Survey fielded between August 16-28, 2013 among a nationally representative sample of American adults (N = 1,000) conducted via landline and cell phone. The margin of error for a sample of 1,000 is ±3.1%.
The national poll was supplemented by a survey of business hiring decision-makers (N = 263) fielded online during July 10-15, 2013. The business elite sample included hiring decision-makers and hiring executives from a cross-section of companies, ranging from small companies to larger businesses with a global presence.
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
Mismatches between workers’ competences and what is required by their job are widespread in OECD countries. Studies that use qualifications as proxies for competences suggest that as many as one in four workers could be over-qualified and as many as one in three could be under-qualified for their job. However, there is significant variation across countries and socio-demographic groups. Our meta-analysis of country studies suggests that over 35% of workers are over-qualified in Sweden compared with just 10% in Finland, with most other OECD countries located between these two extremes. There is also extensive evidence that youth are more likely to be over-qualified than their older counterparts and the same is found to be true for immigrant workers compared with a country’s nationals. On the other hand, no definitive evidence has been found of the persistence of qualification mismatch, with some papers showing that over-qualification is just a temporary phenomenon that most workers overcome through career mobility and others finding infrequent trantisions between over-qualification and good job matches. Across the board, over-qualified workers are found to earn less than their equally-qualified and well-matched counterparts but more than appropriately-qualified workers doing the same job. Under-qualified workers are found to earn
more than their equally-qualified and well-matched counterparts but less than appropriately-qualified workers doing the same job. Over-qualified workers are also found to be less satisfied about their job and more likely to leave their work than well-matched workers with the same qualifications.
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.
For Canada to succeed, all Canadians must have the opportunity to develop and use their skills and knowledge to the fullest. So said the government of Prime Minister Paul Martin in the Speech from the Throne that opened the 37th Parliament of Canada in February 2004: “Investing in people will be Canada’s most important economic investment.”
Such an investment is critical. The new economy demands an increasingly educated and skilled workforce. To remain globally competitive, Canada needs to invest in raising the overall level of education and skills across the country. As well, Canada faces a shortage of skilled workers over the next 10 years, due to both retirement and the country’s low population
growth rate. To replace our aging workforce, Canada needs to look beyond traditional sources for future employees.
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.
One of the important questions to consider in a review of policy for postsecondary education is what kind o f system do we need. To provide a reasonably complete answer to that question would require addressing many different dimensions of postsecondary education including structures, processes, and relationships. In this paper, I will concentrate on two important and closely related subsidiary questions within the broader question of what kind of system we need. Those subsidiary questions are what is the most appropriate mix of different types of postsecondary institutions, and what should be their relationships with one another?1 As those are pretty large questions, within them my principal focus will be even narrower, on the balance and relationship between universities and community colleges.
THE REPORT
Immigrants will represent nearly 100 per cent of net labour market growth in Canada by the year 2011.1 More than ever, employers recognize the need to effectively integrate immigrants into the workplace and they seek solutions to leverage the talents and contributions immigrants bring to the Canadian economy.
From January to March 2009, Colleges Ontario and 12 colleges consulted with employers, ethno-cultural business organizations, business associations and unions to find out their views on employing immigrants and how colleges can support the transition of immigrants to the province’s workforce. Input was obtained through a variety of formats including facilitated round-table discussions, one-on-one dialogues, and an online questionnaire. The purpose of these consultations was to obtain advice from employers on how colleges can better address language needs for the workplace and support immigrant integration.
Colleges engaged in discussions with 218 organizations. These organizations represented a wide cross-section of large, medium and small businesses in five industry sectors that included health care, hospitality, science and technology, construction and manufacturing. Many of these organizations were interested in participating because they understand the valuable role of immigrants in helping companies respond to current labour and consumer market realities.
This report presents the findings from these consultations, offering a snapshot of the experiences of the participants, and outlining some suggestions on how colleges can play an even greater role in effectively integrating immigrants into the workplace.
CONSULTING WITH EMPLOYERS
As part of the Language Skills for the Workplace2 project funded by the federal government, colleges had an opportunity to hold discussions with employers on language needs and immigrant integration. Participants were asked about:
• their experiences in the recruitment, hiring, retention and promotion of immigrants
. training, education and development priorities in the workplace • occupation-specific and workplace-specific language needs
. ways that colleges can effectively help employers in the integration of immigrants
into employment.
