“What is mentoring all about”? Being Telemachus’ guide and resource person Mentor’s prime role was to “help” the young and unskilled son of Odysseus to become a proficient and self-regulated learner, able to cope with the demands of life. This ‘helping” process (Cox, Bachkirova, & Clutterbuck, 2010) was accomplished through conversation. Mentoring’s typical
characteristic is talk, i.e., the communicative interactive exchange between persons. This exchange is considered to be the vehicle of learning and professional development. Therefore, to tentatively answer our opening question, mentoring is about learning in conversations. For mentoring to be of any help its process (i.e., conversation) and its result (i.e., learning to become a professional) need to be carefully appreciated and scrutinized by mentors – i.e., “reflected upon” – in order to
warrant a mentor’s role and position as a “helping” agent.
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.
Over the past decade, the Government of Ontario has increased investment in postsecondary education significantly, including
increasing operating grants by 80 per cent since 2002–03.
These investments helped to improve access to postsecondary education, supported significant enrolment growth at universities and colleges, and drove community and economic development.
The tremendous expansion of Ontario’s postsecondary education system was made possible thanks to the commitment of our
postsecondary education institutions to access, and their willingness to respond to the demand.
The 2008 economic downturn and the ensuing precarious state of the global economy have made Ontario’s fiscal environment
challenging. Substantial new investment by the government at levels comparable to the previous decade is not feasible. Also,
as enrolment growth is expected to slow in the near future so too will operating grant funding. With institutions’ costs outpacing
growth in revenues from operating grants and tuition, existing cost structures are under pressure. Measures that help to mitigate these pressures are needed in order to ensure the continued sustainability of our postsecondary education system.
This paper explores the nature of complexity theory and its applications for educational reform. It briefly explains the history of complexity theory and identifies the key concepts of complex adaptive systems, and then moves on to define the differences between simple, complicated, and complex approaches to educational reform. Special attention is given to work currently underway in the fields of healthcare, emergency management and ecology that draws on complexity theory to build more resilient and robust response systems capable of adapting to changing needs and of identifying key pressure points in the system. Finally, this paper presents several examples of educational reform programmes undertaken worldwide that have implemented complexity theory principles to achieve positive results. It also recommends involving multiple stakeholders across the different levels of governance structure, increasing lateral knowledge-sharing between schools and districts, and transforming policy interventions to bring greater flexibility to the reform process. This move toward feedback-driven adaptive reform allows for better targeting of programmes to specific contexts and may prove a key way forward for educational policymakers
In September 2001, the Association of Registrars of the Universities and Colleges of Canada’s (ARUCC) Executive Committee launched an initiative to develop a national academic record and transcript guide for use in Canadian postsecondary institutions. This Report is the result of that initiative.
Funded in part through the Learning Initiatives Program by the Learning and Literacy Directorate of Human Resources Development Canada, the work began at the end of August 2002 and was finished seven months later. A National Committee representative of all types of postsecondary institutions, in all parts of the country, was formed. Its investigations were supported by four representative Regional Committees from the Atlantic, from Québec, from Ontario and from the West.
In The Wizard of Oz, Dorothy and crew are so intimidated by the Wizard's enigmatic personality that they struggle to talk with him on equal footing. Fear and frustration overwhelm them as they blindly accept a suicide mission to slay the Witch of the West. In return, they each receive a treasured prize: a heart, a brain, courage, and a way home. Ironically, they already have these gifts -- which they only discover after unveiling the man behind the curtain posing as the grumpy wizard.
Differentiated instruction (DI) casts a spell on educators as to how it meets all students' needs. The skillset required to differentiate seems mystical to some and incomprehensible to others in this environment of state standards and high-stakes tests. Where does one find the time? The reality is that every teacher already has the tools to differentiate in powerful ways for all learners. I address some of these elements, such as assessment fog, in other Edutopia posts.
