What makes an undergraduate student “traditional” or “nontraditional”? While definitions vary, researchers generally consider nontraditional students to have the following characteristics: being independent for financial aid purposes, having one or more dependents, being a single caregiver, not having a traditional high school diploma, delaying postsecondary en-rollment, attending school part time, and being employed full time (Brock 2010; Choy 2002; Horn 1996; Kim 2002; Taniguchi and Kaufman 2005).
OISE/UT Guidelines for Theses and Orals
This study investigates the relationship between approaches to studying and course completion in two online preparatory university courses in mathematics and computer programming. The students participating in the two courses are alike in age, gender, and approaches to learning. Four hundred and ninety-three students participating in these courses answered the short
version of the Approaches and Study Skills Inventory for Students (ASSIST). Results show that students demonstrating a deep approach to learning in either course are more likely to complete. In the mathematics course, a combination of deep and strategic approaches correlates positively with course completion. In the programming course, students who demonstrate a surface approach are less likely to complete. These results are in line with the intentions of the course designers, but they also suggest ways to improve these courses. Furthermore, the study demonstrates that ASSIST can be used to evaluate course design.
Over the last decade the global economy has become more competitive, and the jobs needed in that new economy have grown more technologically complex. As a result, educators, education researchers, and national and state policymakers have emphasized that students must graduate from high school “ready for college and career.” While college and career readiness has become the goal for all individuals, opinions have recently begun to differ about what college and—especially—career readiness actually means and how best to assess it.
Where I teach — a small, primarily residential liberal-arts college — there was a time when professors would have avoided online teaching like the plague. Five years ago I wasn’t teaching any online courses. This semester, my entire course load is online. And so is next semester’s.
What’s interesting is how many of us who work at "traditional" colleges — where dorms and dining halls occupy equal pride of place with classrooms and laboratories — are now trying to figure out how to create an online version of a face-to-face course we’ve been teaching for years.
For several decades, policymakers have embraced the goal of preparing students for college and careers, particularly for careers in the area of mathematics and science. The recent emphasis on these STEM (science, technology, engineering,
and mathematics) subjects is due to the growth of STEM occupations and the perceived shortage of qualified workers to fill these positions. There is a concern that many students do not currently have the level of STEM capabilities necessary for high-skill STEM professions such as engineering or even for low-skill STEM positions in fields such as manufacturing.
Several days ago, President Trump issued an executive order barring immigrants and nonimmigrant visitors from seven Muslim-majority countries from entering the United States -- significantly impacting many students and scholars. This follows on the heels of two other executive orders focused on immigration enforcement and border security that he signed last week, which froze
refugee admissions and called for the immediate construction of a wall along the southwestern border of the country.
Three years ago, Schreiner University recognized a need for nursing education in south central Texas. Many registered nurses at local hospitals lacked a bachelor’s of science in nursing -- a degree that would open the door to higher salaries and greater responsibilities.
Schreiner decided to address this issue by building an online nursing program. There was just one problem: the private university didn't have the internal expertise and start-up capital to create such a program.
Mentoring novice teachers often features buddy support, technical advice, and classroom management tips to meet teacher-centered concerns of survival. Such mentoring aligns with conventional models of teacher development that describe the
novice concerned with self-image, materials and procedures, and management, and only after the initial years, able to focus on individual student learning. Drawing on the wisdom of practice of 37 experienced teacher induction leaders and case studies of mentor/new teacher pairs, this study found that mentors can interrupt that tendency among new teachers, focusing them on the learning of individual students, especially those underperforming. For this work, mentors tap knowledge of student and teacher learners, pedagogy for classrooms and for tutoring teachers, and especially multilayered knowledge and abilities in several domains of assessment. These include assessment of students, alignment of curriculum with standards, and formative
assessment of the new teacher. Skillful use of this knowledge can bring individual student learning into focus and help new teachers generate methods for shaping instruction to meet students’ varied learning needs. These results challenge developmental models of teaching and conservative mentoring practices, calling for articulation of a knowledge base and relevant mentor development to focus new teachers early on individual student learning. Do students think I’m in charge? What materials should I use in this unit?
Just as early childhood experiences can have an important impact on health throughout a person's life,I teens' experiences are also linked to health status many years later. Improving the Health of Young Canadians explores links between
adolescents' social environments (families, schools, peers and communities) and their health. Our focus is on the health of
Canadian youth aged 12 to 19 years.
