For the last 16 years, I have struggled with depression. That means I have had 16 years of highs and lows. Sixteen
years of ups and of downs. And 16 years of therapy — for 16 years I have been chasing a cure. It also means I have had 16 years to “hear things,” i.e. to be the recipient of well-meaning, but misinformed, comments. To hear good- intentioned, but unsolicited, advice. To receive encouraging yet completely misguided remarks. Remarks about my “problem.” Remarks about the state, and
severity, of my illness. Remarks about why I cannot have depression, because I do not look depressed. Because I have too much to be thankful for. Because I am too strong.
A teacher’s prime directive is to help students learn. So what is learning? There are a variety of definitions. Figure 1 contains 21 definitions of learning. Read through this list and choose two to three with which you feel most comfortable. (Note: There is no “correct” definition.)
The government of Ontario has signalled the need for Ontario’s publicly funded universities to seek additional productivity gains while sustaining access and quality in light of fiscal constraints. It has identified differentiation as a key policy driver to achieve these goals.
Implementation of these provincial directions likely involves consideration of how universities deploy their faculty to meet their differentiated teaching and research mandates. In fact, a preliminary examination by HEQCO of productivity in the Ontario public postsecondary system suggested that how universities deploy their faculty resources may be one of the most promising opportunities for universities to increase their productivity (HEQCO, 2012).
Graduate students have embraced professional development as an integral part of their education, but what about their supervisors and departments? As part of an initiative to reduce completion times the school of graduate studies at the University of Toronto hosted a series of faculty development workshops to optimize supervisory mentorship in graduate student research progress and professional development.
A blended learning solution often calls for a platform for capturing in-class and out-of-class activities and content, and delivering it live or on demand to students. In just a few short years, colleges and universities have come to understand the many benefits of blended learning, from pedagogical to administrative. Lecture capture is one method of achieving blended learning.
In many institutions, introducing technology into the classroom presents opportunities – and obstacles to overcome. The introduction of any new technology – no matter how transparent or easy to use – requires changed behaviours. In education, the challenges can be grouped into three key areas: cultural, process, and academic. Any of these can hinder achieving return on investment and the ability to leverage – and scale – blended learning technologies. While the benefits of these technologies are
many, identifying and building on them requires strategy and preparation. This white paper, based on interviews with five universities as well as Wainhouse Research’s observations of best practices, identifies five compelling lessons about how to best drive adoption of lecture capture. The lessons include:
􀁸 Business value
􀁸 Inter-departmental cooperation
􀁸 Academic quality
􀁸 Student satisfaction
􀁸 Champions
The paper examines the five universities in detail, describing how each has found its own unique path to successful adoption of blended learning technologies. The paper also offers ten specific steps to overcome cultural, process, or academic obstacles. These are, in short:
1. Understand adoption cycles
2. Involve the right people
3. Clone your champions
4. Identify benefits to your overall institution & map goals of deployment
5. Plan extensively while remaining flexible and open to revising those plans
6. Create a consistent service model
7. Design sustainable policies
8. Create substantive processes for measurement
9. Encourage peer review
10. Leverage best of breed capture and delivery mechanisms
Blended Learning Technology: Navigating the Challenges of Large-Scale Adoption
Copyright © 2012 Wainhouse Research, LLC Page 4
The paper also offers a number of suggestions for addressing the issue of policy, which is so important in academic settings. Understanding how best to create policy can enable colleges and universities to harness and maximize the return on current or future investments in blending learning technologies.
Let's put the worries about our new curriculum into perspective. We live in an increasingly challenging, complex, inter-connected and unpredictable world beset by a range of seemingly insoluble problems.
This is the view of Thomas Homer-Dixon (pictured), an expert in peace and conflict studies, who believes these problems arise from "tectonic stresses". He identifies five: population stress, energy stress, environmental stress, climate stress and economic stress (the ever-widening gap between rich and poor people).
On-line, blended and other forms of web enhanced learning are becoming increasingly popular as a means of delivering post-secondary education. According to a recent report completed by the Higher Education Strategy Associates, 57% of
Canadian university courses make use of some online component (Rogers, Usher & Kaznowska, 2011).
