AAUP sessions center on faculty members' role and responsibilities regarding classroom conversations about race.
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.
Ontario's colleges of applied arts and technology (CAATs) were granted authority to offer bachelor degrees in 2000, and the first degree programs were offered in 2002. The rationale for granted colleges permission to offer degrees was threefold: first it was to meet the needs of a higher skilled workforce in a changing economic, social and political environment; second, it was to widen access to degrees for Ontarians overall, but particularly for students from disadvantaged backgrounds who are more likely to attend a college than a university; and third, it was anticipated that college degrees would be less expensive than university degrees for students and governments (Skolnik 2016b).
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).
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.
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:
Consuming information online is as simple as a click, scroll, or swipe these days. All searches are not created equal — and rarely do we think about fact checking what we find on the internet.
“…The internet is actually changing the way we read, the way we reason, and even the way we think, and all for the worse,” says Tom Nichols in his recently published book, The Death of Expertise.
In higher education, I think it is imperative that we teach our learners and peers about what it means to participate and interact in digital spaces and places. How can our institutions help students, staff, and faculty “be” online and consider how both information and digital environments impact knowledge sharing and learning.
Chpt. 12 from Prentice Hall
Leadership and management must go hand in hand. They are not the same thing. But they are necessarily linked, and complementary. Any effort to separate the two is likely to cause more problems than it solves.Still, much ink has been spent delineating the differences. The manager’s job is to plan, organize and coordinate. The leader’s job is to inspire and motivate.
As the world continues to watch the evolving implications of the Trump administration’s executive orders to restrict certain nationalities from entering the United States, academic institutions have been acting swiftly in response, from university presidents issuing statements against the ban, to widespread student protests. Many campus communities agree international students and scholars not only bring diversity to a university campus, but also contribute to vital research and diverse perspectives to global affairs.
Post-secondary education is the great equalizer. It gives us all a chance to reach higher no matter where we come from or whatever our background. Both of my parents came from very modest upbringings and saw a university degree as a ticket to a good job and an entry to Ontario’s middle class. They, in turn, placed a high importance on post-secondary education and encouraged my sister and I to follow in their footsteps.
There is a lot about Ontario’s colleges and universities that we can be proud of, but we need to ensure our students are getting the best value for their tuition. In Ontario today, we see far too many students graduate with degrees and deep debts who can’t find a job.
We are spending a lot more money as a province, but we aren’t seeing the results. Government funding has
increased by 84% since 2003, yet Ontario universities are slipping in international rankings, tuition keeps rising, new graduates keep heading out West and there are many jobs in the skilled trades that can’t be filled.
This has got to change. We need to make the necessary changes to ensure our schools are the best in the world at preparing students for a career. The key will be incenting excellence, harnessing market forces, encouraging specialization and being honest.
Given the pace of technological change and the strong forces to innovate from the global market place, the need to invest in human capital continues to increase as does the requirement for high return on investment (ROI) in training. One of the obstacles of measuring the ROI of training is that many of the benefits of training may not be immediately visible for measurement and it may be impossible to allocate the improvements exhibited by the firm to a particular training event. The lack of longitudinal studies to measure the ROI of training, particularly with respect to supporting the use of technology and intensity of innovation, is an area that will be addressed in this study.
The pace of innovation and technological change in the global market place make it imperative that companies constantly look at improving the skills of their workforce (Bresnahan, Brynjolsson and Hitt, 1999). The investment in human capital through the use of relevant and targeted training is critical in order to keep a business competitive (Rabemananjara and Parsley, 2006). One of the key components to an organization’s competitive advantage is the development of knowledge workers and increasing the value of their human capital.
Epitomized by the OECDs Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) and the US governments Race to the Top,
accountability is becoming a pervasive normalizing discourse, legitimizing historic shifts from viewing education as a social and cultural to an economic project engendering usable skills and competences. The purpose of this special issue is to provide context and perspective on these momentous shifts. The papers point to historic antecedents, highlight core ideas, and identify changes in the balance of power between domestic and global policy makers.
Can we step out of our bubble for a moment? I hope so, because unless we do we will not see that we are losing the battle.
What battle is that? Just the one for the hearts and minds of our fellow citizens, within the nation and without. Just the contest between the forces of rationality and those of darkness and ignorance. Just the eternal struggle to make ideas, and not force, relevant to the plight of those oppressed by ignorance and bad rhetoric. Just that.
If you have not seen the mainstream media lately, if you prefer more filtered sources of experience or retreats into sanity, maybe this is not obvious. However, a glimpse into the abyss of larger public discourse is enough to make the point vivid. Academic research, once celebrated as the vanguard of the best that was thought and expressed, is on the run. Enrolments are down. Public denunciations are routine, running a gamut from casual dismissal (“useless” degrees and the
like) to open hostility (“incubators of social justice warriors,” “ideological fog-machines,” etc. etc.).
