In 2007 one of the key conclusions from the synthesis report 'Sharing eLearning Content'1 (SELC)was that, while evidence may exist in support of it, the business case for an institution to share learning materials has not been sufficiently well articulated in the UK. In fact, the issue highlighted is rather broader. There is evidence that would support a range of business cases, such as those for:
. lecturers sharing learning materials;
. lecturers using and attributing others’ materials;
. institutions putting in place policies whereby learning materials are well managed, so that they can be shared appropriately and reused over time;
. the UK tertiary education sector as a whole putting in place arrangements in support of sharing learning materials.
This report aims to articulate the advantages and imperatives for sharing learning resources using evidence from the UK and elsewhere. This JISC funded study has also identified a number of compelling business cases and has developed a set of variations as a result of studying a range of business models. It highlights some interesting trends as many of the existing business models have reached a level of maturity and are currently under review.
The government of Ontario has signalled the need for Ontario’s publicly funded universities to seek additional productivity gains while sustaining access and quality in light of fiscal constraints. It has identified differentiation as a key policy driver to achieve these goals.
Implementation of these provincial directions likely involves consideration of how universities deploy their faculty to meet their differentiated teaching and research mandates. In fact, a preliminary examination by HEQCO of productivity in the Ontario public postsecondary system suggested that how universities deploy their faculty resources may be one of the most promising
opportunities for universities to increase their productivity (HEQCO, 2012).
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.
The following research reports detail the results of programs or inventions designed to increase the retention of post-secondary students. This bibliography is intended as a sample of the recent literature on this topic, rather than an exhaustive list. For inclusion, articles or reports generally described experimental research studies of PSE retention programs. Preference was given to larger scale projects focused on colleges in jurisdictions outside of Ontario (in several cases, progress reports from ongoing, large-scale initiatives were also included). Where possible, links to the original research are provided.
In Canadian universities and colleges, the registrar role appears to be evolving. It absolutely remains a position focused on the diligent care and oversight of student academic records and related student services. However, those holding these roles are more often being called upon to create interesting and unique partnerships; actively support or steer enrolment management; oversee significant pan-institutional responsibilities and related accountabilities; and develop policies, procedures, and integrated systems that serve as the backbone for the institution and support overall student success. Registrars are exercising their duties in an increasingly virtual world where institutional boundaries are becoming less rigid and new approaches are becoming the norm. Examples include different course delivery models, online course and program offerings, new forms of inter-institutional collaboration, cross-boundary sharing of data, targeted access programs, increasingly mobile students, etc. The evolving role of the Canadian registrar suggests a close examination of current reporting line practices and responsibilities is timely.
Abstract
The demand for quantitative assessment by external agencies and internal
administrators can leave post-secondary instructors confused about the
nature and purpose of learning outcomes and fearful that the demand
is simply part of the increasing corporatization of the university system.
This need not be the case. Developing learning outcomes has a number
of benefits for course design that go beyond program assessment. This
article clarifies some key aspects of the push toward using learning outcomes
and introduces a tripartite nomenclature for distinguishing among
course outcomes, outputs, and objectives. It then outlines a process for
instructors to use these three categories to develop and design courses
that meet institutional assessment demands while also improving overall
teaching effectiveness.
Résumé
L’évaluation quantitative que demandent les agences externes et les
administrateurs internes peut confondre les instructeurs de niveau
postsecondaires quant à la nature et à l’objectif des « résultats d’apprentissage
», et leur faire craindre que cette demande ne fasse simplement partie de
la privatisation croissante du système universitaire. Ce n’est pas forcément
le cas. La création de résultats d’apprentissage présente de nombreux
avantages sur le plan de la conception de cours, avantages qui vont au-delà
de l’évaluation de programme. L’article clarifie quelques aspects principaux
de la poussée vers l’utilisation de « résultats d’apprentissage » et présente
une nomenclature tripartite pour faire la distinction entre les résultats de
cours, le rendement et les objectifs. Il décrit ensuite un processus pour
Learning (About) Outcomes / R. S. Ascough 45
CJHE / RCES Volume 41, No. 2, 2011
que les instructeurs emploient ces trois catégories afin de concevoir des
cours qui répondent aux exigences en évaluation de l’institution, tout en
améliorant l’efficacité de l’enseignement dans son ensemble.
