Nearly every college and university in America has refocused its attention on “student success.” Like many institutions, Cleveland State University, where I work, has erected an entire enterprise devoted to this endeavor. We have reorganized ourselves administratively, invested in new staff, updated technology and taken a deep dive into institutional data to ensure we are best positioned to make sure all our students have a high potential to graduate. We have improved as a result.
Four frogs are sitting on a log, and one decides to jump off. How many frogs are left? Th answer is
four, not three, because deciding is not the same as doing.
This paper is about how an entire system from bottom to top can engage in systematic, deeper reform on a continuous basis — from school and community, through district and regions, to system or national levels. It’s about getting the agenda right comprehensive, coherent, deep focus on teaching and learning) and doing it in a way that results in continuous improvement in actuall practice.
Much has been written about the challenges of teaching an online course. While not discounting the unique (and sometimes frustrating) aspects of the online learning environment, it could be said that, despite the numerous differences, many of the same course management strategies that are essential to success in a traditional classroom also apply in the online classroom. These strategies include the importance of a strong syllabus, clear directions, well-organized materials, and timely feedback.
One of the many lessons learned from the early years of distance education is the fact that you cannot simply pluck an instructor out of the classroom, plug him into an online course, and expect him to be effective in this new and challenging medium. Some learned this lesson the hard way, while others took a proactive approach to faculty training. All of us continue to refine our approach and discover our own best practices. Today, it’s possible to learn much from the mistakes and successes of those who blazed the trail before us. Faculty development for distance educators is a critical component of all successful distance education programs. Well thought-out faculty development weaves together needed training, available resources, and ongoing support, and carries with it the same expectations for quality teaching that institutions of higher education have for their face-toface classes. This special report, Faculty Development in Distance Education: Issues, Trends and Tips, features 12 articles pulled from the pages of Distance Education Report, including:
• Faculty Development: Best Practices from World Campus
• Developing Faculty Competency in Online Pedagogy
• A Learner-Centered, Emotionally Engaging Approach to Online Learning
• How to Get the Best Out of Online Adjuncts
• Workload, Promotion, and Tenure Implications of Teaching Online
• Four Steps to Just-in-Time Faculty Training
This report is loaded with practical strategies that can help you build a comprehensive faculty development program, helping ensure that instructors stay current in both online pedagogy and practical technical know-how. No matter what the particular character of your program is, I think you’ll find many ideas you can use in here.
Remember how you felt during your first semester of teaching? Excited? Nervous? A little over-whelmed? At times you even might have wondered how the school could give you a job with so much responsibility and so little training. Now you’re a seasoned educator making the move from faculty to administration. And guess what? You’re excited, nervous, and a little overwhelmed. And, once again, you wonder how the school could give you a job with so much responsibility and so little training.
Inadequate preparation, unrealistic expectations, and increased workload can create undue stress on faculty members making the transition to department chair or other levels of administration. This special report features 14 articles from Academic Leader newsletter that address many of the challenges faced by new leaders, from establishing a leadership
style to redefining relationships with former peers. Here are some of the articles you will find in Academic Leadership Development:
How to Make a Smooth Transition from Faculty to Administrator:
• Look Before You Leap: Transitions from Faculty to Administration
• Translating Teaching Skills to Leadership Roles
• The First 1,000 Steps: Walking the Road from Academic to Administrator
• Why New Department Chairs Need Coaching
• 10 Recommendations toward Effective Leadership
This report will help new administrators navigate the potential minefields and find their voice when it comes to leading effectively. It also may remind experienced leaders what it was like that first year in hopes that they might reach out to help make someone else's transition a little easier.
Social media, when used in a corporate setting, represents a balancing act of rewards and risks for IT, business and senior management in virtually any organization or industry:
• Rewards in the context of new business opportunities that can be created, the competitive differentiation that a company can enjoy from intelligent use of social media, the ability to build customer loyalty, and the new channels of communications that open up with current and prospective customers. Risks from the inappropriate content that can be posted on social media sites, the malware that can enter a network through short URLs or phishing attacks, and the failure to retain
important business records posted on social media. In short, although social media is a relatively new communication and information management channel relative to more traditional tools like email or instant messaging, the same fundamental
management requirements apply: social media must be monitored for malware and inappropriate content, and relevant business records sent through social media must be retained and easily accessible for as long as necessary.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
There are four important points made in this white paper:
Social media management – by virtue of the sheer numbers of social media users and the importance of the applications for which the technology is used – cannot be ignored by corporate decision makers.
Social media creates a number of potential risks for firms of any size and across all industries. These risks are focused primarily on a) the ingress of malware that could wreak financial or other havoc in an organization; b) the potential for employees to post content that could harm their employer; and c) not retaining business records that must be preserved to satisfy legal, regulatory or other obligations. Any organization – whether or not it sanctions the use of social media must develop detailed policies focused on how and when social media can and cannot be used. The technologies exist to monitor and archive social media content in a way that can minimize corporate risk – every organization should evaluate and deploy technologies that will meet their requirements.