In B.C.’s Skills for Jobs Blueprint: Re-Engineering Education and Training, we said we would get and use better data to drive decisions. This B.C. Labour Market Outlook (the Outlook) is that data. Presented by the Ministry of Jobs, Tourism, and Skills Training and Responsible for Labour (the Ministry), the Outlook provides labour market demand and supply trends to 2022.
With the anticipated investment and activity related to LNG, the Ministry contracted KPMG to produce labour market forecasts for the LNG sector. The resulting LNG workforce occupation forecasts are added as a supplementary analysis of workforce needs in the Outlook and are aimed at providing a better understanding of the skills needs for this new sector. This Outlook report includes two major parts:
THE FIRST PART provides the labour market outlook based on an economic scenario without LNG; and THE SECOND PART highlights the findings of the LNG workforce occupation forecasts.
its use of temporary foreign workers, it led politicians and pundits to scrutinize and question the growing use by Canadian firms of imported, short-term labour. The Royal Bank was accused of misusing a system designed to help employers who could not find Canadian workers by using it, instead, to find cheaper foreign labourers to replace higher-cost Canadians. But the incident raises a bigger question than simply how one bank makes use of Canada’s Temporary Foreign Worker Program (TFWP): Whether the program is, in fact, interfering with the natural supply and demand responses of the labour market. And if we want
to make better use of available Canadian labour, the time has come for the federal government to start cutting back on the use of TFWP.
The number of admissions under the TFWP has nearly tripled in 25 years, from 65,000 to 182,000 in 2010. The primary justification for the expansion of the program has been the widespread assumption that Canada is suffering from a growing shortage of labour. Yet, it is hard to find any evidence to support this belief.
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).
Vision
The post-secondary destination of choice for internationally acclaimed, career-focused education
that is essential to an inclusive, prosperous and globally competitive Ontario.
Mission
Colleges will lead educational innovations and advance public policy reforms to build the
advanced workforce required to support new economic investments, rewarding careers and strong
communities throughout Ontario.
COLLEGES ONTARIO
Fuelling Prosperity: Colleges Ontario’s strategic plan 2015-18
Our Values
■ Student success: We promote inclusive college programs and services that will enable all
qualified students to graduate to meaningful careers.
■ Learning and teaching excellence: We drive an innovative learning environment that focuses on
best practices and delivers the high-quality, relevant education required by students and the
labour market.
■ Responsiveness: We are responsive to our communities and to the needs of the labour market.
■ Collaboration: We act as one voice on critical issues in higher education while recognizing and
respecting each other’s unique differences.
■ Strong stewardship: We are committed to excellent stewardship of public resources.
The earliest studies of undergraduate retention in the United States occurred in the 1930s and focused on what was referred to at the time as student mortality: the failure of students to graduate (Berger & Lyon, 2005). Historically higher education research has had an eye toward pathology with a focus on repairing students’ problems (Shushok & Hulme, 2006). To this end, much research exists on why students fail to persist as opposed to why they succeed. Strength-based approaches to the study of undergraduate retention involve studying successful students. Studying what is right with students may illuminate new aspects of successful student experiences which can in turn be applied to supporting all students. This paper will provide a brief historical overview of undergraduate retention followed by factors commonly related to undergraduate retention. Finally, an overview of the recent application of motivational theories to understand undergraduate retention including attribution theory, expectancy theory, goal setting theory, self-efficacy beliefs, academic self-concept, motivational orientations and optimism will be provided. Considerations for the future of motivational theories in undergraduate retention will be discussed with particular emphasis on the value of strength-based approaches to study and practice.
Online education programs continue to rely on a significant contingent of adjunct faculty to meet the instructional needs of the students. Discourse relating to this situation primarily focuses on the extent to which adjuncts are able to ensure the rigor and quality of instruction as well as the ability of the organization to attract, retain, and support qualified professionals. In response, organizations have created very structured,standardized professional development opportunities, meticulous monitoring of adjunct activities and inflexible policies to guide interactions with learners. This one-size-fits-all strategy limits the organization’s ability to facilitate an adjunct-organizational relationship that supports the adjunct in ways that meet their individual needs. The purpose of this exploratory, quantitative questionnaire study was to examine the difference between the adjuncts’ primary rationale for teaching, and their self-identified professional category. In addition, the study sought to explore the difference between the adjunct’s primary professional needs and their self-identified professional category. The results of the study demonstrated that there was a significant difference between the self-identified professional employment groups in the areas of student focused instruction, personal needs, an interest in online pedagogy, career advancement, and flexible work schedule categories. There was not a significant difference in the self-identified professional employment groups and the category of skill development