Aboriginal peoples in Canada face multiple and systemic barriers to attaining and succeeding in post-secondary education. A long history of discrimination, including the legacy of residential schools, and chronic government underfunding of Aboriginal
education has contributed to low high school completion rates, a widening gap in post- secondary attainment, and the lowest labour market outcomes of any group in Canada.
Centrality of language proficiency in academic achievement Proficiency in language is recognized as an essential component of student success at Ontario's colleges and in the provincial workplace. Research indicates that postsecondary underachievement, failure, and attrition are highly correlated with academic under-preparedness, especially with respect to deficits in language proficiency. Contemporary college students in Ontario do not represent a homogeneous population; rather, they exhibit a wide range of abilities and needs related to language proficiency. Additionally, an increasing percentage of Ontario college students have second language challenges. The identification of students who are at-risk of not successfully completing their programs due to deficits in language proficiency, and the provision of timely and appropriate remediation where necessary, represent critical priorities in supporting student success.
Student participation in applied research as a form of experiential learning in community colleges is relatively new. Ontario Colleges today participate at different levels with different numbers of projects and faculty involved. A few colleges in Ontario are more established in doing applied research including having basic infrastructure for research and having defined in which disciplines they will conduct research. This study took place in a college with a more established applied research program with the study goal of hearing and listening from the students and their teacher/research leaders as to their perceived benefit from the research program. The findings showed that the students found the program very beneficial and that student learning in areas considered important for the workplace was occurring that would not have been possible in the regular classroom.
Conference participants agreed that the innovation process is complex, and that models cannot simply be imported wholesale from one national context to another. However, successful innovation systems do appear to include common elements: strong
support for basic research; the involvement of students as researchers, innovators and entrepreneurs; support for creativity and risk-taking in research; multidisciplinary collaboration; and strong university-industry ties.
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.
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?
ABSTRACT
This article examines whether rising tuition fees for post-secondary education are a contributing factor in students’ labour market decisions. When labour market decisions for total number of working hours and for participation were measured, the results suggested that concerns about increased tuition fees leading to more work and compromising academic studies were unwarranted. The tuition fee effect was highly seasonal in nature. When tuition fees increased, students devoted more hours and participated more in labour market activities, but they did so only during the summer period, a time when most students are typically not involved in study activities.
RÉSUMÉ
Dans cet article, les auteurs examinent comment les facteurs d’augmenter ou de maintenir les frais de scolarité, au niveau des études post-secondaires, peuvent infl uencer les étudiants et leurs décisions en ce qui concerne le marché du travail. Elles ont mesuré les décisions des étudiants en considérant toutes les heures travaillées ainsi que le taux de participation. Les résultats indiquent qu’une augmentation de frais de scolarité ne mène ni à plus d’heures travaillées ni à plus d’études académiques compromises. L’effet des frais de scolarité est très saisonnier. Lorsqu’il y a une augmentation de frais de scolarité, les étudiants travaillent plus d’heures et participent plus dans le marché du travail, mais ceci uniquement pendant la période d’été lorsqu’ils ne sont pas impliqués aux études.
University Works uses empirical data to report on the outcomes of university graduates in terms of employment levels
and earnings, as well as average debt upon graduation.
University graduates experienced the highest employment growth of any educational attainment group over the last decade.
This edited book fills a gap in what we know about reforms targeting the internationalization of Canadian higher education. Contributions from scholars across Canada (and a few from international contexts) delivered multi-focal approaches to the study of internationalization processes, involving both empirical and theoretical considerations for readers. The book offered everything from descrip- tive accounts of contemporary policies and practices to historical tracings of past policies and their influences on current initiatives, from position papers arguing for more national coordination to crit- ical positions that question foundations to justify international reforms. The topics and paradigmatic approaches imparted in the chapters represent a collection of contributions from a conference held at York University in 2006. The editors argue that the topics lack attention in current literature but warrant significant consideration from scholars and practitioners alike.
Overall, people with a college education do better in the labor market than people with no education beyond high school. Higher levels of education correspond, on average, to higher levels of employment and higher wages. Yet, as college prices rise and as examples of graduates struggling to find remunerative employment despite their credentials become more visible, both potential students and the general public are questioning the value of a college education.
The data, however, remain clear: even at current prices, postsecondary education pays off for most people. Promising occupational and personal opportunities are disproportionately available to college graduates. It is increasingly difficult to maintain a middle class lifestyle without a postsecondary credential, and the economic, social, and civic benefits of a more educated population are well documented.
The New Technologies: New Pedagogies project endeavoured to take an innovative approach not only in the creation of new, authentic pedagogies for mobile devices but also in the action learning approach adopted for the professional development of participants. The project involved 19 people including teachers, IT and PD personnel. It was a large and ambitious project that resulted not only in a range of innovative pedagogies, but in the creation of more knowledgable and confident users of mobile technologies among teachers and students in the faculty of Education at the University of Wollongong.
