As laptops become smaller and more ubiquitous, and with the advent of tablets, the idea of taking notes by hand just seems old-fashioned to many students today. Typing your notes is faster — which comes in handy when there's a lot of information to take down. But it turns out there are still advantages to doing things the old-fashioned way.
For one thing, research shows that laptops and tablets have a tendency to be distracting — it's so easy to click over to Facebook in that dull lecture. And a study has shown that the fact that you have to be slower when you take notes by hand is what makes it more useful in the long run.
The more than one million undergraduate students heading to Canadian universities this fall will benefit from innovative
approaches to teaching and learning, including more opportunities for experiential learning. After graduation, they’ll enjoy
higher earnings and better employment outcomes than those without degrees.
ALGONQUIN COLLEGE KEY AREAS OF DIFFERENTIATION
Algonquin College delivers a comprehensive range of applied education and training experiences to
serve the diverse learner choices and the breadth of employer labour demands across Eastern Ontario
and the province.
Algonquin College works with industry partners to:
• Develop labour-market informed programs and services;
• Provide opportunities for work-integrated learning, and experience inside and outside the
classroom; and
• Engage in applied research and commercialization activities that support student success,
employee growth, and social and economic development in the region and beyond.
Algonquin College employees are engaged in the strategic direction of the College to:
• Lead the transformation of Ontario’s postsecondary system;
• Deliver high-quality teaching methods and modalities that leverage technology to enhance the
educational experience; and
• Improve student learning outcomes for career and life success.
Algonquin College broadens learner access to applied postsecondary education and training in
Ontario, demonstrating leadership through:
• Alternative learning modalities and options to suit multiple learning styles and learner
preferences;
• New, targeted approaches to programs and services that improve pathways for learners of diverse
demographic characteristics; and
• Smart investments in technology that enhance the Algonquin learner experience.
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.
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.
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.
95% of those in households earning over $75,000 use the internet and cell phones Those in higher-income households are more likely to use the internet on any given day, own multiple internet-ready devices, do things involving money online, and get news online Those in higher-income households are different from other Americans in their tech ownership and use. Analysis of several recent surveys conducted by the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Projects find that there are key differences between those who live in households making $75,000 or more relative to those in lower-income households. Some 95% of Americans who live in households earning $75,000 or more a year use the internet at least occasionally, compared with 70% of those living in households earning less than $75,000. Even among those who use the internet, the well off are more likely than those with less income to use technology. Of those 95% of higher-income internet users:
- 99% use the internet at home, compared with 93% of the internet users in lower brackets.
- 93% of higher-income home internet users have some type of broadband connection versus 85% of the internet users who live in households earning less than $75,000 per year. That translates into 87% of all those in live in those better-off households having broadband at home.
- 95% of higher-income households own some type of cell phone compared with 83% in households with less income.
Reading instruction has been reformed successfully in the primary grades, but with no consequent improvement in adolescent literacy. This commentary asks the question: What changes can the states and federal government make to education policy that will boost adolescent reading achievement?
In a project funded by the Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario (HEQCO), a team of researchers completed three related studies exploring and assessing innovative practicum models included in a pre- service concurrent teacher education program across two campuses of an Ontario university.
These models are integrated into the field experience component of the Bachelor of Education degree and are intended to provide collaborative and diverse learning opportunities for teacher candidates in various practicum settings. Traditionally, teacher candidates in faculties of education complete their practicum in a school classroom for determined periods of time. In recognizing the need for teacher candidates to become contributing members of varied learning communities (Feiman-Nemser,
2001), the innovative practices studied in this project extend beyond the norm of placing a single teacher candidate with an associate teacher in a publicly funded school to include such models as peer mentorship, alternative service learning and international practicum placements.
Because innovation is an inherently social process – requiring people to make connections, develop ideas, and orchestrate implementation – colleges have built relationships to help their clients increase their scope of innovative practices. Each college is directly involved with many local economic development and innovation networks.
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.
More than 120 years ago, in a small town in British Columbia, a railroad tycoon named Donald Smith hammered the last spike in the Canadian Pacific Railway, linking Canada from the Pacific to the Atlantic with a great ribbon of wood and steel. At the time, many said the project was folly: too expensive, too bold, too difficult. Yet the dreamers behind that tremendous feat
of engineering never wavered in their vision of what the railway would achieve: the opening up of a continent, the end of geographic and economic isolation, and the physical uniting of a great nation. This vision moved closer to its realization some decades later, when a vast network of telephone wires, followed by a system of interprovincial highways and roads, further shrank the distances between farm, town, and city.
This morning I will speak to what we must do next to more effectively address the continuing problem of student attrition in higher education. To do so I will briefly look back on what is now a thirty-year history of research & practice on student retention and reflect on the lessons we have learned over that time. I will argue that we have yet to attend to the deeper educational issues that ultimately shape student success in higher education. Until we do so, our efforts will always be less effective than we desire.
To compete successfully in today’s global economy, countries need to develop the potential of all of their citizens. They need to ensure that men and women develop the right skills and find opportunities to use them productively. Many countries are working towards achieving gender parity at the workplace and in access to jobs. In education, too, many countries have been successful in closing gender gaps in learning outcomes. Yet, as this report reveals, even when boys and girls are equally proficient in mathematics and science, their attitudes towards learning and aspirations for their future are markedly different – and that has a significant impact on their decisions to pursue further education and their choice of career.