What sources and resources do college students utilize to assist them in the transfer process? What factors influence students’ transfer decisions? What information do students possess about transfer and of what quality is the transfer information students receive? This investigation interviews students of two-year College of Applied Arts and Technology (CAAT) and Institute of Technology and Advanced Learning (ITAL) programs in the province of Ontario, Canada who identify intentions to transfer to university within their first semester in college. Grounding all analysis in Spence (1973), Akerlof (1970) and Stiglitz’s (1990) work on asymmetric information, adverse selection and signaling, this study examines students’ knowledge of transfer and their attainment of that knowledge. Policy recommendations for the further development of transfer assistance mechanisms and timing of implementation are provided.
Keywords: transfer credit; seamless education; asymmetric information; signalling.
This paper deals with the problematic nature of the transition between education and the workplace. A smooth transition between education and the workplace requires learners to develop an integrated knowledge base, but this is problematic as most educational programmes offer knowledge and experiences in a fragmented manner, scattered over a variety of subjects, modules and (work) experiences. To overcome this problem, we propose a design approach and shifting the educational focus of attention from individual learners to learning environments. The broader notion of learning environments facilitates transitions by establishing horizontal connections between schools and the workplace. The main argument of this paper is that combining or connecting aspects of school-based settings only is not sufficient to ensure learners will develop an integrated knowledge base. The concept and examples of “hybrid learning environment” show how formal, school-based learning and workplace experiences can be closely connected. The paper offers a framework of four coherent perspectives that can help to understand the complex nature of such environments and to design hybrid learning environments: the “agency perspective”, the “spatial perspective”, the “temporal perspective”, and the “instrumental perspective”. The framework is applied to three cases taken from vocational education in the Netherlands to describe what hybrid learning environments look like in contemporary educational practice.
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?
Last month’s Women’s March, one of the largest demonstrations in American history, drew between three and five million people across 673 U.S. cities and 170 cities internationally, according to a Google Drive effort to capture estimates. Since then, protests have continued in communities nationwide, including a series of major demonstrations in response to President Trump’s executive order barring travel to the United States from seven predominantly Muslim nations, his order to move ahead with the wall along the Mexican border and the controversial North Dakota pipeline.
Viewed as signaling white nationalism, racism, sexism and xenophobia, the election of Donald Trump has provoked strong and negative responses among students. The turbulent political atmosphere recently engulfed the University of California, Berkeley, where students or -- according to campus officials -- agitators from off the campus violently interrupted what were to be peaceful protests and a speech by Breitbart editor Milo Yiannopoulos. Student protests against Trump’s travel ban have also occurred at Ohio, American, Chapman and Rutgers Universities.
What do these events say, if anything, about activism on college campuses today? Have they sparked a new wave of student engagement? Or is it a momentary outcry?
The characteristics of appropriately worded behavioral objectives and the advantages for curriculum design and implementation of a clear specification of objectives in advance of any teaching or testing have been articulated by a number of people, for example, Mager, Popham, and Sullivan. Essentially, a behavioral objective is a statement or description of intent. It is not, however, a statement of what a teacher intends to do, but rather, a statement of what the teacher intends that the student will be able to do or produce at the conclusion of some period of instruction.
A properly stated behavioral objective must describe without ambiguity the nature of learner behavior or product to be measured. Two major advantages are claimed for behavioral objectives. First, they provide clear end points toward which all can strive; and second, because they focus on expected terminal performance of students (what students are expected to be able to do), they suggest methods of assessing the extent to which objectives have been realized. The apparent logic of such an approach is obvious to all; to argue against behavioral objectives would seem to be to argue for ambiguity, if not irrationality. Nevertheless, a number of people have drawn attention to some of the difficulties and possible hazards of the approach, for example, Atkin,5 Eisner,6 and this author. It is not my intention here to go over old ground; however, I do wish to draw attention to some very serious dangers in evaluating programs from the simple instructional model implied in the behavioral approach.
Reporting mandates, new leeway in using federal aid, and the chance to make it a school-quality indicator all raise the issue’s profile.
What are digital textbooks?
Today’s K-12 students have grown up with technology. Most wouldn’t dream of looking up information in a hardbound dictionary or encyclopedia; they turn to Internet search engines when they have questions, perhaps using a smartphone or tablet. News comes not on newsprint, but from Google News; writing to friends means Facebook, not a letter (what’s that?); phone books and watches are artifacts from another age. Yet such digital natives are often expected to attend schools equipped with aging, heavy, hardbound textbooks — some a decade old and outdated (history texts that remind them that the U.S. has never elected an African-American president, for example). They then are asked to tote five or six or more such books from school to home each day.