Colleges held discussions with their local employer community and Colleges Ontario contacted larger provincewide employers and associations. There were 218 unique organizations that participated: 198 employers, 17 associations and three unions (See Appendix for list of participants). Employers from a broad range of sectors were invited to participate. Approximately 60 per cent of participants were from small- and medium-sized businesses and 40 per cent were large employers (employers with more than 500 employees).
The National Student Financial Wellness Study (NSFWS) is a survey of college students examining the financial attitudes, practices, and knowledge of students from institutions of higher education across the United States. The purpose of the 2014 NSFWS is to gain a more thorough and accurate picture of the financial wellness of college students. The NSFWS was developed and administered by The Ohio State University in collaboration with co-investigators from Cuyahoga Community College, DePaul University, Iowa State University, Oberlin College, Ohio University, and Santa Fe College. The survey was administered online during autumn 2014 or winter 2015 to random samples of students from 52 participating institutions. Please see the following page for a complete list of the institutions that participated in the study. More information on the study is available at go.osu.edu/nsfws or by emailing the NSFWS team at [email protected].
This report compares eligibility for student financial aid by examining the amount of funds (both repayable and non-repayable) that a student would be eligible to receive in each province, based on their income group (low-, middle- and high-income). Provincial administration of part (or all) of financial aid has resulted in great variability in the type, quantity, and availability of resources offered to students. Individual provinces have demonstrated priorities such as debt reduction strategies, universal grants, and student independence from parental support, to name a few.
Key findings include that:
• The combination of federal, provincial and joint administered student financial aid programs are inherently complex, lack transparency, and thus, remain removed from public scrutiny and discussion.
• Appalling inequities exist in the amount of resources offered to students, based on their province of residence.
• Enormous differences in tuition between provinces are the greatest factor in determining the cost of education and therefore have a great impact on the amount of debt a student may accumulate.
• Provincial grant programs, whether needs-based or universal, are the largest contributor to debt reduction.
Project Background
In 2008, the Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario (HEQCO) issued an open Request for Proposals (RFP) to Ontario colleges and universities that would allow them to evaluate interventions that already existed at those institutions and that were designed to promote student success in various ways. Brock University was involved in a total of four research projects that were approved for funding at that time, including this project. This research project also has the distinction of being the only one in the RFP which involved a re-examination of institutional financial aid policies.
Project Purpose
Institutional financial aid applications ask a wide range of questions dealing with both the personal and financial history of the student and his/her family. This process can take a significant amount of the student’s time, and may even intimidate some. Moreover, the level of financial detail required in the application may be a deterrent to students who might be either embarrassed to disclose family details, or uncomfortable asking their parents about the financial situation of their family.
It is believed that the complex and potentially discouraging application process that exists at many postsecondary institutions (and many government financial aid programs) can be simplified by including fewer fields in the application for funding. This would benefit both student applicants and institutional administrators, and could likely be done without significantly altering
the output that would have been generated using the original full application.
The purpose of this project is to compare two approaches to calculating student financial assessed need for the purposes of determining eligibility for the Brock University Entering Student Bursary. The research question being addressed in this project is whether a simplified approach to calculating assessed need would lead to similar outcomes in terms of identifying
eligibility for the Entering Student Bursary as the original application process that had been in place for years at Brock University.
Despite Canada having one of the world’s best-educated populations, numerous rationales have been presented to support the continued expansion and broadening of participation in post-secondary education (PSE). Not only do recent federal and provincial occupational projections suggest that future jobs will overwhelmingly require candidates with some form of PSE, the evidence on earnings premiums and private rates of return to PSE provide some indications that the labour market can still absorb large quantities of PSE graduates. Provinces have made higher PSE attainment a priority — for example, in the most recent Ontario budget, the government set as one of its goals to increase the PSE attainment rate from 62 per cent to
70 per cent (Ontario Ministry of Finance, 2010).
