This report aims to introduce the reader to the apprenticeship sector in Ontario by providing an overview of the current state of affairs. We begin by outlining the structure and governance of apprenticeship in the province and survey the literature relevant to some of the policy debates regarding apprenticeship. The report then identifies and consolidates key data concerning the various components of this complex system, providing comparative Canadian data where relevant to identify areas of strength and weakness. The intent is for this report to provide a firm foundation from which further discussions concerning apprenticeship might proceed.
In November 2005, the province of Ontario and the federal government signed two historic agreements – the Canada-Ontario Labour Market Development Agreement and the Canada-Ontario Labour Market Partnership Agreement. One year later, on Nov. 24, 2006, key labour market stakeholders, including users, delivery agents and government came together to collectively take stock of progress and to explore how partners can help governments move forward with successfully
implementing the agreements.
The symposium, Developing Skills through Partnerships, was co-hosted by Colleges Ontario, the Ontario Chamber of
Commerce, ONESTEP, and the Canadian Policy Research Networks.
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.
Technology and the Problem of Change
There is currently a powerful push-pull factor in schooling. The push factor is that school is increasingly boring for students and alienating for teachers. The pull fac-tor is that the exploding and alluring digital world is irresistible, but not necessarily productive in its raw form. The push-pull dynamic makes it inevitable that disruptive changes will occur. I have been part of a group that has been developing innova-tive responses to the current challenges. This response consists of integrating three components: deep learning goals, new pedagogies, and technology. The result will be more radical change in the next five years than has occurred in the past 50 years.
Is it just that time of the semester, or are academics more and more stressed out? In the past week alone, I’ve talked with:
-A colleague emotionally reeling from counseling two students who each had a parent die this semester.
-Another unsettled colleague who received an expletive-filled email from an angry student demanding to "speak to your supervisor."
-A friend at another institution buried under a mountain of papers — the product of a fourth course that he’s teaching on overload to make a little extra money.
SUMMARY
This paper analyses business-driven innovation in education by looking at education-related patents. It first draws a picture of the challenges for innovation in the formal education sector, which suffers from a poor knowledge ecology: science is hardly linked to core teaching and administrative practices. It then turns to a common indicator of innovation: patents. In the case of education, patents typically cover educational tools. An analysis of education-related patents over the past 20 years shows a clear rise in the production of highly innovative educational technologies by businesses, typically building on advances in information and communication technology. While this increase in educational innovations may present new opportunities for the formal education sector, the emerging tool industry currently targets the nonformal education rather than the formal education system. We shortly discuss why business entrepreneurs may be less interested in the market of formal education.
RÉSUMÉ
Cet article porte sur l’innovation entrepreneuriale dans le secteur de l’éducation, à partir d’une analyse des dépôts de brevets dans le secteur éducatif. Premièrement, il propose un tableau des défis de l’innovation dans le secteur de l’éducation formelle, dont l’écologie du savoir est faible : la science y est peu liée avec le cœur des pratiques pédagogiques et administratives. L’étude porte ensuite sur un indicateur courant de l’innovation : les brevets. Dans le cas de l’éducation, les brevets couvrent généralement des « outils » éducatifs. L’analyse des brevets éducatifs durant les vingt dernières années montre une claire croissance de la production de technologies éducatives hautement innovantes par des entreprises privées, qui s’appuient souvent sur les progrès des technologies d’information et de communication. Bien que cette croissance des innovations éducatives puisse donner de nouvelles opportunités au secteur formel de l’éducation, l’industrie émergente d’outils éducatifs cible actuellement les secteurs informels d’éducation. Nous discutons brièvement les raisons pour lesquelles les entrepreneurs privés semblent moins intéressés par le secteur de l’éducation formelle.
The following Guidelines are intended for use in planning, implementing, and/or judging the benefits and contributions of campus-based assessment efforts. The Guidelines were developed through conversations with institutional researchers, faculty, practitioners, and assessment scholars that focused on which aspects of the assessment process were most important in optimizing the utility ofassessment efforts on college campuses. Additionally, the authors of the Guidelines reviewed the major publications focused on assessment utilization and drew from their collective experience of over 50 years working in the area of higher education assessment.
