In recent months, there has been much discussion in the media and among academics about the skills acquired by Canadian university graduates. The issues being raised are threefold. The first concerns the question of whether Canada is facing a “skills gap”. While the Conference Board of Canada (2013a) has argued that we definitely are (and that the long-term economic consequences will be severe), reports by economist Don Drummond and TD Bank indicate that the skills gap is largely a
myth (TD Economics, 2013; Goar, 2013). Others have indicated that current discussions about a skills gap often lack an appropriate level of specificity, making it difficult to assess the merit of these arguments or to generate potentially necessary
solutions (Weingarten, 2013)
The traditional pathway into postsecondary education (PSE) is to enter college or university directly after graduating from high school. Not all students follow the traditional pathway into PSE. The Ontario government recently set a goal “to raise the postsecondary [attainment] rate to 70 per cent” (Speech from the Throne, 2010). In 2011, 64 per cent of Ontario residents aged between 25 and 64 held a PSE credential.1 One way to help reach the target educational attainment rate of 70 per cent is for Ontario colleges and universities to attract and retain learners who follow non-traditional pathways. Therefore, one of the priorities of the Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario (HEQCO) is to evaluate the adequacy and efficiency of non-traditional pathways in obtaining a PSE credential. This study mainly examined one non-traditional pathway, delayed
entry into PSE. Graduates who have taken more years than expected to graduate are also included in the discussion. The purpose of this paper is to address the following research questions:
• What is the demographic profile of these non-traditional graduates?
• Are their program choices and pathways through PSE different from those of direct entrants?
• Do their labour market outcomes differ from those of direct entrants?
What is a mobile education environment?
Education today doesn’t need to take place within the confines of a school building, thanks to the Internet, wireless communication and mobile computing devices. Students and teachers are no longer required to be “stuck inside these four walls” for learning to take place. Teens whose body clocks don’t mesh with 7:15 a.m. class starts can sleep in — then do the work when they are at their mental peak (9 p.m., perhaps). Teachers, too, can gain increased flexibility in organizing their time. Lessons can be more easily tailored for students with whom they can work one-on-one with using interactive online programs. This is the promise of mobile learning, currently in place in some schools across the country. However, most K-12 schools are just starting to scratch the surface of what mobility can mean for education. Those that adapt to mobile technology will find it easier to reach students; research shows this sort of learning at the K-12 level improves student engagement, enthusiasm and test scores.
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.
Over the past decade there has been an upsurge of interest in the quality of postsecondary education, with a particular focus on learning, engagement, and other student outcomes. Instructors, administrators, and other staff across the postsecondary sector have been investigating innovative approaches and services, while many institutions, faculties, departments, and professional associations have established teaching and learning centres or offices to help enhance student success. Governments and governmental organizations have provided support for new approaches and for research projects evaluating them.
This guide, co-sponsored by the McMaster Centre for Leadership in Learning (CLL) and the Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario (HEQCO), and endorsed by the Society for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education (STLHE) and the Canadian Association of College and University Student Services (CACUSS), is intended to assist researchers and evaluators of postsecondary educational outcomes. The intended audiences for this document include, but are by no means restricted to, the following:
• faculty members and educational developers investigating innovative approaches or technologies designed to enhance learning in postsecondary contexts;
• faculty members and administrators leading initiatives for students enrolled in programs or courses that are considered particularly challenging;
• anyone involved in professional development initiatives for faculty, graduate students, and others intended to enhance teaching and learning effectiveness;
• student service providers at postsecondary institutions; and
• students and student associations focusing on effective teaching, learning and student success.
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
This paper explores the evolution of digital communication skills development in post-secondary educational institutions around the world. It considers how expectations of and opportunities for effective digital communicators extend well beyond the domain of graphic and visual artists, videographers, and web designers. Today, competencies that have traditionally been expected from art and design professionals are now expected from professionals working in such disciplines as journalism, education, and medicine.
The emergence of new post-secondary fields of study such as informatics, medical imaging, instructional design, and educational technology, featuring digital proficiencies as core components of discipline-specific epistemology, further extends the notion of what it means to be a proficient digital communicator.
The Evolution of Literacy
Today’s focus on building capacity for effectively communicating ideas and information extends beyond the traditional notion of literacy. Historically, literacy was defined as the ability to read and write. In the current era, a literate individual is one who has developed competencies that leverage reading and writing skills toward the goal of effective communication. In today’s world, a proficient communicator needs to be computer literate, visually literate, information literate, media literate, and digitally literate.
To be computer literate, one must know how to use a word-processing program, a spreadsheet program, a slide-presentation program, and how to perform the appropriate maintenance and security to ensure that his or her computer works properly. Visually literate individuals understand the nature of images and multimedia and comprehend how visual representations are created, produced manipulated, and shared.