Unable to cope with the transition from secondary school to postsecondary school or the new pressures of first year, a number of students at Ontario’s universities and colleges withdraw before they graduate. What leads them to leave is still under discussion. One possibility is that they lack what are called emotional and social competencies that are often linked to academic success and retention.
Emotional Intelligence Interventions to Increase Student Success was a project undertaken at Fleming College that aimed to improve the emotional and social competencies of first semester students through the modification of a Technology Career Essential course.
As we work to improve life outcomes for young people, their voices must guide our efforts. The report that follows includes the results st-ever, nationally representative survey of young people’s perspectives on mentoring. Core to our collective work is the fundamental belief that children and adolescents should receive the supports they need and deserve — including consistent and caring relationships with adults. By asking 18- to 21-year-olds across the country to share their opinions on and experiences with mentoring, they shared their realities with us: while the mentoring needs of our young people are not being fully met, for those with quality mentors, there is a powerful effect on their life trajectory.
I am very pleased to present this issue of In Conversation as it provides me with the opportunity to say once again that I have long believed that we are well on our way to achieving a level and quality of school and system leadership that is second to none in the world. Since the launch of the Ontario Leadership Strategy (OLS) in 2008, we have been recognized internationally as one of the world’s top school systems, and as a system that is building leadership capacity for the future. And that, I believe, is a tribute to the work of our school and system leaders.
Ontario's youth are among the best educated, most diverse and digitally connected in the world.
Our investments in education, social development and inno-vation helped them weather the recent economic downturn better than their counterparts in many developed countries.
Yet the unemployment rate for Ontario youth remains unaccept-ably high and more than double that of workers aged 25-64. For young people facing multiple barriers to employment – Aboriginal youth, recent immigrants, visible minorities, and young people with disabilities – the rates are even higher.
Our future prosperity depends on giving young people the right skills, experiences and supports they need to succeed in today’s global economy.
That is why we’ve developed an unprecedented $295 million Youth Jobs Strategy that aims to help young Ontarians develop their career skills, find employment, or be their own boss.
And to help tackle this challenge and ensure success, we’re partnering with employers, educators, industry, labour and not-for-profits.
Mental health is a growing concern for all Canadians.
To date, it is estimated that approximately 20% of Canadians will experience some sort of mental illness in their lifetime. It also
remains a pressing issue for students across Canadian campuses as institutions continue to signal a number of meantal health cases.
This report analyzes the economic impact of post-secondary education (PSE) in Canada. It is one of three foundational studies by The Conference Board of Canada’s Centre for Skills and Post-Secondary Education. The report considers three kinds of economic impact: spending in the economy (either directly by PSE institutions or indirectly through tourism and other channels), human capital formation, and intellectual capital formation. The report develops a bottom-up approach to understanding impacts, from the PSE institutions to the broader economy.
The Principal: Three Keys to Maximizing Impact
Online Student Engagement Tools and Strategies
Most online students, even those who are successful, will tell you it takes an extra dose of motivation to stay on top of their assignments compared to the traditional classroom. In fact, the anytime/anywhere convenience of online learning sometimes makes it too convenient … to procrastinate, forget about, and become otherwise disengaged. No wonder online courses have an attrition rate that’s 10 – 20 percent higher than their face-to-face counterparts.
For faculty teaching in the online classroom, this reality underscores the importance of having activities that build student engagement and help create a sense of community among their geographically dispersed students.
Online Student Engagement Tools and Strategies features 11 articles pulled from the pages of Online Classroom and provides practical advice from online instructors who recognize the value of engagement and its role in student retention and success.
Here are just a few of the articles you will find in this report:
• Engaging Students with Synchronous Methods in Online Courses
• Indicators of Engagement in the Online Classroom
• Teaching Online With Errol: A Tried and True Mini-Guide to Engaging Online Students
• Engage Online Learners with Technology: A Free Tool Kit
• Promoting Student Participation and Involvement in Online Instruction: Suggestions from the Front
In short, this special report explains how adjustments in tone, technology, teaching presence and organization can bring positive changes to student learning.
After reviewing the state of student retention research and practice, past and present, the author looks to the future and identifies three areas of research and practice that call for further exploration. These concern issues of institutional action, program implementation, and the continuing challenge of promoting the success of low-income students.
Key Word: Tinto
The Ontario government recognizes the importance of ensuring equality of access to postsecondary education (PSE). One group that has been and continues to be underrepresented in PSE is students with disabilities. As a response, the Ontario government has made improvements to the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act, 2005, with the end goal of making Ontario a more accessible province for people with disabilities by 2025. In addition to making changes to legislation, there has been increased funding for students with disabilities, with more than $47 million allocated in 2010-2011 to help these students achieve
success in PSE. The Ontario government now also provides targeted funding for students with learning disabilities (Tsagris and Muirhead, 2012).