The BYOD Concept
The days of students carrying heavy, book-laden backpacks to school are numbered. Increasingly, students at all
levels expect to access learning materials electronically. And students expect their school to support access to the Internet from anywhere, not just from a classroom computer with a wired connection.
The push for mobile learning options isn’t just coming from students. Teachers also have high opinions of the educational value of these new tools. A PBS/Grunwald survey in 2010 reported that teachers view laptops, tablets and e-readers as having the highest educational potential of all portable technologies. The movement to mobile and digital learning reflects the exploding popularity of mobile devices among consumers and the parallel growth in wireless network services to support them. Instead of using shared or enterprise-owned computers at work, school or libraries, people now want to use their personally owned mobile devices everywhere, a trend called bring your own device (BYOD). In fact, personal computing devices are fast becoming not just a luxury in both primary and secondary education, but a necessity. The growth of more virtual, personalized learning experiences throughout the educational spectrum is engaging students like never before.
The 2010 ”Speak Up” education survey conducted by Project Tomorrow found that more than one quarter of middle school students and 35 percent of high school students use online textbooks or other online curricula as a part of their regular schoolwork. The survey also found that nearly two-thirds of parents of school-aged children see digital curriculum as a key component of the ”ideal” classroom for their student, making access to computing devices a key part of today’s educational experience.²
This trend is creating tremendous new demand levels for wireless networks. For example, one market research firm reports growth of 40 percent in enterprise wireless local area networks (WLANs) in Q2 2011, attributable in part to the BYOD trend and the tremendous popularity of the Apple iPad.³ Gartner Research supports this notion as well, concluding that without adequate preparation, iPads alone will increase enterprise WiFi demands by 300 percent.⁴
Support for this trend is also found in Center for Digital Education (CDE) interviews with K-12 district IT staff. A notable 27 percent of school IT decision-makers interviewed expressed an intent to pursue a BYOD policy.
While the percentage of higher education students with their own devices is significantly higher than at the elementary level, CDE’s Digital Community Colleges Survey reveals that they grapple with many similar technology challenges. A full 92 percent of community colleges report expanded distance learning offerings for online, hybrid and Web-assisted courses, providing ample support for their No. 1 identified technology priority: mobility. The growing popularity of mobile devices isn’t the only factor straining the capacity of educational networks today. Video, interactive learning games and other media-rich content are being
watched, created and shared by students and teachers to foster learning of both skills and subject matter. These media not only gobble up bandwidth — they may also require priority over other network traffic in order to deliver acceptable performance for in-class use. From a technical perspective, the challenge for educational institutions is supporting BYOD for students and staff with secure wireless and remote access network capabilities. Yet the movement to mobile learning isn’t just about supporting new technologies. It’s also about shifting to new ways of teaching and learning.
Before you even print off the application forms to request funding for your research project, take some time to review these tips.
Students enter college hoping it will be a major step up from what they were doing before, writes Roger Martin, but
they are often disappointed.
College-Level Literacy: An Inventory of Current Practices at Ontario's Colleges instrument for gathering and reporting information. Three categories of college size, based on the Fall 2009 intake of students into postsecondary programs, provided further insight into the distribution of various practices. All 24 Ontario colleges participated in this study.
Equity and Access to Higher Education?
Participation rates in both university and college vary based on the student’s
family income. That variation is relatively small for college students, but
skews toward children from wealthy families for universities. College students
come almost evenly from the family income quartiles; regardless of
family income, about 25% of students come from each family income quartile.
In contrast, more university students come from wealthy families than
low-income ones. Almost 35% of all university students come from the top
quartile, compared to just under 20% from the poorest quartile.
SUMMARY OF RECOMMENDATIONS
The OCUFA plan aims to dramatically enhance the quality and affordability of university education in Ontario by 2020 through increased government investment. We are also sensitive to the financial constraints the province is facing. As such, our recommendations reflect both the estimated minimum and maximum cost of our proposals. The Government of Ontario can choose to make a smaller investment as finances dictate. The important thing is that reinvestment begin now.
We recommend:
1. Increasing per-student public investment in universities to the national average by 2020.
Cost in 2013-14: A minimum of $120 million and a maximum of $280 million
2. Bringing the student-faculty ratio to the national average by 2020 by hiring new fulltime
faculty.