Being information literate entails knowing how to find, analyze, and share accurate information coming from valid and authoritative sources. A media literate person has a deep understanding of the means by which communications are created and shared. This includes mass media, such as newspapers and online news sources; television; magazines; websites; and “long tail” interactive social media, including RSS, blogs, wikis, and micro-blogging applications for Twitter. The boundaries of digital literacy continues to morph and change as the digital world around us morphs and changes. The 2010 United States Department of Education’s National Technology Plan recently observed that our education system relies on core sets of standards-based concepts and competencies to form the basis of what all students should know and should be able to do. Whether the domain is English language arts, mathematics, sciences, social studies, history, art, or music, states should continue to consider the integration of 21st-century competencies and expertise, such as critical thinking, complex problem solving, collaboration, multimedia communication, and technological competencies demonstrated by professionals in various
disciplines. (http://www.ed.gov/sites/default/files/netp2010.pdf )
To help with the task of bounding expectations, some professional associations are providing guidelines to members that situate definitions and standards for practice under the purview of the association issuing the guidelines. For example, the International Society of Technology in Education’s (ISTE) National Educational Technology Standards for Students (NETS−S) gives K-12 teachers a framework for guiding skill development in elementary and secondary schools. NETS-S suggests that the digitally literate student knows how to use technologies in socially acceptable ways and has a healthy understanding concerning privacy and safety issues. The digitally literate student can also demonstrate creativity and innovation, create new knowledge collaboratively in a face-to-face environment and at a distance, think critically, and use technology effectively and productively in order to share the results of such efforts.
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.
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 nsfws@osu.edu.
ABSTRACT
In this article we investigate Canadian university and college students’interpersonal confl icts and exposure to abuse and violence during their postsecondary studies and assess the emotional, social, and academic impact of these experiences. Our findings, based on a sample 1174 university and college students in Southwestern Ontario, revealed that although most of the incidents reported were verbal in nature and had relatively little emotional or academic impact, a small proportion of students reported experiencing serious violent incidents including sexual assault or rape, and these incidents have had a significant impact on their lives. Female students living on their own reported greater impact of negative social experiences than those who were living in college or university residences. In addition, students who reported confl icts involving institutional policies or rules, including what they perceived to be unfair workloads or grading practices, indicated that such experiences had a negative impact on their academic performance. We discuss these fi ndings in the context of maintaining safe, healthy climates on university and college campuses.
RÉSUMÉ
Dans cet article, nous étudions les confl its interpersonnels et l’exposition à l’abus et à la violence des étudiantes et étudiants canadiens des niveaux collégial et universitaire au cours de leurs études postsecondaires, ainsi que l’impact émotionnel, social et académique de ces expériences. Les résultats sont basés sur un échantillon de 1174 étudiantes et étudiants du sud-ouest de l’Ontario. Les résultats démontrent que, bien que la plupart des incidents signalés soient des confl its de nature verbale qui ont eu peu d’impact émotionnel ou académique, une petite proportion d’étudiantes et d’étudiants ont quand même signalé des incidents violents, y compris l’agression sexuelle et le viol, et ces expériences ont eu un impact signifi catif sur leur qualité de vie. Les étudiantes vivant seules ont signalé un plus grand impact que celles vivant en résidence au collège ou à l’université. Les étudiantes et étudiants qui ont signalé des expériences reliées aux politiques institutionnelles et aux règles d’évaluation telles que des charges de travail et des évaluations perçues comme inéquitables ont indiqué que ces expériences ont eu un impact négatif sur leur rendement académique. Nous discutons de ces résultats dans le contexte des efforts visant à maintenir un climat sain de sécurité dans les universités et les collèges.
Although research on Canadian higher education has advanced considerably over the past few decades, the opportunities for university level study of higher education in Canada are still quite limited . Only four universities offer higher education programs; only one has a higher education department; and only a handful of other institutions offer even a course in higher education. The number of students enrolled in higher education programs in Canada is about 200, compared to about 6,000 in the United States; the number of faculty about 15 compared to 700 in the U.S.
Ontario firms and organizations are being challenged to increase productivity through innovation in order to compete on the fiercely competitive world stage and improve the quality of life of Ontarians. Yet, Ontario suffers from innovation gaps
that place its productivity and prosperity goals at risk.
Ontario’s 24 Colleges of Applied Arts and Technology have long been recognized for their contributions to career-oriented education and training programs that have strengthened the Ontario economy throughout the latter part of the 20th century.
Poised on the threshold of the 21st century, college-based applied research and development (R&D) and business and industry innovation activities are of ever increasing importance to the achievement of Ontario’s productivity and prosperity
goals.