The 2005 Postsecondary Review, “Ontario: a Leader in Learning,” authored by Bob Rae, addressed issues facing students with disabilities. Key recommendations1 included:
Require institutions to reach out to students with disabilities at their schools and in their communities to ease the transition to postsecondary education. Provide funding for enhanced academic and career counselling on campus. Allow for the evolution of centres of research and service excellence and distribute funding to institutions for supports and services on the basis of the size of a given institution’s population of students with disabilities (Rae, 2005: 32).
As video-based instructional materials become available to distance learners to learn practical skills at a distance, it is important to assess the instructional effectiveness of these materials and to understand how students respond to them. This paper is the second part of a larger exploratory study that assessed the instructional effectiveness of video-based instructional materials for teaching distance learners practical skills in block-laying and concreting and how learners respond to these instructional materials. Specifically, this paper aims to assess learners’ acceptance and satisfaction with the materials. It also aims to determine whether levels of learner satisfaction and acceptance differ according to study centres. Data were collected from 71 respondents at three study centres using a self-completion questionnaire comprising 17 Likert-type items. The data were analyzed using descriptive statistics, ANOVA, and Scheffe’s post hoc test at a 0.05 level of significance. Learners appeared positive about their learning experiences with the use of video-based instructional materials to learn practical skills at a distance as they rated highly all the items assessing their acceptance and satisfaction. Results of item-by-item ANOVA regarding learner acceptance indicated that the respondents, categorized according to study centres, exhibited similar levels of acceptance for nine of the ten items. For learner satisfaction, there were no statistically significant differences for six of the seven items. Thus, learners of different study centres exhibited about the same level of acceptance and satisfaction.
Keywords: Block-laying and concreting; distance learning; learner acceptance; learner satisfaction; technical and vocational education and training (TVET); technology acceptance model (TAM); video-based instructional materials International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning
Vol. 12.5 June – 2011
Assessment of Learner Acceptance and Satisfaction with Video-Based Instructional Materials for Teaching Practical Skills at a Distance
Francis Donkor, University of Education, Winneba, Ghana
What is good learning? That may be a subjective question. But it's likely that many educators would give answers that fall in the same ballpark'sstudents collaborating and discussing ideas, possible solutions project-based learning, designed around real world contexts connecting with other students around the world, on topics of study immersing students in a learning experience that allows them to grapple with a problem, gaining higher-order thinking skills from pursuing the solution
To many educators, these notions are music to their ears. Would it seem terribly strange then to hear that students indeed are doing these things regularly outside of their classrooms? While Timmy or Susie may not be running home from school saying, “What fun, deeply-engaging learning experience can we do today?, they are engaging with new technologies that provide them with the same opportunities. Every day, many students are spending countless hours immersed in popular technologies such as Facebook or MySpace, World of Warcraft, or Sim City which at first glance may seem like a waste of time, and brain cells. But these genres of technologiesSocial Networking, Digital Gaming, and Simulations deserve a second, deeper, look at what is actually going on.
Despite the tremendous growth of distance education, retention remains its Achilles’ heel.
Estimates of the failed retention rate for distance education undergraduates range from 20 to 50 percent. Distance education administrators believe the failed retention rate for online courses may be 10 to 20 percent higher than for face-to-face courses.
As an increasing number of colleges and universities identify online education as a critical component to their long-term strategy, the issue of retention can no longer be ignored. It is mandatory for everyone who touches the distance learner to understand why these students leave their online courses, and what it will take to keep them there. Featuring a collection of top articles from Distance Education Report, this new Faculty Focus special report provides practical strategies for improving online student retention, engagement and satisfaction. Articles include:
• 11 Tips for Improving Retention of Distance Learning Students
• Understanding the Impact of Attrition on Your School
• Taking a Holistic View of Student Retention
• Eight Suggestions to Help You Get Your Retention Act Together Now
• Online Mentoring Builds Retention
• Nine Truths about Recruitment and Retention
• Finding Helpful Patterns in Student Engagement
With the strategic importance of distance education courses on the rise, this report will help you understand the key variables that impact the retention of your web-based students and adopt proactive strategies proven to mitigate potential retention problems.
Premier McGuinty appointed the Honourable Bob Rae as Advisor to the Premier and the Minister of Training, Colleges and Universities. With the support of a seven-member Advisory Panel, Mr. Rae was asked to advise on strategies to improve higher education by providing recommendations on: • the design of a publicly funded postsecondary system offering services in both
official languages that promotes: – recognized excellence in curricular activities to build the skilled workforce
and promising scholars of the future; – an integrated and articulated system that meets the diverse learning needs
of Ontarians through the most cost-effective design; • funding model(s) that: – link provincial funding to government objectives for postsecondary education, including the objectives of better workers for better jobs in an innovative economy and an accessible, affordable and quality system;
– establish an appropriate sharing of the costs of postsecondary education among the government, students and the private sector;
– identify an effective student assistance program that promotes increased access to postsecondary education.