Cost in 2013-2014: A minimum of $16 million and a maximum of $110 million
3. Freezing tuition fees and consulting with students, faculty, and administrators on a new
funding framework that preserves quality while ensuring affordability.
Cost in 2013-14: $170 million.
4. Increasing research funding to universities by phasing out ineffective tax credits for private sector research and development.
Cost in 2013-14: No additional cost.
5. Respecting faculty collective bargaining rights.
6. Engaging faculty meaningfully in pension reform.
Abstract
Along with the amount of time spent learning (or time-on-task), the quality of learning time has a real influence on learning performance. Quality of time in online learning depends on students’ time availability and their willingness to devote quality cognitive time to learning activities. However, the quantity and quality of the time spent by adult e-learners on
learning activities can be reduced by professional, family, and social commitments. Considering that the main time pattern followed by most adult e-learners is a professional one, it may be beneficial for online education programs to offer a certain degree of flexibility in instructional time that might allow adult learners to adjust their learning times to their professional constraints. However, using the time left over once professional and family requirements have been fulfilled could lead to a reduction in quality time for learning. This paper starts by introducing the concept of quality of learning time from an online student centred perspective. The impact of students’ time-related variables (working hours, timeon-task engagement, time flexibility, time of day, day of week) is then analyzed according to individual and collaborative grades achieved during an online master’s degree program. The data show that both students’ time flexibility (r = .98) and especially their availability to learn in the morning are related to better grades in individual (r = .93) and collaborative activities (r = .46).
Keywords: E-learning; computer-supported collaborative learning; academic performance;
e-learning quality; time flexibility; time-on-task; time quality; learner time
Post-secondary education is the great equalizer. It gives us all a chance to reach higher no matter where we come from or whatever our background. Both of my parents came from very modest upbringings and saw a university degree as a ticket to a good job and an entry to Ontario’s middle class. They, in turn, placed a high importance on post-secondary education and encouraged my sister and I to follow in their footsteps.
There is a lot about Ontario’s colleges and universities that we can be proud of, but we need to ensure our
students are getting the best value for their tuition. In Ontario today, we see far too many students graduate
with degrees and deep debts who can’t find a job.
We are spending a lot more money as a province, but we aren’t seeing the results. Government funding has increased by 84% since 2003, yet Ontario universities are slipping in international rankings, tuition keeps rising, new graduates keep heading out West and there are many jobs in the skilled trades that can’t be filled. This has got to change. We need to make the necessary changes to ensure our schools are the best in the world at preparing students for a career. The key will be incenting excellence, harnessing market forces, encouraging specialization and being honest. We cannot ignore the fact that increasingly university students end up in colleges, after accumulating significant student debt. We need a culture shift in our sytem. Promoting a ‘College First’ approach in our high schools will recognize the hundreds of thousands of jobs in the skilled trades and applied learning at risk of going unfilled and will help alleviate pressure on our universities while preparing those students who decide to
continue on to pursue a university degree.
We also cannot ignore the fact that our university rankings on the global stage have been slipping for some time. Our universities should be focused on quality, not quantity. Allowing undergraduate instructors to focus on teaching full time will improve the student experience by incenting excellence in teaching. Let us make no mistake about the promise we can offer our young graduates and the taxpayers who fund the system. A purposeful evolution of post-secondary education has the potential to do more for the long term health of Ontario than any other program or policy imaginable.
Progressive Conservatives Ontario
If every worker had the essential skills needed to do their jobs really well, productivity and competitiveness in the West would soar. But many workers do not. Forty per cent of our workforce does not have the essential skills – including language, literacy and numeracy – needed to apply their technical skills and knowledge at globally competitive levels. Investing in upgrading essential skills would provide the West with an opportunity to change the productivity narrative.