The results of the latest MetLife Survey of the American Teacher confirm what many of us are experiencing and seeing in the depressing descent of the teaching profession. In the past two years, the percentage of teachers surveyed who reported being very satisfied in their jobs has declined sharply, from 59 percent to 44 percent. The number who indicated they were thinking of
leaving the profession has jumped from 17 percent to 29 percent. Imagine being a student knowing that every other teacher you encounter is becoming less and less satisfied, and close to one in three would rather be somewhere else.
Helping individuals obtain a college or university education, regardless of background, remains a key priority for provincial and federal governments in Canada. More and more postsecondary education (PSE) students, however, struggle academically. While PSE enrolment has increased, completion rates have fallen. Within Canadian universities today, about 70 per cent of entering students eventually graduate, and some schools face completion rates of as low as 50 per cent. Average grades have also fallen or been inflated. Administrators’ efforts to reverse these trends by offering additional support services such as advising, time management workshops and remedial education have been generally unsuccessful. Another explanation for worsening academic performance is declining study time. Recent evidence shows a substantial fall in average study times among postsecondary students over the last four decades. Greater financial constraints on today’s students and an increased need to work part time may prevent them from spending more time on school. On the other hand, poor-performing students may simply see less need to achieve better grade performance because they perceive obtaining an undergraduate degree as the primary benefit from postsecondary education. Or it is possible that more PSE students are myopic. Students invest time and effort for uncertain returns that are not realized until many years later. This uncertainty may lead students to focus more on immediate gratification and present opportunities and spend less time on school work. Many stakeholders are interested in how to motivate students to overcome these difficulties and perform better in school.
The goal of the Opportunity Knocks (OK) Project was to effectively learn more about the potential for merit-based scholarships to provide both additional financial support and more motivation for improved academic performance. OK was a randomized field experiment that involved first year and second year students receiving financial aid in 2008/09 at the University of Toronto Scarborough (UTSC). Students on financial aid were chosen because monetary incentives should be more meaningful to them. The campus includes a diverse student body, most of whom commute from home. About ten thousand full-time students attend each year. All first year and second year students on financial aid were invited to participate in OK. Those selected by lottery into the treatment group were offered merit scholarships for obtaining course grades above 70 per cent, as well as regular peer advising services. More specifically, for each one-semester course (with a full course load being 5 courses worth 5 2.5 credits), students received $100 for obtaining a grade average of 70 per cent and $20 for each percentage point above 70 per cent. For example, a student receiving a grade of 76 per cent would have received $220. If a student received 76 per cent in all of her or his 10 courses over the school year (5 each semester), she or he would have received a total of $2,200 (equal to 10 × $220).
OK participants selected for treatment were also assigned a peer advisor of the same gender and were offered opportunities to engage in e-mail correspondence with that advisor to discuss academic matters, as well as issues arising from campus life. Peer advisors were enthusiastic, paid upper year students or recent graduates with successful academic achievement. Each peer advisor was assigned to 50 students who had been selected for the OK treatment program. Advisors were the key front-line service and information providers for OK participants. They proactively sent e-mails to advisees approximately once every two to three weeks, whether or not a response was acknowledged. These e-mails offered advice on upcoming academic events and workshops and on how to approach particular periods in the academic calendar such as midterms and finals. Advisors also provided information about the Opportunity Knocks scholarships, including payment schedules and reminders of how scholarships were calculated.
Interest in leadership increased during the early part of the twentieth century. Early leadership theories focused on what qualities distinguished between leaders and followers, while subsequent theories looked at other variables such as situational factors and skill level. While many different leadership theories have emerged, most can be classified as one of eight major types:.
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.
• As part of the Open Ontario Plan outlined in the 2010 Speech from the Throne and the 2010 Budget, the government announced the intention to establish an Ontario Online Institute (OOI).
• While Ontario has a strong foundation to build on including existing elearning initiatives such as Contact North/Contact Nord, elearnnetwork/ reseauelearning and OntarioLearn, it was recognized that these initiatives do not capture the full scope of elearning activity taking place at our institutions. As a result, a survey of colleges and universities was done in spring 2010.
