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.
ACT has been measuring college readiness trends for several years. The Condition of College & Career Readiness
is ACT’s annual report on the progress of the graduating class relative to college readiness. This year, 54.3% of the graduating class took the ACT® college readiness assessment. The increased number of test takers enhances the breadth and depth of the data pool, providing a comprehensive picture of the current graduating class in the context of readiness levels as well as offering a glimpse of the emerging educational pipeline.
The Canadian Trans Youth Health Survey was a national on-line survey conducted by researchers from several Canadian universities and community organizations. The survey had 923 trans youth participants from all 10 provinces and one of the territories. The survey included somewhat differ- ent questions for younger (14-18 years) and older (19-25 years) trans youth about a wide range of life experiences and behaviours that influence young people’s health. This national report is a first snapshot of survey results.
To be the most personally connected learning organization in Canada – a catalyst for individual, organizational, and community transformation. Through partnerships, we will connect people from all walks of life to extraordinary learning experiences that will inspire innovation and prepare them for life and career success. With a reputation for excellence, Georgian graduates
will be in demand by employers and will contribute to the economic vitality, sustainability, and quality of life in their communities. Our learners and employers will feel a lifelong connection to Georgian because of the positive difference we have made in their lives.
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
Think back to your first few years of teaching. If you’re like most educators, you probably ade your share of mistakes. To be sure, we all do things differently now than we did when we were first starting out. Thank goodness for that! When Faculty Focus put out a call for articles for this special report on teaching mistakes, we really didn’t know what to expect. Would faculty be willing to share their earlier missteps for all to see? Would the articles all talk about the same common mistakes, or would the range of
mistakes discussed truly reflect the complexities of teaching today?
We were delighted at the response, not only in terms of the number of instructors willing to share their stories with our readers, but by the variety of mistakes in the reflective essays. For example, in “You Like Me, You Really Like Me. When Kindness Becomes a Weakness,” Jolene Cunningham writes of her discovery that doing everything you can for your students is not
always the best policy.
In “If I Tell Them, They Will Learn,” Nancy Doiron-Maillet writes about her realization that it’s not enough to provide information to students if they don’t have opportunities to then apply what you are trying to teach them.
Other articles in Teaching Mistakes from the College Classroom include:
• When Expectations Collide
• Things My First Unhappy Student Taught Me
• Understanding My Role as Facilitator
• Don’t Assume a Student’s Previous Knowledge
• What Works in One Culture May Not Work in Another
We thank all the authors who shared their stories and know that the lessons learned will help
prevent others from making these same mistakes.
Mary Bart
Editor
Faculty Focus
OVER THE LAST FIVE YEARS OR SO WE HAVE HEARD A great deal about something called the Knowledge Society. The term ‘knowledge’ is appearing in places we wouldn’t have expected to see it a decade or so ago. The media is full of references to the knowledge economy and the knowl-edge revolution; business discussions now routinely talk about knowledge management, knowledge resources, knowledge clusters, knowledge work, and knowledge workers; and policy documents argue for the need to ‘catch’ the knowledge ‘wave’.
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.
Canadians are making sacrifices to prepare themselves for a changing workforce. Federal and provincial government
decisions are forcing students to take on more education related debt than any previous generation, while middle class
earnings have largely stagnated in the past twenty years.
Skyrocketing tuition fees and the prevalence of loan-based financial assistance have pushed student debt to historic
levels. This past year, almost 425,000 students were forced to borrow in order to finance their education. The aggregate of
loans disbursed by the Canada Student Loans Program, less the aggregate of loan repayments received is resulting in student
debt increasing by $1 million per day.
Vocational education and training are highly valued by many. The European Ministers for Vocational Education and Training, the European Social Partners and the European Commission have issued in 2010 the Bruges Communiqué, which describes the global vision for VET in Europe 2020. In this vision, vocational skills and competencies are considered as important as academic skills and competencies. VET is expected to play an important role in achieving two Europe 2020 headline targets set in the education field: a) reduce the rate of early school leavers from education to less than 10 percent; b) increase the share of 30 to 40 years old having completed tertiary or equivalent education to at least 40 percent. However, there is limited hard evidence that VET can improve education and labour market outcomes. The few existing studies yield mixed results partly due to differences in the structure and quality of VET across countries.
As with higher-education institutions around the world, British Columbia (BC) and Ontario are increasingly faced with demographic and market pressures that erode the traditional difference between the university and nonuniversity
sectors (i.e., colleges and institutes). Key components that ensure these provinces’ institutions preserve their unique roles and differentiations in a changing context, partially driven by their governments, include research mandates, transparency in institutional governance, and strategic documents that resist the academic drift created by institutional isomorphism. Both governments are actively reshaping their post-secondary systems to align with national or regional economic needs, increasing access, streamlining degree completion, and responding to community pressure to have a university or a degree-granting institution. An analysis of the enabling legislation, government policy directives, and institutional documents of both provinces shows that there is a blurring in the distinction between colleges and universities, and the costs associated with this.
A fraternity member from the University of Oklahoma is videotaped chanting a racist song. At the University of Missouri, a slow response to racial slurs and graffiti fueled protests and led to the resignation of top administrators. At Bowie State University, a
swastika was spray-painted on the Martin Luther King Jr. Communications Art Center. Other incidents on campuses ranging from Yale University and Ithaca College on the east coast to Claremont McKenna College in California, led to campus protests and calls for change.
