The Accord on the Internationalization of Education emerges from the Association of Canadian Deans of Education (ACDE), a network of deans, directors, and chairs of faculties, colleges, schools, and departments of education from across Canada. ACDE members are committed to “national, public discourse on the importance of public education in developing and sustaining a civil society (ACDE General Accord, 2006a, p.1). This Accord is the product of a shared commitment across members of the ACDE network, and is intended to speak to a diversity of stakeholders and audiences, within and external to the university communities from which it emerged. In particular, the Accord seeks to stimulate discussion of critical issues and institutional responsibilities in the internationalization of education, and to give careful consideration to representations of marginalized individuals, groups, and communities.
This paper proposes a new measure of skills mismatch that combines information about skill proficiency, self-reported mismatch and skill use. The theoretical foundations underling this measure allow identifying minimum and maximum skill requirements for each occupation and to classify workers into three groups, the well-matched, the under-skilled and the over-skilled. The availability of skill use data further permit the computation of the degree of under and over- usage of skills in the economy. The empirical analysis is carried out using the first wave of the OECD Survey of Adult Skills (PIAAC) and the findings are compared across skill domains,labour market status and countries.
Ask most people who don’t teach online about the likelihood of academic dishonesty in an online class and you will likely hear concerns about the many ways that students could misrepresent themselves online. In fact, this concern about student representation is so prevalent it made its way into the Higher Education Opportunities Act (HEOA).
Passed into law in 2008, the act brought a few big changes to online education, including
a new requirement to “ensure that the student enrolled in an online class is the student doing the coursework.” Although there’s some disagreement as to whether distance education is more susceptible to academic dishonesty than other forms of instruction, what isn’t up for debate is the fact that for as long as there’s been exams, there’s been cheating on exams. The online environment simply opens up a different set of challenges that aren’t typically seen in traditional face-to-face courses.
Promoting Academic Integrity in Online Education was developed to help you understand the latest tools and techniques for mitigating cheating and other unethical behaviors in your online courses. The report features nine articles from Distance Education Report, including:
• Combating Online Dishonesty with Communities of Integrity
• 91 Ways to Maintain Academic Integrity in Online Courses
• The New News about Cheating for Distance Educators
• A Problem of Core Values: Academic Integrity in Distance Learning
• Practical Tips for Preventing Cheating on Online Exams
Online education didn’t invent cheating, but it does present unique challenges. This report
provides proactive ways for meeting these challenges head on.
Christopher Hill
Editor
Distance Education Report
[email protected]
Shifting from an emphasis on teaching to learning is a complex task for both teachers and students. This paper reports on a qualitative study of teachers in a nurse specialist education programme meeting this shift in a distance education course. The study aimed to gain a better understanding of the teacher-student relationship by addressing research questions in relation to the students' role, the learning process, and the assessment process. A didactical design comprising three phases focusing on distinct learning outcomes for the course was adopted. Data were collected through in-depth interviews with teachers and were analysed using inductive thematic analysis. The results indicate a shift towards a problematising and holistic approach to teaching, learning, and assessment. This shift highlighted a teacher-student relationship with a shared responsibility in the orchestration of the learning experience. The overall picture outlines a distance education experience of process-based assessment characterised by the imposition of teachers’ rules and a lack of creativity due to the limited role of ICT merely as a container of content.
Keywords: Distance education; higher education; e-learning
Abstract
The community college is one of many providers of postsecondary and adult education in Canada. In making decisions about how the community college should allocate its efforts among various possible programs and activities, it is important to understand its relationship to other providers of postsecondary and adult education. This article describes and analyzes the relationship between Canada's community colleges and other providers of postsecondary and adult education in Canada. It attempts to identify the comparative strengths and weaknesses of community colleges relative to other providers with respect to particular types of activity, and from that analysis it offers suggestions regarding the emphases that colleges might place on certain of their activities.