Yet, demographic trends suggest that maintaining, let alone increasing, the number of postsecondary graduates in coming years will prove challenging. Though there are currently supplyside constraints in some regions (principally urban Ontario), within 20 years, the pool of postsecondary- aged Canadians will be substantially shallower than it is today. To keep the supply of skilled workers at current levels, participation rates will have to keep climbing. As participation rates are already quite high among economically advantaged segments of the population, there is growing consensus that the best opportunity for growth in participation rates may be among groups that are currently under-represented in PSE, such as students from low-income families, students with no history of post-secondary education in their families and Aboriginal students. A strong case can be made as well that governments and PSE institutions should strive to close the gap in participation rates between under-represented groups and the rest of the population on the grounds that all Canadians should be provided with the same chances and opportunities to engage in PSE studies, independently of their socio-economic background. In short, increasing the participation rates of disadvantaged populations is an objective worth pursuing from both an efficiency and equity perspective.
Partnerships between Ontario colleges and universities have become increasingly important recently for at least two
reasons. Partnerships are encouraged generally in Canada, USA, Europe and elsewhere to transcend organizational boundaries, foster synergies and stimulate change. So universities are enjoined to partner with employers to integrate education and work, with industry to foster innovation and with other universities to avoid duplication.
The Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario (HEQCO)’s Third Annual Review and Research Plan provides a comprehensive evaluation of the postsecondary education (PSE) system in Ontario. In doing so, it contributes to a discussion on a new PSE strategy for the province following the completion of Reaching Higher: The McGuinty Government Plan for Postsecondary Education (Reaching Higher) initiated in 2005. This is a critical juncture in PSE; Reaching Higher ends this fiscal year, as do the current tuition framework and the Multi-Year Accountability Agreements (MYAAs) with postsecondary institutions. Successor strategies must address a new set of priorities and a new economic reality. Reaching Higher was generally well received by the PSE sector and by the public, and much progress has been made in realizing the stated objectives in the plan.
The Third Annual Review and Research Plan recommends that a new PSE strategy should build directly on Reaching Higher. To this end, it proposes a reformulation of PSE objectives to give emphasis to meeting human capital needs, improving accessibility
and educational quality, and stimulating research and innovation.
This scoping study was conducted as part of a boarder study funded by the Australian Learning and Teaching Council Fellowship (ALTC) on Building Leadership Capacity for Undergraduate Students. The present scoping study is phase one of the project (see aim below).
Before outlining the current study, it is important to briefly summarise the literature on leadership development and theories.
Background information: Literature on leadership development and theories
Since the late 1970s scholars have criticized the traditional theories of leadership (e.g., Greenleaf, 1991). From the literature (see reports from Anderson & Johnson, 2006; Marshall, 2008), these more traditional theories include: personality theories (which propose that leadership depends on traits that are either inherited or emerge in early life development), trait theory (which involves the assumption that there are characteristics for leadership deeply embedded in the personalities of leaders), and finally theories of power and influence (which assume that leaders are people in positions of formal responsibility within an organization).
Ontario colleges, universities, secondary schools, the Ministry of Training, Colleges and Universities, the Ministry of Education, as well as service and technology providers from the public and the private sectors are investing significant funds, time and energy on technology in learning.
It may not always be clear how or even whether this investment will add sufficient value to our education system. There are skeptics as well as technology evangelists who rightfully draw attention to the decisions that are made, or not made, and seek explanation and justification.
At Contact North | Contact Nord, Ontario’s distance education & training network, we believe there is a critical need to articulate the fundamental guiding principles that drive our decisions and policymaking with respect to technology in learning.
We have a set of guiding principles, which has informed our planning and served our network well over the past number of years. Many of these principles, at least the ideas themselves, did not originate with us but were gleaned from a variety of sources. We did, however, synthesize these ideas into a coherent set of principles and provided our own explanations and clarifications.
It is most likely that all of our decisions as college, university, and secondary school administrators, instructors, policymakers and funders have already been implicitly driven by some or most of these principles. It is by identifying just what these principles might have been that we are
more likely to be consistent and on target.
The following is a summary of ten principles that have had merit for us at
Contact North | Contact Nord over the years, and may have merit for others.