The major assertion of this article is that the present curriculum-development approaches to education are limited in the types of tasks they can address and the level of proficiency they can expect from students. Such approaches may be useful as management tools, allowing the systematic management of instructional activities. However, the approaches may interfere with the quality of the educational process. It seems obvious that one of the goals of teaching reading and mathematics is to facilitate the development of proficiency in these skills. We can contrast mediocre competence with proficient performance of a task. A novice who is trained to achieve mediocre competence can follow rules and procedures with satisfactory levels of speed and accuracy, but has difficulty in applying skills to new situations and in acquiring greater expertise. In contrast, the
attainment of proficient performance implies that a person can perform a skill so well and so efficiently that it can be a building block for the acquisition of additional skills, and is easily extended to unfamiliar tasks. The contrast is between young adults who can read 150-200 words per minute, and get most questions right on comprehension tests, and students who read for enjoyment and view libraries as tools for answering questions. The contrast is between students who can generally follow the steps of a mathematical procedure to get an answer right and students who can recognize which type of mathematical
procedure is needed in order to attack a given problem. Someone who has reached mediocre competence must still concentrate on performing the task correctly. Someone who has achieved proficiency at a task can focus attention on achieving personal and vocational goals.
Mentoring novice teachers often features buddy support, technical advice, and classroom management tips to meet teacher-centered concerns of survival. Such mentoring aligns with conventional models of teacher development that describe the
novice concerned with self-image, materials and procedures, and management, and only after the initial years, able to focus on individual student learning. Drawing on the wisdom of practice of 37 experienced teacher induction leaders and case studies of mentor/new teacher pairs, this study found that mentors can interrupt that tendency among new teachers, focusing them on the learning of individual students, especially those underperforming. For this work, mentors tap knowledge of student and teacher learners, pedagogy for classrooms and for tutoring teachers, and especially multilayered knowledge and abilities in several domains of assessment. These include assessment of students, alignment of curriculum with standards, and formative
assessment of the new teacher. Skillful use of this knowledge can bring individual student learning into focus and help new teachers generate methods for shaping instruction to meet students’ varied learning needs. These results challenge developmental models of teaching and conservative mentoring practices, calling for articulation of a knowledge base and relevant mentor development to focus new teachers early on individual student learning. Do students think I’m in charge? What materials should I use in this unit?
The CGS/GRE Survey of Graduate Enrollment and Degrees is jointly sponsored by the Council of Graduate Schools (CGS) and the Graduate Record Examinations (GRE) Board. Conducted annually since 1986, the survey provides information about applications for admission to graduate school, first-time and total graduate student enrollment, and graduate degrees and certificates conferred. The 2013 survey was sent to 793 colleges and universities, and useable responses were received from 655 institutions, for an 83% response rate.
Efforts to reduce harmful alcohol use by university students require a concentrated examination of the culture of alcohol use on campus and within the broader community. Drinking heavily among young people, even before university, is often viewed as normal and expected behaviour by youth and frequently condoned by their parents and the community because it is viewed
as a rite of passage. Adults can turn a blind eye to the practice, frequently hoping or feeling relieved that their
children aren’t using something “worse”.
In the knowledge-based economy (KBE), a strong education system should produce a
citizenry that is equipped with the tools for success: skills,ompetencies, and knowledge. The role of higher education in the development of the KBE is crucial because institutions are the "creators of, and venues for, cultural and social activity” (OECD, 2007: 39). Around the world, governments are aiming to provide higher education equitably and en masse while ensuring it is both of high quality and of relevance to the labour market. This is a challenge that Ontario, too, faces as it prepares its strategies to enhance the knowledge and skills of its citizens. This research note is the second of a three-part series that examines international trends in strategies for developing knowledge-based economies1. It examines issues pertainingto the development of skills, competencies, and knowledge — areas of focused government attention — and the labour market issues faced by skilled graduates. It draws heavily on the experiences of the United Kingdom, the European Union, and the United States and examines particular fields of government interest in addition to the issues of labour market demand, of skills-matching, and of employer needs. An understanding of these international activities and trends should be of help when Ontario is developing a comprehensive and informed strategy for ensuring students are prepared for the KBE labour market. This research note is structured in three sections, each covering a major theme in the literature. In the first section, debates on the role of higher education within the knowledge based economy are addressed. The role of government in determining future skills needs is discussed, and international trends toward developing a demand-led rather than a supply-led system are addressed. The second section provides an overview of trends in such government activities designed to produce
graduates with specific skill sets and qualifications in Science, Technology, Engineering,and Mathematics (STEM), Creative Competencies, and Middle Skills which many governments consider priority areas. The third section examines skills-matching in the labour market and deals specifically with skills-matching and valued graduate characteristics by examining Ontario data on skills training.