The Higher Education Report 2011-2013 is part of a suite of technical publications which report on the Australian higher education sector for the period 2011-2013. The Higher Education Report 2011-2013 provides:
• an overview of the higher education sector for the period 2011 to 2013;
• details of funding allocations under the Higher Education Support Act 2003 (HESA); and
• an overview of the outcomes of funding and other departmental programmes (including the
allocation of places).
Analysis of student, staff and financial data is published separately and available at:
http://education.gov.au/higher-education-statistics and https://education.gov.au/finance-
publication.
In a longitudinal, randomized field experiment, we tested the impact of transformational leadership, enhanced by training, on follower development and performance. Experimental group leaders received transformational leadership training, and control group leaders, eclectic leadership training. The sample included 54 military leaders, their 90 direct followers, and 724 indirect followers. Results indicated the leaders in the experimental group had a more positive impact on direct followers' development and on indirect followers' performance than did the leaders in the control group.
In 1999, GLSEN identified that little was known about the school experiences of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) youth and that LGBT youth were nearly absent from national studies of adolescents. We responded to this national need for data by launching the first National School Climate survey, and we continue to meet this continued need for current data by conducting the study every two years. Since then, the biennial National School Climate Survey has documented the unique challenges LGBT students face and identified interventions that can improve school climate. The survey documents the prevalence of anti-LGBT language and victimization, such as experiences of harassment and assault in school. In addition, the survey examines school policies and practices that may contribute to negative experiences for LGBT students and make them feel as if they are not valued by their school communities. The survey also explores the effects that a hostile school climate may have on LGBT students’ educational outcomes and well-being. Finally, the survey reports on the availability and the utility of LGBT-related school resources and supports that may offset the negative effects of a hostile school climate and promote a positive learning experience. In addition to collecting this critical data every two years, we also add and adapt survey questions to respond to the changing world for LGBT youth. For example, in the 2013 survey we added a question about hearing negative remarks about transgender people (e.g., “tranny”). The National School Climate Survey remains one of the few studies to examine the school experiences of LGBT students nationally, and its results have been vital to GLSEN’s understanding
of the issues that LGBT students face, thereby informing our ongoing work to ensure safe and
affirming schools for all.
In our 2013 survey, we examine the experiences of LGBT students with regard to indicators of negative school climate:
Canada’s universities develop globally aware graduates with the internationally competitive skills suited to the jobs of today and tomorrow, while fostering globally connected research and scholarship. Results from a new survey by Universities Canada highlight how universities across the country are highly engaged in and committed to internationalization – and where there is room for improvement.
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.
Technology and the Problem of Change
ACT defines readiness for college as acquisition of the knowledge and skills a student needs to enroll and succeed in credit-bearing, first-year courses at a postsecondary institution, such as a two- or four-year college, trade school, or technical school.
Simply stated, readiness for college means not needing to take remedial courses in college.
Today, college readiness also means career readiness. While not every high school graduate plans to attend college, the majority of the fastest-growing jobs that require a high school diploma, pay a salary above the poverty line for a family of four, and provide opportunities for career advancement require knowledge and skills comparable to those expected of
the first-year college student (ACT, 2006b). We must therefore educate all high school students according to a common academic expectation, one that prepares them for both postsecondary education and the workforce. Anything less will not give high school graduates the foundation of academic skills they will need to learn additional skills as their jobs change or
as they change jobs throughout their careers.
It’s 4 a.m. in Alaska — not a time when you expect many people, much less teenagers, to be awake. Yet, about 100 eager sophomore world history students are gathered in three high schools spread across the Kenai Peninsula on Alaska’s southern edge, excitedly looking at video screens mounted on their classroom walls. The teens are here to connect with students from the Arab Minority school in Nazareth, Israel. They are joined by students in schools in Louisiana and South Dakota.
For an hour, a moderator in Manhattan bounces the conversation back and forth, pinging questions from school to school as the students get to know a little more about each other and the different — and similar — worlds in which they live.
”It was so cool,” says Emily Evans, a 16-year-old in Greg Zorbas’ world history class at Kenai Central High School. The students from Israel ”thought so highly of us because we were from America.”
Now, says Evans, when the Middle East is a topic in school, ”it’s a lot more interesting. Before it was just, we’re reading a book on it and it’s not very real to us. But it’s real and you can see them and talk to them and see firsthand how it is. Now I pay more attention in history class.”
The videoconferencing session Evans and the other students experienced is the type of video communication that is becoming more common in education at all levels around the world, as the walls between classrooms disappear. This Center for Digital Education white paper shows how video collaboration is an essential part of the K-20 education environment that enables cost savings, engages students and creates a more productive learning experience. It prepares students with the skills to thrive in a future workforce that will depend on video collaboration technologies. Indeed, today’s video collaboration is rapidly moving from a ”nice to have” classroom enhancement to a ”must have” necessity.