As a result, a survey of colleges and universities was done in spring 2010.
The 2013 Ontario Budget will play an essential part in ensuring the province has the qualified workforce it needs for the years ahead.
The challenges facing Ontario are significant. Young people throughout the province are struggling to find meaningful
work. People who have lost their jobs after years at the same company continue to seek opportunities to train for new
careers.
Meanwhile, there is an increasing skills mismatch in Ontario and throughout the country, as many employers struggle to
find qualified people to hire.
As Seneca College president emeritus Rick Miner predicted in his seminal report, People Without Jobs, Jobs Without
People: Ontario’s Labour Market Future, there is a growing divide between the qualifications sought by employers and
the education and training of much of the workforce. Growing numbers of job seekers simply aren’t qualified to fill a large
number of vacant positions.
If you’re interested in using technology tools to enhance your teaching, it’s easy to get overwhelmed by the mountain of information out there. To make matters worse, much of it is either highly technical or simply not very practical for the college classroom.
Teaching with Technology: Tools and Strategies to Improve Student Learning approaches teaching technologies from your perspective — discussing what works, what doesn’t, and how to implement the best ideas in the best ways.
These articles were written by John Orlando, PhD, program director at Norwich University, as part of the Teaching with Technology column on Faculty Focus. You’ll find the articles are loaded with practical information as well as links to valuable resources. Articles in the report include:
• Using VoiceThread to Build Student Engagement
• Wikipedia in the Classroom: Tips for Effective Use
• Blogging to Improve Student Learning: Tips and Tools for Getting Started
• Prezi: A Better Way of Doing Presentations
• Using Polling and Smartphones to Keep Students Engaged
Whether the courses you teach are face-to-face, online, blended, or all of the above, this report
explains effective ways to incorporate technology into your courses to create a rich learning
experience for students, and a rewarding teaching experience for you.
Mary Bart
Editor
Faculty Focus
The Student Success Program (SSP) at George Brown College is designed to foster a supportive college environment for first-year students. The College committed to fund the SSP for a five-year period beginning in 2008-2009. As part of the SSP, a range of academic and non-academic activities are offered to first-year students in order to promote collaborative learning and peer interaction. Some of these activities take place in class, while others are offered outside of class. The SSP components are tailored to programs within individual centres or schools, so as to provide the types of activities best suited to assist first-year students in those areas.
This paper presents an overview of gender differences in education outcomes in OECD countries. A rich set of indicators describes the improvement of educational attainment among women over the past decades, and various dimensions of male under-performance in education. Possible explanatory factors include incentives provided by changing employment opportunities for women, demographic trends, as well as the higher sensitivity of boys to disadvantaged socio-economic backgrounds. Gender differences in field of study and in performance by subject are found to be related to attitudes and self-perceptions towards academic subjects, which are in turn influenced by social norms. A number of policy options to
address gender gaps are presented in the final section of the paper.
• Recognition for excellence in polytechnic education.
Mission
• To champion innovation and excellence in career-focussed education, training, and applied research.
• To serve the ever-changing needs of our diverse and growing community.
• To inspire students and employees to strive towards their highest potential.
PREAMBLE
Seamless Pathways: A Symposium on Improving
Transitions from High School to College gathered prominent Ontario educators, policy-makers and government leaders in Toronto on June 6, 2006. The purpose of the symposium was to bring together an expert group of education leaders to:
learn about other jurisdictions approaches to building meaningful pathways that contribute to higher success rates in secondary school and higher participation in post-secondary education discuss what has been learned from current research; the School/College/Work Initiative projects; and the unique role of colleges and apprenticeship pathways in student success
• identify systemic issues and develop policy advice for creating better school-college linkages in order to raise both participation and success rates for post-secondary students.
There was a clear need for a high-level strategic discussion on the future of transitions in order to: follow up on the recommendations in Ontario: A Leader in Learning (the Rae report on postsecondary education) respond to the Ontario government's Learning to 18 and Student Success strategies, such as dual credits and high-skills majors.
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.