Enter the digital textbook, defined as anything stored on a digital medium that can be transmitted through various
digital devices over computer networks, including the Internet. Students can access digital books on e-readers, tablets and smartphones; and on netbooks, laptops or desktop computers. Because the books can be read on mobile devices, the materialcan travel with students just as a physical textbook can, but in a much lighter and more compact way (no more overstuffed backpacks). Textbooks displayed on digital devices can take advantage of Web 2.0 tools: multi-media features (video and audio clips); interactivity (quizzes, games); the ability to search and annotate text; text-to-speech functionality; and customizable (and current) content. In the classroom, teachers can project digital content from these books onto interactive whiteboards and engage the class in viewing material together. Notes taken on the interactive whiteboard can be stored and saved to each student’s laptop, tablet, netbook or smartphone, while students can use their digital devices to submit answers to quizzes or problems. All of these features make digital textbooks more relevant to today’s students, who then become more engaged in learning.
In 2010, there were almost 1.2 million students in degree programs on Canadian campuses: 755,000 undergraduates, 143,400 graduate students studying full-time, and an additional 275,800 students studying part-time. Fifty-six percent of university students were women, and 10 percent were international students. The number of full-time university students has more than doubled since 1980, and part-time enrolment is up 16 percent. In 1980, there were 550,000 full-time and 218,000 part-time university students
on Canadian campuses. Clearly, universities have experienced tremendous growth over the last 30 years.
The relationship between academia and technology is notoriously complicated. Faculty often view IT staffers as gadget-mongers eager to roll out new tech regardless of its value to teaching and learning, while technology specialists are certain they could make life easier for those on the other side — if they'd only listen!
Team-based learning, or TBL, is an application-oriented teaching method that combines small- and large-group learning by incorporating multiple small groups into a large group setting. It has been increasingly used in postsecondary and professional
education over the past two decades. Given this increasing us- age, many faculty wonder about the effects TBL has on learning outcomes. The authors performed a review and synthesis on the educational literature with respect to TBL to examine the quality of their descriptions of core TBL elements, then con- structed narrative summaries of these selected articles. Their analysis demonstrated early evidence of positive educational outcomes in terms of knowledge acquisition, participation and engagement, and team performance. The authors conclude that the TBL literature is at an important maturation point, where more rigorous testing and study of additional questions relating to the method are needed, as well as more accurate reporting of
TBL implementation.
This article describes the major findings from a longitudinal study of the impact of learning communities on the success of academically under-prepared, low-income students in 13 community colleges across the country. In this study, we employed both quantitative longitudinal survey and qualitative case study and interview methods. We utilized the former in order to
ascertain to what degree participation in a learning community enhanced student success and the latter to understand why and how it is that such communities do so. The findings strongly support adapting the learning community model to basic skills instruction to improve learning and persistence for this population.
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.
A look at the sexual harassment policies at Canadian universities.
The recent decision of the British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal in the case of Fariba Mahmoodi, a student who accused her professor of sexual harassment, has once again focussed attention on a controversial issue. Ms. Mahmoodi complained to the tribunal that Donald Dutton, a psychology professor at the University of British Columbia, and UBC as his employer, had sexually harassed her. The tribunal agreed, awarding her a total of $13,000 including $4,000 for injury to her dignity, feelings and self-respect, and $5,200 for counseling expenses.
When viewed holistically, Canada lacks a clear and common understanding of the future directions and top priorities of its post-secondary education (PSE) sector. Perhaps as a result, Canada has not yet comprehensively addressed a fundamental question: How do we demonstrate quality in PSE? To answer this question requires clarification of many issues, including the roles that various institutions and sectors play. It also requires the development of a shared vision of PSE, of what can and should be achieved. Despite much discussion among leaders of various education sectors in Canada, an agreement on
a plan of action has yet to be reached. Indeed, a national dialogue on this critical issue is needed.