The decision of Mohawk College to move to blended learning was part of a strategic plan begun in 2008 that focused on “advancing educational outcomes through the strategic integration of learning technologies” (Mohawk College 1). To this end the college formulated a committee composed of faculty, administration and management to examine the various learning platforms current at that time (FirstClass, WebCT) and tasked with deciding which learning management system the college
should adopt. They selected Desire2Learn (D2L) as the learning management system to be adopted, and a further plan was developed to have all courses fully blended within five years of the initial start-up of D2L in 2009. Blended learning is defined as using the web “to deliver substantial course materials accompanied by a strategic reduction in face-to-face contact. Online and
face-to-face learning spaces are thoughtfully integrated, maximizing the unique characteristics of each, in order to enhance the quality of the learning experience” (Mohawk College 2).
The Ontario government has indicated its intention to negotiate individual mandate statements with each of Ontario’s public postsecondary institutions and to amend funding formulas to focus resources on what each institution does best. These actions signal the government’s desire to pursue a policy of greater institutional differentiation within the Ontario public postsecondary system. The purpose of this paper is to inform and assist the development of a differentiation framework for the university sector by describing the diversity of Ontario universities on variables that other jurisdictions have used to differentiate their university systems. These variables are important to consider first because they are globally accepted, and therefore influence the way the rest of the world will judge the Ontario system and its quality.
Post-secondary education is effectively a requirement to succeed in today’s labour market. Unfortunately, while the demand for education has increased, public funding has failed to keep up. Public funding shortfalls have resulted in a significant growth of costs that have been downloaded onto individual students, namely in the form of high tuition fees. From 1990 to 2014, national average tuition fees have seen an inflation-adjusted increase of over 155%. In Ontario, tuition fees have increased over 180%.
For most students—often having spent little time fully active in the workforce—funding their education has become increasingly difficult. Many students must now take on significant levels of debt to pay for their education. Students requiring a Canada Student Loan now graduate with an average debt of over $28,000.
Relying on debt to finance education means the full impact of high tuition fees is delayed until after graduation—when it is then compounded by interest. This impact is now exacerbated by the effects of the Great Recession and the rising trend of precarious, and even unpaid, employment. The broader effects of high levels of student debt on both the individual and the general economy are now becoming obvious:
In 2004, former Ontario Premier Bob Rae was invited to lead the Postsecondary Education Review to provide advice on the seemingly intractable job of reconciling the province’ aspirations for a high quality, highly accessible and affordable postsecondary education system with the level of financial support that governments have felt able to provide for this endeavor. The report was considered extremely successful in providing 28 recommendations that were “sensitive to long- standing patterns of public opinion, articulated new public goals, [and] recognized the important role to be played by each major stakeholder.”(Clark and Trick, 2006, p. 180).
CWUR 2018-2019 | Top Universities in the World
Strong culture, strong impact focuses on the role of culture in driving high-impact entrepreneurship in G20 countries. The report provides actionable recommendations for governments and a clear, time-bound path for achieving support for young entrepreneurs. Our report, released alongside this year’s G20 Young Entrepreneurs’ Alliance (YEA) Summit in Turkey, builds on our Avoiding a lost generation reports. It drills down on the one driver that is at once omnipresent, yet difficult to quantify or capture, for an entrepreneurial ecosystem:
entrepreneurial culture.
ABSTRACT
Community college systems were established across North America from the early 1960s through the early 1970s. The new systems had two principal models: in one model, the college combined lower-division, university-level general education with technical education programs; in the other, most or all of the colleges were intended to concentrate on technical education. Ontario was the largest of the provinces and states in North America that opted for the second model. Many of the issues that planners confronted when designing these college systems have either persisted or re-emerged in recent years. This article re-examines the debate on the design of Ontario’s colleges that took place when they were founded and considers its implications for the present.
RÉSUMÉ
Depuis le début des années 1960 et jusqu’au début des années 1970, lorsqu’on créait des réseaux de collèges communautaires partout en Amérique du Nord, deux modèles majeurs étaient proposés pour ces nouveaux réseaux. Dans un des modèles, le collège combinait l’enseignement général universitaire de division inférieure avec les programmes d’enseignement technique ; dans l’autre, la plupart des collèges, sinon tous, se concentraient sur l’enseignement technique. L’Ontario était la plus importante parmi les provinces et les États en Amérique du Nord qui ait opté pour le deuxième modèle. Beaucoup des défi s auxquels les planifi cateurs ont été confrontés lorsqu’ils ont conçu le réseau des collèges sont encore présents ou sont réapparus au cours des dernières années. Cet article réexamine l’ancien débat sur la conception des collèges de l’Ontario et considère ses implications actuelles.