I wish to thank the Association of Colleges of Applied Arts and Technology of Ontario, and particularly the organizers of this conference, for giving me the honour of delivering the Sisco Address. It is always a privilege to speak to members of the college community, and, owing to the great respect and admiration that I had for Mr. Sisco, it is a special privilege to be giving the
address which bears his name.
The invitation did not carry with it a request that I speak on a particular theme or topic. This freedom can be both an opportunity and a problem. It is an opportunity to have a captive audience, for a while, at least - depending upon how easy it is to get to the exit doors - to hear me hold forth on something that I think is important. On the other hand, the whole domain of community
colleges, past, present, and future, is a daunting universe from which to craft remarks for a late afternoon on a winter's day.
In what I hope will turn out to have been a sensible, if no doubt ambitious, choice, I decided to try to focus my remarks on one of those big themes that has long been of interest to me, that of the identity, or essence, of the Ontario colleges; and whether, and if so, how, it may have changed over time. I believe that these questions are of speculative, philosophical interest to people who
care about the colleges, and that is sufficient justification for us to consider them in a forum like this. However, these questions also have important practical consequences. In dialogue about proposals for change in the colleges, what has often been deemed a vital questi
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.
Educational disparities in U.S. adult mortality are large and have widened across birth cohorts. We consider three policy relevant
scenarios and estimate the mortality attributable to: (1) individuals having less than a high school degree rather than a high school degree, (2) individuals having some college rather than a baccalaureate degree, and (3) individuals having anything less than a laureate degree rather than a baccalaureate degree, using educational disparities specific to the 1925, 1935, and 1945
cohorts.
Trust is indispensable for social and economic relations; it is the glue that holds organisations together and appears to work somehow mysteriously. Overall, trust is a ubiquitous ingredient in policymaking and implementation across many governance systems including education, whether it concerns accountability mechanisms, capacity building or strategic thinking. Yet our understanding, conceptualisation and measurement of these issues remain limited. This working paper asks the question: what is trust and how does it matter for governance, especially in education systems? It explores why trust is key for policymaking and where it fits within current governance issues. The paper examines different definitions of trust, presents various ways of measuring trust and discusses some of their benefits and limitations. It proposes a definition of trust made up of three parts: trust as an expectation, a willingness to be vulnerable and a risk-taking act. The paper then presents a simple model of trust and governance and reviews the relationship between trust and different elements in education systems, such as complexity, asymmetries in information and power, collaboration/cooperation, monitoring and accountability, and professionalisation. It concludes with some policy findings and identifies several research gaps.
The potential impacts and implications of technology on the professional lives of instructors in higher education, and the role of leadership in integrating educational technology, present a variety of complexities and challenges. The purpose of this paper is to identify the reasons why faculty members are not fully embracing technology and what leadership exists in those institutions to help instructors adapt to technology in the teaching and learning process. The authors examine instructor’s perceptions and attitudes related to educational technology as it applies to the learning process and investigated the organization-wide view of leadership in the education institutions. The authors also developed a theoretical model for how leadership can be applied in the use of educational technology in higher education. The model contains five major blocks. In addition to the concerns of higher education faculty, this paper also considers the impact educational technologies have on instruction itself and why many faculty members view the technology as being too difficult to apply to existing technology infrastructure.
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.
Ask most people who don't teach online about the likelihood of academic dishonesty in an online class and you will likely hear concerns about the many ways that students could misrepresent themselves online. In fact, this concern about student representation is so prevalent it made its way into the Higher Education Opportunities Act (HEOA). Passed into law in 2008, the act brought a few big changes to online education, including a new requirement to “ensure that the student enrolled in an online class is the student doing the coursework Although there'ome disagreement as to whether distance education is more susceptible to academic dishonesty than other forms of instruction, what isn't up for debate is the fact that for as long as there's been exams, there's been cheating on exams. The online environment simply opens up a different set of challenges that aren't typically seen in traditional face-to-face courses.
Promoting Academic Integrity in Online Education was developed to help you understand the latest tools and techniques for mitigating cheating and other unethical behaviors in your online courses. The report features nine articles from Distance Education Report, including:• Combating Online Dishonesty with Communities of Integrity
. 91 Ways to Maintain Academic Integrity in Online Courses
. The New News about Cheating for Distance Educators
. A Problem of Core Values: Academic Integrity in Distance Learning
. Practical Tips for Preventing Cheating on Online Exams
Online education didn't invent cheating, but it does present unique challenges. This report provides proactive ways for meeting these challenges head on.
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.
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!