Abstract
A growing number of education and social science researchers design and conduct online research. In this review, the Internet Research Ethics (IRE) policy gap in Canada is identified along with the range of stakeholders and groups that either have a role or have attempted to play a role in forming better ethics policy. Ethical issues that current policy and guidelines fail to address
are interrogated and discussed. Complexities around applying the human subject model to internet research are explored, such as issues of privacy, anonymity, and informed consent. The authors call for immediate action on the Canadian ethics policy gap and urge the research community to consider the situational, contextual, and temporal aspects of IRE in the development
of flexible and responsive policies that address the complexity and diversity of internet research spaces.
RÉSUMÉ
Un nombre croissant de recherchistes en enseignement et en sciences sociales conçoivent et dirigent des recherches en ligne. La présente revue identifie les lacunes en matière de politique d’éthique en recherche Internet (Internet Research Ethics - IRE) au Canada, et reconnaît l’éventail d’intervenants et de groupes qui ont soit joué un rôle, soit tenté d’en jouer un, dans la
création d’une meilleure politique d’éthique. On y aborde les enjeux éthiques auxquels les politiques et lignes directrices actuelles ne répondent pas et on s’interroge à ce sujet. On y explore les complexités relatives à l’application du
modèle humain à la recherche dans Internet, comme les enjeux portant sur l’anonymat, le consentement éclairé et le respect de la vie privée. Les auteurs invitent à passer immédiatement à l’action en ce qui a trait aux lacunes en matière de politique d’éthique au Canada, et pressent le milieu de la recherche afin qu’il prenne en considération les aspects situationnels,
contextuels et temporels de l’éthique en recherche Internet dans la création de politiques souples et judicieuses qui abordent la complexité et la diversité des espaces de recherche Internet.
There are about 420 registered private career colleges (PCCs) in Ontario – the number is in constant flux. 60% of schools are ten years of age or younger. They serve 53,000 full time equivalent (FTE) students, or about 1 in 15 Ontario postsecondary students. Their overall vocational revenues are in the order of $360M annually. They are mostly small; 70% have total revenues under $1M and average enrolment is under 200.
The reasons why students need to be involved and engaged when they attend college are well established. Engagement can be the difference between completing a degree and dropping out. Research has sought to identify what makes student involvement more likely. Factors like student-faculty interaction, active and collaborative learning experiences, involvement in extracurricular activities, and living on campus have all been shown to make a difference. Not surprisingly, faculty play a critical role in student engagement … from the obvious: facilitating discussions in the classroom; to the often overlooked: maximizing those brief encounters we have with students outside of class. This special report features 15 articles that provide perspectives and advice for keeping students actively engaged in learning activities while fostering more meaningful interactions between students and faculty members, and among the students themselves.
For example, in “Student Engagement: Trade-offs and Payoffs” author E Shelley Reid, associate professor at George Mason University, talks about how to craft engagement-focused questions rather than knowledge questions, and explains her willingness to take chances in ceding some control over students’ learning.
In “The Truly Participatory Seminar” authors Sarah M. Leupen and Edward H. Burtt, Jr., of Ohio Wesleyan University, outline their solution for ensuring all students in their upper division seminar course participate in discussion at some level.
In “Reminders for Improving Classroom Discussion” Roben Torosyan, associate director of the Center for Academic Excellence at Fairfield University, offers very specific advice on balancing student voices, reframing discussions, and probing below the surface of group discussions.
And finally, in “Living for the Light Bulb” authors Aaron J. Nurick and David H. Carhart of Bentley College provide tips on setting the stage for that delightful time in class “when the student’s entire body says ‘Aha! Now I see it!’” Who wouldn’t like to see more light bulbs going on more often? One of the most challenging tasks instructors face is keeping students engaged. Building Student Engagement: 15 Strategies for the College Classroom will help you meet that challenge while ensuring your classroom is a positive and productive learning environment.
This paper examines the implications of expanding the number and scope of college-to-university transfer arrangements as a means of meeting the demand for undergraduate degrees in Ontario. It focuses on two research questions:
1. What are the differences in the learning outcomes of students in college-to-university transfer arrangements compared with those in four-year university programs?
2. What are the differences in the cost per student for college-to-university transfer arrangements compared with four-year university programs?