All of this and more occurred in 2015, leading the Washington Post’s Michael E. Miller to conclude “Whatever you call it, what’s clear is that unrest is spreading across American universities. One by one, campuses are lighting up with protests, demonstrations and — in a handful of cases — death threats, plunging the country into a broader debate about lingering racism
more than half a century after the Civil Rights Act.”
To be sure, today’s college students are helping to shine a spotlight on race, cultural differences, and the need for more inclusive, respectful campuses. It’s no surprise that faculty play an important role.
Universities play an increasingly prominent role in shaping regional, social, and economic development. In Canada, however, spatial, economic, and so- cial differences between universities and their host communities continue to challenge positive town–gown relationships and undermine the benefits associated with high concentrations of prospective young, “creative” graduates. The purpose of this article is to identify the factors that lead to positive town– gown relations and,
subsequently, encourage graduate retention. Through this research, university and town administrators were found to play a key role in establishing a positive relationship between students and community members. Local employment opportunities were also found to help students build an experiential relationship with their localities and make them more
likely to settle there after graduation.
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.
Purpose – This paper reports on a census of high-level sustainability initiatives at all accredited post-secondary institutions in Canada by documenting the institutions that have undertaken sustainability assessments, have signed one or more sustainability declarations, have sustainability offices or officers, or have sustainability policies. Our aim was to better understand the broad-scale patterns of commitments by post-secondary institutions to these sustainability initiatives by exploring the interrelationships among them, and with geographic and institutional characteristics.
GLOBE (Global Leadership and Organizational Behavior Effectiveness) is a research program focusing
on culture and leadership in 61 nations. National cultures are examined in terms of nine dimensions: performance
orientation, future orientation, assertiveness, power distance, humane orientation, institutional collectivism, in-group collectivism, uncertainty avoidance, and gender egalitarianism. In a survey of thousands of middle managers in food processing, finance, and telecommunications industries in these countries, GLOBE compares their cultures and attributes of effective leadership. Six global leadership attributes are identified and discussed. ©
In an era of fiscal restraint, it is particularly important that governments focus on providing the greatest value to Canadians in the most efficient way. The most common response for those acting under financial pressure is to examine what a government does and to choose among competing priorities. However, a complementary approach is often overlooked: Governments must also examine how the work gets done.
Across sectors, organizations are continuously improving the way they work. Teams are developing better practices and processes, leveraging new technologies, and building more efficient and inspiring workspaces to generate greater value.
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.
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.
Previous research on blended course offerings focuses on the addition of asynchronous online content to an existing course. While some explore synchronous communication, few control for differences between treatment groups.
This study investigates the impact of teaching a blended course, using a virtual, interactive, real-time, instructor-led (VIRI) classroom, on student engagement, performance, and satisfaction. We use an experimental design with
both a control group and a treatment group. Up to 90 students in a large urban university are randomly assigned by the registrar into two sections of an introductory marketing course. Using a pre- and post-semester questionnaire, the study measures student engagement, performance, and satisfaction. There are no statistical differences in student performance between the control and treatment groups. The only student engagement factor with a statistically significant difference between groups is student interest in their courses. Compared with the control group, the treatment group appears to be more interested (+10%) in their courses at the end of the semester. Finally, fewer than 2 in 10 students express dissatisfaction with their participation in a VIRI course. Blended course offerings are increasing in importance in marketing and business
education. The study provides guidance for fine-tuning the features of those course offerings by demonstrating how a VIRI classroom leverages the capabilities of technology without compromising learning outcomes.
Résumé
Des recherches antérieures portant sur l’offre de cours mixtes ciblent l’ajout de contenu en ligne asynchrone à un cours préexistant. Alors que certains explorent la communication synchrone, d’aucuns effectuent un contrôle des différences entre les groupes de traitement. Cette étude examine l’impact de l’enseignement d’un cours mixte, sur l’engagement, la performance, et la satisfaction des étudiants, en utilisant une classe Virtuelle, Interactive, en temps réel (Real Time), dirigé par un Instructeur ou une Instructrice (VIRI). Nous utilisons un modèle expérimental avec un groupe, à la fois, de contrôle et de traitement. Un nombre d’étudiants qui peu atteindre 90, dans une grande université urbaine, sont aléatoirement répartis par le registraire
en deux sections d’un cours introductoire de marketing. L’étude mesure l’engagement, la performance, et la satisfaction des étudiants en utilisant un questionnaire pré- et post-semestriel. Il n’existe pas de différences statistiques de performance des étudiants entre le groupe de contrôle et celui de traitement. Le seul facteur d’engagement des étudiants ayant une
différence statistiquement significative entre les groupes est l’intérêt des étudiants à leurs cours. Comparé aux étudiants du groupe de contrôle, ceux et celles du groupe de traitement semble être plus intéressés (+10%) à leurs cours à la fin du semestre. En définitive, moins que 2 étudiants sur 10 éprouvent une insatisfaction à l’égard de leur participation à un cours VIRI.
Les cours mixtes gagnent en importance, notamment dans les domaines de l’éducation du marketing et des affaires. L’étude fournit des directives pour affiner les caractéristiques de ces offres de cours en démontrant comment une classe VIRI optimise les capacités de la technologie sans compromettre les résultats d’apprentissage.