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.
Though they are private businesses operating in a competitive market, they intersect with public interests on several fronts. They must register with government and are subject to consumer protection requirements (including student contracts, tuition refund policies, contribution to a train-out fund that takes care of students in the event of a sudden closure). Their programs of study must be government-approved following an external, third-party quality review. They are subject to sanction (financial penalties, even closure) if they fail to meet these requirements.
Education is overloaded with programs and data. The growth of digital power has aided and abetted the spread of accountability-driven data—adequate yearly progress, test results for every child in every grade, common core standards, formative and summative assessments galore. Each data set shows a full continuum from below standard to exceed standards. Educators need to be able to put FACES on the data at all points on the continuum and, to know what to do to help individual children behind the statistical mask.
Universities and colleges strive to grow and fulfill their mission of educating their communities. Communicating the data around that mission—how many students are graduating? What does the student population look like? Is the University managing its finances?— is an important component of any institution’s daily life. In this era of larger data and disparate data sources, that can be especially challenging. However, institutions that have been able to present important data online have been able to tell their stories better and engage with their communities in a meaningful way.
This paper presents eight ways that higher education is using analytics and data visualization, supported by examples from real institutions. It also addresses common issues such as keeping data up-to-date as well as appropriately private and secure.
Grade Change - Tracking Online Education in the United State is the eleventh annual report on the state of online learning in U.S. higher education. The survey is designed, administered and analyzed by the Babson Survey Research Group, with data collection conducted in partnership with the College Board. Using responses from more than 2,800 colleges and
universities, this study is aimed at answering fundamental questions about the nature and extent of online education.
As Canada’s youth consider their increasingly broad and complex array of post-secondary education (PSE) options, they are faced with potentially costly decisions. Moreover, they often do not have the information they need to make appropriate choices, which can negatively impact their participation and persistence in PSE. For many students, it is a challenge to choose,
design and follow a post-secondary pathway to its conclusion without deviating from their original plan. Students are increasingly taking non-linear pathways through PSE. Some may need to relocate and attend a different institution. Many students may decide to change the focus of their study, while others may wish to change their program entirely. Some may shift their goals from academic to applied forms of study, or vice versa. However, the structures of post-secondary systems in our provinces, and the various mechanisms that bind them, do not always provide clearly apparent and unobstructed pathways for students, particularly for mobile students. These problems are exacerbated by shifting mandates, roles, and labels of institutions across the Canadian PSE sector.
Self-care -- maintaining a healthy and balanced lifestyle through individually determined activities -- has been found
to improve productivity and a sense of well-being as well as physical and emotional health in a variety of work
settings. Although it is still considered a somewhat controversial concept, many colleges and universities are now
regarding self-care as essential for the optimal well-being of everyone in their community: faculty, staff,
administrators, students, support personnel and others. The benefits of promoting self-care in the workplace are
well documented.
This article examines the impact of culturally responsive pedagogy in an introduction to university course developed in collaboration with local and place-based First Nations communities, Aboriginal Access Studies and the Faculty of Education of the University of British Columbia’s Okanagan Campus. In keeping with requests that Indigenous worldviews be incorporated into curriculum, the content of EDUC 104, modelled on the University of South Carolina’s University 101 Programs, was adapted to incorporate Indigenous traditions of teaching and learning. The introductory course included a holistic approach aimed at supporting the social and emotional well-being of students. Facilitated by peer mentoring, collaborative circles of learning introduced seminal concepts and facilitated the progressive use of newly learned skills. As part of a longitudinal research, the following presents the content of interviews conducted at the conclusion of the courses. Analysis indicated that three themes emerged emphasizing the importance of the circles of learning, peer mentoring, and the relationship with the instructor. In particular, the results demonstrated the perceived value of the course from the students’ perspectives.