or style, this special report will give you a variety of strategies to try. Those that work effectively with your students you should make your own.
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.
Over the last few decades there has been a great deal of ink spilled about the importance of postsecondary education (PSE) in Canada and globally. We are moving from a mid-20th century idea of postsecondary education as “elite†to a new understanding of “mass†postsecondary education (Trow, 1974), and potentially to a newer view of postsecondary education as “universal.†The growing consensus is that postsecondary education is important to society, in providing the skills workers require in the labour market, in supporting the social and economic health of society, and in ensuring individuals have the necessary abilities to participate and contribute fully in that society and labour market. What once was accepted as the luxury of the upper and middle classes is now understood to be a prerequisite for full inclusion in the benefits and functioning of society.
As PSE in Ontario grows to “universal†proportions and beyond, youth from low-income backgrounds stand to gain in terms of their socio-economic status. Nevertheless,potential students from low-income backgrounds continue to take up postsecondary education with less frequency than their middle- and high-income counterparts, particularly at the university level (Drolet ,2005; de Broucker, 2005; Berger, Motte and Parkin, 2009; HEQCO, 2010). Income is an important determinant of participation in PSE. Knowing this, the public policy response has long been a focus on keeping tuition relatively low and providing student assistance to students who demonstrate need. However, recent research has revealed that income alone is not as strong a determinant as academic achievement or parental education (Drolet, 2005; Frenette, 2008a; Finnie, Childs and Wismer, 2010).
Characteristics often associated with income make the barriers to postsecondary more complex and multi-faceted. Furthermore, it has also been shown that changes to student assistance and tuition levels over time have had very little effect on the participation of the lowest income quartile (Berger et al., 2009); meaning that other policy levers may be required to address the complexity of the barriers in a more sophisticated way.
This is the first in a series of @ Issue Papers that looks at the participation of traditionally under-represented cohorts in postsecondary education.1 The purpose of this @ Issue Paper is to summarize what is currently known about the participation of low-income students in PSE, with a particular emphasis on low-income students in Ontario. Where relevant data or research is not available for Ontario, the discussion will focus on the larger Canadian picture.
In March 2012, the U.S. Council on Foreign Relations released its ”U.S. Education Reform and National Security” report calling attention to a distressing truth that many people have known for years: American students are lagging behind their international peers. This report laid out the implications in stark terms with a sense of urgency reminiscent of President Obama’s 2011 State of the Union Address, in which he called for the U.S. to ”outeducate” the rest of the world.
ABSTRACT
Community college systems were established across North America from the early 1960s through the early 1970s. The new systems had two principal models: in one model, the college combined lower-division, university-level general education with technical education programs; in the other, most or all of the colleges were intended to concentrate on technical education. Ontario was the largest of the provinces and states in North America that opted for the second model. Many of the issues that planners confronted when designing these college systems have either persisted or re-emerged in recent years. This
article re-examines the debate on the design of Ontario’s colleges that took place when they were founded and considers its implications for the present.
RÉSUMÉ
Depuis le début des années 1960 et jusqu’au début des années 1970, lorsqu’on créait des réseaux de collèges communautaires partout en Amérique du Nord, deux modèles majeurs étaient proposés pour ces nouveaux réseaux. Dans un des modèles, le collège combinait l’enseignement général universitaire de division inférieure avec les programmes d’enseignement technique ; dans l’autre, la plupart des collèges, sinon tous, se concentraient sur l’enseignement technique. L’Ontario était la plus importante parmi les provinces et les États en Amérique du Nord qui ait opté pour le deuxième modèle. Beaucoup des défis auxquels les planifi cateurs ont été confrontés lorsqu’ils ont conçu le réseau des collèges sont encore présents ou sont réapparus au cours des dernières années. Cet article réexamine l’ancien débat sur la conception des collèges de l’Ontario et considère ses implications actuelles.
Effective Practices to Enhance the Educational Quality of Structured Work Experiences Offered through Colleges and Universities
What is the evolutionary process of leadership theories?
Faculty developers and others who specialize in research on teaching and learning recognize that much of the research is convergent. Positive teaching and learning practices do not operate in stand-alone vacuums. A savvy university teacher draws eclectically from a number of sources and resources to design coherent teaching and learning plans. This article will examine symbiotically how cooperative learning and deep learning together can promote greater success both in and out of the classroom.
KPI 2015
Abstract
This paper analyzes the ideological orientations of Canadian university professors based on a unique 2000 study of a representative sample of Canadian academics (n=3,318). After summarizing methodological problems with extant research on this subject, and tentatively comparing the political views of Canadian and American academics, the paper demonstrates that Canadian academics fall to the left of the political spectrum but are not hugely different in this respect from the Canadian university-educated population. Multivariate analyses reveal considerable heterogeneity in the ideological views of Canadian professors, suggesting that contemporary characterizations of the North American professoriate as left- or right-leaning tend to be overdrawn. Multivariate analyses demonstrate the importance of disadvantaged status and disciplinary socialization in shaping professors’ ideological views, although self selection processes are not discounted.