ABSTRACT
The purpose of faculty development in terms of the educational role is to assist faculty in becoming better educators. Educational peer review (EPR) is one method of faculty development. This article is based on a study that explored the different development needs of nursing faculty within a school of nursing at an Ontario university. The study explored on three variables of interest: level of skill acquisition, type of faculty appointment, and type of teaching. A qualitative research design in the case-study tradition was employed. Findings indicated that faculty challenges could be grouped into three themes: job knowledge, skills development, and systems challenges. Job knowledge and skills development challenges varied by level of skill acquisition and type of teaching, while identifi ed systems challenges were related to type of appointment. A fl exible EPR program that allows for some customization may lead to an increased ability to meet individual faculty development needs and greater faculty buy-in.
RÉSUMÉ
Le but du développement de faculté dans le rôle éducatif est d’aider la faculté à devenir des meilleurs éducateurs. L’évaluation éducative par les pairs (EEP) est une méthode de développement de faculté. Cette étude a exploré les différences dans les besoins de développement de faculté d’une faculté d’infi rmiers dans une école d’infi rmiers à une université d’Ontario basée sur trois variables d’intérêt : niveau d’acquisition de compétence, type de désignation de faculté et type d’enseignement. Un protocole de recherche qualitatif dans la tradition d’étude de cas a été 54 CJHE / RCES Volume 40, No. 1, 2010 utilisé. Les résultats ont indiqué que des défi s de faculté pourraient être groupés dans trois thèmes: la connaissance de travail, le développement de compétences et les défi s du système. La connaissance de travail et les défi s de développement de compétences ont varié par le niveau de l’acquisition de compétence et le type d’enseignement, alors que
des défi s du système identifi és étaient liés au type de désignation. Un programme fl exible de EEP, qui tient compte de personnalisation, peut mener à la capacité accrue de répondre aux différents besoins de développement de faculté et au plus d’acceptation de faculté.
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.
Cyberbullying Dealing with Online Meaness, Cruelty and Threats
Drawing mainly from HEQCO’s own research, this @Issue paper:
• Describes how the definition of student success has gradually broadened at Ontario colleges and universities;
• Summarizes some of the underlying institutional and student population factors that also impact on most current measures of student success;
• Provides broad observations about some recent findings as they relate to the awareness, utilization and impact of various student service, course-based and other initiatives designed to promote student success;
• Recommends what can be measured – as well as how and what outcomes can be expected – when it comes to initiatives and interventions designed to improve student success.
During the past twenty years, the educational attainment level of Ontario’s population has increased dramatically. The number of individuals residing in Ontario with post-secondary education (PSE) has more than doubled since 1990. With such rapid expansion, there is always the concern that there are now too many PSE graduates in Ontario, leading to higher unemployment rates and/or underemployment rates. On the other hand, it has been argued that Ontario is still lacking PSE graduates with the right skill set to match labour market needs (Miner, 2010). Moreover, it is forecast that 70 per cent of new jobs created in Ontario will require PSE. In order to meet this expected need, the Ontario government seeks to increase the percentage of citizens with PSE attainment from 62 per cent to 70 per cent (Throne speech, 2010).
Is the Ontario labour market able to absorb these PSE graduates? This paper will address this concern through an examination of the early labour market outcomes of graduates in the period between 1982 and 2005. The primary dataset used in this study is from Statistics Canada’s National Graduates Survey (NGS) and Follow-up of Graduates Survey (FOG), which surveyed PSE graduates two and five years after graduation, respectively. There are a total of six cohorts available, including those who graduated in 1982, 1986, 1990, 1995, 2000, and 2005. The class of 2005 does not have a FOG because this survey was terminated after the 2007 NGS. Using all six available cohorts of NGS/FOG data, the following research questions are examined:
1. What is the trend of Ontario PSE graduates’ labour market outcomes between the cohorts of 1982 and 2005?
2. How do the labour market outcomes of Ontario PSE graduates compare to the rest of Canada?
3. Do Ontario PSE graduates’ labour market outcomes improve between two and five years after graduation?
4. How do labour market outcomes differ among graduates with different levels of credentials?
Among the cohorts examined, the unemployment rate of Ontario PSE graduates ranged between 4 per cent and 9 per cent two years after graduation and between 2 per cent and 7 per cent five years after graduation. PSE graduates’ unemployment rate two years after graduation mirrored the overall unemployment rate trend in Ontario and the rest of Canada over the examined period.2 However, Ontario PSE graduates’ unemployment rate five years after graduation was generally lower than the rest of Canada except graduates with advanced degrees from cohorts 1990, 1995 and 2000.
Over the cohorts examined, neither bachelor’s degree holders nor college graduates saw consistent growth in their real earnings, while the earnings of graduates with advanced degrees increased steadily. Between two and five years after graduation, PSE graduates’ earnings increased by between 15 per cent and 35 per cent, depending on credential level and cohort. Graduates with higher credentials were rewarded with higher earnings, and the earnings gap among credentials increased between two and five years after graduation. Compared with their counterparts in the rest of Canada, Ontario PSE graduates earned more, and the earnings gap was greater five years after graduation than it was two years after graduation.
Assessment is a very complex topic. As this essay articulates, it is meant to monitor or to measure what students have learnt. For validity and reliability, and to minimise subjectivity, standardised tests are often adopted and marks are awarded, followed by a process in which test scores are converted into grades. The grades are then recognised as measures of students’ learning attainment. But what assessment actually means is seldom articulated. Is it a measure of the body of knowledge that a student has acquired, or is it also a measure of other attributes?