Résumé
Le collège communautaire est un des nombreux fournisseurs d’enseignement supérieur et d’éducation aux adultes au Canada. En prenant des décisions concernant la manière dont les collèges communautaires devraient allouer leurs efforts parmi différents programmes et activités, il est important de comprendre leurs relations avec d’autres fournisseurs d’enseignement supérieur et d’éducation aux adultes. Cet article décrit et analyse la relation entre les collèges communautaires du Canada et les autres fournisseurs d’enseignement supérieur et d’éducation aux adultes au Canada. Il tente d’identifier les forces et faiblesses des collèges communautaires comparativement à d’autres fournisseurs relativement à certains types d’activités, et à partir de cette analyse, il offre des suggestions concernant l’importance que les collèges peuvent accorder à certaines de leurs activités.
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.
Tinto’s integration framework is often assumed to be inapplicable to the study of student persistence at community colleges because one of the linchpins of the framework — social integration — is considered unlikely to occur for students at these institutions. Community college students are thought to lack the time to participate in activities, such as clubs, that would facilitate social integration. Using in-depth interviews with students at two urban community colleges in the Northeast, we examine the ways that first-year community college students engage with their institutions. We find that the majority of them do develop attachments to their institutions. Moreover, this sense of attachment is related to their persistence in the second year of college. We also find that this integration is both academic and social. Contrary to findings from other studies that apply Tinto’s framework, we find that these two forms of integration develop in concert for community college students. The same activities lead to both academic and social relatedness. This is particularly true for information networks that students develop in the classroom.
The primary objectives of this paper were to determine whether there are significant gaps in Ontario’s postsecondary education system with respect to education and research activities, with particular attention to activities connoted by the term “polytechnic”, and if so, to consider how to address such gaps. In response to the first part of our task, we identified three major gaps in Ontario’s postsecondary education system: a free standing, degree-granting, primarily teaching-oriented institution that concentrates on undergraduate education; an open university that would expand accessibility and enable Learners to combine credits from different institutions and different types of learning experiences; and effective pathways for students who start their postsecondary education in a college to attain a baccalaureate degree and be able, if they are so
inclined, to continue on to graduate study.
We did not find compelling evidence that there is a shortage of opportunity for polytechnic education in
Ontario. Presently students are able to draw upon Ryerson University and the University of Ontario Institute of
Technology (UOIT), a modest but growing number of joint university-college programs, and baccalaureate and diploma programs of the colleges. In addition, many students create a polytechnic experience for themselves through transfer from a university to a college or from a college to a university, though more needs to be done to improve opportunities of the latter type.
Also, we think that there are some other good reasons for not designating some colleges as polytechnic institutions. The term polytechnic is fraught with ambiguity, and thus adding a new sector of postsecondary institutions with that name could be more confusing than helpful for prospective students. The institutions in British Columbia and Alberta that use the term polytechnic, either formally or informally, have since their founding been formally differentiated from other college sector institutions in their province and have a history of specialization in technology-based programming. No college sector institutions in Ontario have had a differentiated role like the institutes of technology in British Columbia and Alberta. We are aware also that five
colleges in Ontario have been seeking the polytechnic designation. In regard to both labour market needs and practices in other North American jurisdictions, it is hard to see a justification for adding that many polytechnic institutions to the provincial postsecondary education system, especially when four of them would be in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA). We appreciate that many colleges across Canada, including in Ontario, have made valuable contributions to industry through their applied research activities. Our impression is that the expertise and interaction with industry that fosters these contributions is largely situational and contextual related to the existence of particular faculty in particular programs and institutions.
Accordingly, we do not believe that designating some colleges as polytechnics is necessary to maintain or enhance the capability of the college sector to make such contributions.