Résumé
Cet article analyse les orientations idéologiques des professeurs des universités canadiennes selon une étude unique datant de l’an 2000 et portant sur un échantillon représentatif composé de 3 318 professeurs d’université du Canada. Après avoir résumé les problèmes méthodologiques avec une recherche approfondie sur le sujet, puis tenté de comparer les vues politiques de professeurs d’universités canadiennes et américaines, l’article démontre que les professeurs d’université du Canada se situent à la gauche de l’éventail politique,sans être très différents de l’ensemble des diplômés universitaires du Canada. Les analyses
multidimensionnelles révèlent une hétérogénéité considérable des vues idéologiques des professeurs canadiens, suggérant ainsi que les aractérisations contemporaines selon lesquelles le professorat nord-américain se situe soit vers la droite, soit vers la gauche, ont tendance à être à exagérées. Les analyses multidimensionnelles démontrent l’importance de la socialisation disciplinaire et du statut de défavorisé pour former les vues idéologiques des professeurs, même si les processus d’autosélection ne sont pas pris en compte.
M. Reza Nakhaie
University of Windsor
Robert J. Brym
University of Toronto
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).
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.
Over the next several years, more than 500 Aboriginal communities across Canada will find themselves living right in the heart of some of the biggest oil, gas, forestry and mining projects Canada has seen in decades. Debates over pipelines, accelerated foreign investment, and the push for a national energy strategy have turned a spotlight on the central role that Aboriginal communities can play in resource development.
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.
Insight into Impressive Practices in Career Services: A Reference Guide is the second of two reports summarizing the findings of a CERIC-funded study that sought to establish the importance publicly funded universities and colleges place on the provision of career development services and to highlight particularly impressive models of career service provision across the country.
Specifically, CERIC’s interest in conducting this study was two-fold:
1. To understand the landscape of career service models across Canada
2. To examine the level of institutional commitment to the provision of career services
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.
While the most traditional metric, Gross Domestic Product (GDP), measures all goods and services produced by a country, it has two critical shortcomings. First, by focusing exclusively on the economy, GDP fails to capture areas of our lives that we care about most like education, health, environmental quality, and the relationships we have with others. Second, it does not identify the costs of economic growth — like pollution.
To create a robust and more revealing measure of our social progress, the Canadian Index of Wellbeing (CIW) has been working with experts and everyday Canadians since 1999 to determine how we are really doing in the areas of our lives that matter most. The CIW measures overall wellbeing based on 64 indicators covering eight domains of vital importance to Canadians: Education, Community Vitality, Healthy Populations, Democratic Engagement, Environment, Leisure and Culture, Time Use, and Living Standards. The CIW’s comprehensive index of overall wellbeing tracks progress provincially and nationally and allows comparisons to GDP.
Comparing the CIW and GDP between 1994 and 2010 reveals a chasm between our wellbeing and economic growth both nationally and provincially. Over the 17-year period, GDP has grown almost four times more than our overall wellbeing. The trends clearly show that even when times are good, overall wellbeing does not keep up with economic growth and when times are bad, the impact on our wellbeing is even harsher. We have to ask ourselves, is this good enough?
The founding of the Canadian Society for the Study of Higher Education took place over 40 years ago and this year marks the 40th anniversary of its critically important Canadian Journal of Higher Education. It is time to look back, and time to imagine the future of both the Society and the Journal. I attended that intimate founding meeting in Winnipeg. It was held on May 29, 1970. With no more than 40 people in attendance, we listened to the late Edward (Ted) Sheffield open the meeting. He had prepared a paper in 1969 on “Canadian Research in Higher Education.” He told us that it was only an “impressionistic survey but it served to highlight the fact that research in this field is being undertaken by a great variety of persons in a great variety of organizations: universities, voluntary associations, and government agencies.” Ted Sheffield noted, however, that little research in higher education was being conducted in university faculties of education. Underscoring that Canada was slow to make higher education a specialized field of study, he reminded the audience that Robin S. Harris, Canada’s first Professor of Higher Education, was appointed in 1964. Six years later, Ted Sheffield summarized the progress observing that “the Higher Education Group at the University of Toronto has increased to four and there is now a good deal of activity. . . at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education.” In addition, he noted the emergence of recent program initiatives at the Universities of British Columbia, Calgary, and Alberta.
Keywords: Canadian Society for Studies in Higher Education; Glen Jones
Summary of findings
Questions have been raised about the social impact of widespread use of social networking sites (SNS) like Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, and Twitter. Do these technologies isolate people and truncate their relationships? Or are there benefits associated with being connected to others in this way? The Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project decided to examine SNS in a survey that explored people’s overall social networks and how use of these technologies is related to trust, tolerance, social support, and community and political engagement. The findings presented here paint a rich and complex picture of the role that digital technology plays in people’s social worlds. Wherever possible, we seek to disentangle whether people’s varying social behaviors and attitudes are related to the different ways they use social networking sites, or to other relevant demographic characteristics, such as age, gender and social class.
The number of those using social networking sites has nearly doubled since 2008 and the population of SNS users has gotten older. In this Pew Internet sample, 79% of American adults said they used the internet and nearly half of adults (47%), or 59% of internet users, say they use at least one of SNS. This is close to double the 26% of adults (34% of internet users) who used a SNS in 2008. Among other things, this means the average age of adult-SNS users has shifted from 33 in 2008 to 38 in 2010. Over half of all adult SNS users are now over the age of 35. Some 56% of SNS users now are female.
Facebook dominates the SNS space in this survey: 92% of SNS users are on Facebook; 29% use MySpace, 18% used LinkedIn and 13% use Twitter. There is considerable variance in the way people use various social networking sites: 52% of Facebook users and 33% of Twitter users engage with the platform daily, while only 7% of MySpace and 6% of LinkedIn users do the same.
On Facebook on an average day:
- 15% of Facebook users update their own status.
- 22% comment on another’s post or status.
- 20% comment on another user’s photos.
- 26% “Like†another user’s content.
- 10% send another user a private message