While we do not believe that there are compelling arguments for designating some colleges as polytechnics, we are mindful of the contribution that could be made by enabling at least a few colleges to have a more substantial and broader role in offering baccalaureate programs if they are able to demonstrate that they meet the conditions required for such activity. Based upon our examination of the issues outlined above, we review a number of possible policy options to address the predicted demand for increased access to university degree programs in the GTA including: 1)
creating satellite campuses of existing universities; 2) creating new universities that are of the same type as existing universities; 3) creating new universities of a new type focusing on undergraduate study and with a limited role in research; 4) providing selected colleges with a new substantial role in baccalaureate programming; 5) providing colleges with a greater role in transfer programs in basic university subjects, such as arts and science; and 6) creating an open university. We review each of these options and discuss factors that should be considered by government.
Vincent Tinto (1993) identifies three major sources of student departure: academic difficulties, the inability of individuals to resolve their educational and occupational goals, and their failure to become or remain incorporated in the intellectual and social life of the institution. Tinto's "Model of Institutional Departure" states that, to persist, students need integration into formal (academic performance) and informal (faculty/staff interactions) academic systems and formal (extracurricular activities) and informal (peer-group interactions) social systems.
Abstract: This article describes the consequences for workplace e-learning of viewing organisations as political systems. Organisations tend to stratify, and potential conflicts develop between “top-down†or designer-generation of workplace systems, and “bottom-up†or learner- and practice-based approaches. The differences in the objectives, procedures, tacit knowledge and conceptions of the value of workplace e-learning between these orientations have led to conflicts that have damaged real e-learning projects in the past. Some cases from the literature are analysed to support this point. However, other examples show how these tensions may also be turned into opportunities for communication, learning and collaborative design by including a measure of operational proximity and organisational citizenship behaviour in workplace e-learning design. It is suggested that through initiatives like these, designer-generation and learner-generation of context may act as complementary checks or balances, each helping compensate for the deficits of the other, thus improving workplace e-learning effectiveness.
Keywords: workplace e-learning; professional development; learner-generated contexts; communities of practice (CoPs); conflict; co-ordination
How S y s t e m s I m p r o v e : A C o n s t e l l a t i o n o f F o r c e s
Aboriginal people in Canada have long understood the role that learning plays in building healthy, thriving communities. Despite significant cultural and historical differences, Canada’s First Nations, Inuit and Métis people share a vision of learning as a holistic, lifelong process.
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.
The main objective of this report is to learn about the state of knowledge regarding the role of financial literacy as a complex barrier to postsecondary attendance. To achieve this goal, the report contains a literature review of existing studies in the area, as well as an environmental scan of existing programs and initiatives.
When possible, the focus of the report is on low-income high school students in the context of making decisions regarding postsecondary education. In this ideal setting, financial literacy will be defined as knowledge of all the costs, benefits, and available aid associated with postsecondary education. In reality, there are few studies and existing programs that fit this ideal profile. However, we have identified several studies that share these characteristics to a large extent. Specifically, we describe and discuss 21 related studies and 34 related programs. Although most studies and programs are Canadian, we also broaden the scope somewhat to include countries with similar postsecondary systems as Canada (e.g. the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand).
Our literature review focuses on Canadian and American evidence, and has uncovered several important findings. First, the cost of a postsecondary education is vastly overestimated by the public at large and by low-income youth in particular. In contrast, the economic benefits to attending university are generally underestimated (equally for low- and high-income households). Whether knowing about the costs and benefits matters for pursuing a postsecondary education is less clear given the lack of convincing evidence in this area.
While awareness of student financial aid is not necessarily an issue, it appears that knowledge of aid is limited. This may be related to the complexity of student financial aid, which is not only costly, but may also represent a barrier to some students.
A non-negligible portion of students are loan averse, which means that they will avoid grant opportunities when they are coupled with an optional student loan. This is the case even though the loans can be refused or invested at zero repayable interest.
Research also demonstrates that helping students complete their financial aid and postsecondary application forms has a large impact on application and admission rates. In contrast, offering information to students (without application assistance) is generally not sufficient to affect behaviour.
Finally, once in university, the majority of undergraduates follow a budget and regularly pay off their credit card balance each month. This suggests a certain degree of awareness and control regarding their finances, which may help them repay their loans on time and avoid defaulting.
PROLOGUE
What sources and resources do college students utilize to assist them in the transfer process? What factors influence students’ transfer decisions? What information do students possess about transfer and of what quality is the transfer information students receive? This investigation interviews students of two-year College of Applied Arts and Technology (CAAT) and Institute of Technology and Advanced Learning (ITAL) programs in the province of Ontario, Canada who identify intentions to transfer to university within their first semester in college. Grounding all analysis in Spence (1973), Akerlof (1970) and Stiglitz’s (1990) work on asymmetric information, adverse selection and signaling, this study examines students' knowledge of transfer and their attainment of that knowledge. Policy recommendations for the further development of transfer assistance mechanisms and timing of implementation are provided.
Keywords: transfer credit; seamless education; asymmetric information; signalling.
PROLOGUE
Quelles sources et ressources les étudiants de collège utilisent-ils pour faciliter leur transfert ? Quels sont les facteurs qui influencent leur décision d’être transférés? Quelles informations possèdent-ils sur les transferts, et quelle est la qualité de ces informations ? Cette enquête interroge des étudiants de deuxième année du Collège d’arts appliqués et de technologie (CAAT) et de l’Institut de technologie et d’enseignement supérieur (ITAL) ; ces collèges offrent des programmes de deux ans dans la province de l’Ontario, au Canada pour identifier les décisions des étudiants d’être transférés dans une université durant leur premier semestre au collège. Fondée sur l’analyse de Spence (1973), d’Akerlof (1970) et de Stiglitz (1990) sur l’information asymétrique et les sélections erronées, elle signale les connaissances que les étudiants ont du transfert et comment ils les ont acquises. Le texte fournit des recommandations sur la politique à suivre pour développer davantage les mécanismes d’aide au transfert et le choix du moment de l’effectuer. Mots clés: crédit de transfert, éducation continue, information asymétrique, signaler
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 Association of Registrars of the Universities and Colleges of Canada (ARUCC) and the Pan-Canadian Consortium on Admissions and Transfer (PCCAT) have collaborated to lead an extensive study to understand current transcript and transfer credit nomenclature practices in Canada. These findings will ultimately inform a comprehensive update and expansion of the 2003 ARUCC National Transcript Guide and potentially result in a searchable database of transcript practices and Canadian transfer credit nomenclature. The ultimate goal is to enhance the clarity, consistency and transparency of the academic transcript and transfer credit resources that support student mobility. The specific deliverable for this phase was to identify and summarize Canadian transcript and transfer credit nomenclature practices, review four international jurisdictions as a means to highlight promising practices related to these two areas and, finally, to provide both an overview of systems and an initial examination of emergent perspectives and themes. The report purposefully avoids suggesting prescriptive solutions or outcomes; however, the findings from this study will provide a solid foundation from which to move forward the standards and terminology discourse in Canada. This report collates the findings from the supporting research conducted from January through to April 2014.
At Dalhousie we must accept responsibility for creating the conditions for everyone to flourish and to belong.
A culture of belonging requires ongoing commitment to greater inclusivity with focus on creating a welcoming home for Dalhousie’s diverse faculty, staff, students, and alumni alongside the broader community.
In his book, The World is Flat, author Thomas L. Friedman argues the barriers that used to separate countries – such as commerce and the movement of people – are gone, leaving the world more integrated, mobile and open to competition from all. Only countries that understand how to embrace this new reality will thrive in the world economy of the future. Creativity is always looking for a better home, as the Canadian Urban Institute and Jane Jacobs have argued.
What’s working in adult learner recruitment and marketing and which practices are most widely used? To find out, Ruffalo Noel Levitz conducted a 72-item, web-based poll in April 2015 as part of the firm’s continuing series of benchmark polls for higher education. Because undergraduate and graduate programs often employ similar practices to attract adult learners, this report combines its findings across undergraduate and graduate levels. For a profile of the poll respondents, please refer to the Appendix, page 41. Note that all respondents in this study had at least one adult-focused degree program.