Discussions of Canada’s so-called “skills gap” have reached a fever pitch. Driven by conflicting reports and data, the conversation shows no signs of abating. On the one hand, economic indicators commonly used to identify gaps point to problems limited to only certain occupations (like health occupations) and certain provinces (like Alberta) rather than to a general skills crisis. On the other hand, employers continue to report a mismatch between the skills they need in their workplaces and those possessed by job seekers, and to voice concern that the postsecondary system is not graduating students with the skills they need.
Vision
•Transforming lives and communities through learning.
Mission
•To educate students for career success.
Globally, some 39 million girls of lower secondary age are currently not enrolled in either primary or secondary education, while two‐thirds of the world’s 796 million illiterate adults are women. Only about one‐third of countries have achieved gender parity at secondary level. The evidence shows that something needs to change.
The IIEP 2011 Evidence‐Based Policy Forum on Gender Equality in Education: Looking Beyond Parity, aimed to review how schools and the education system as a whole can function pro‐ actively in the equal interests of girls and of boys, men and women. Much of the currently available research on gender equality in education has focused on gender parity in terms of access to primary and secondary schools (including how this is related to engagement of women within the teaching
profession and the education system more broadly). More recently, evidence has emerged that looks beyond access, examining gender equality in more depth in terms of learning achievement.
The United States remains the leading educational destination of globally mobile students; however, actionable information about the experiences that mitigate the key challenges international students face is rare. Almost weekly, new headlines highlight the uneven and unequal experiences of international students.
This report confirms many of the disturbing trends reported in major higher education periodicals, including a lack of community, low-quality faculty-student interactions, and uneven global learning. It adds to the nation-al conversation by highlighting “encounters with difference that make a difference” based on an analysis of a representative sample of 36,973 U.S. and international students from 135 U.S. colleges and universities using the Global Perspective Inventory (see Braskamp, Braskamp, & Engberg, 2013).
One of the first things I saw this morning was a Toronto Star article concerning more First Nations kids taking their lives, and chiefs calling for help to deal with the suicide crisis. In conversation with a friend about it, she said to me “I wish I could help, but as a student I just don’t know how.”
Talking about it more with her, she expressed that she felt as if she couldn’t do anything because she’s non-Indigenous, but also far away both socially and physically from the issues at hand.
But that’s simply not true. It needs to be known that we are all treaty people, and reconciliation needs to be a national movement with 100 per cent of Canadians being a part of it, both non-Indigenous and Indigenous.
Everyone has a role to play, especially young people.
Leigh-Ellen Keating, who directs international services for Brock University, in Ontario, just attended a student recruiting fair in Mexico. “The table was flooded with people, which is not historically what I have seen with the Mexican market,” she said. “They just want to go to Canada, and historically I think a lot of them would go to the States.”
“It didn’t hurt,” Keating continued, that the recruitment fair coincided with an anti-Trump rally in front of the hotel where the fair was held. She suspects some of the rally participants might have popped over to check out college options in Canada. President Trump is highly unpopular in Mexico. He kicked off his campaign by depicting some Mexican immigrants as criminals and rapists and has pledged to deport millions of immigrants who are in the country
illegally and build a border wall.
PwC has been retained by Colleges Ontario to provide an independent assessment of the fiscal sustainability of the Ontario college sector over the next decade to 2024-25.1 To that end, we have analyzed the current fiscal condition of Ontario’s 24 public colleges (collectively referred to hereafter as “colleges”) and conducted interviews with senior executives at each college to augment our understanding as to how recent economic and demographic trends have affected colleges’ financial condition, as well as the challenges and opportunities they foresee, for their respective college, over the course of the next decade.
A great deal of research has been conducted and published on the topic of hybrid or “blended” learning in university settings, but relatively little has been conducted within the college environment. The purpose of this multi-method study was to identify the impact of hybrid course delivery methods on student success and course withdrawal rates, and to evaluate faculty and
student experience of hybrid instruction from within the Canadian college environment.
Quantitative findings suggest that students achieved slightly lower final marks in hybrid courses as compared to the face-to-face control courses offered in the previous year, though the magnitude of this effect was very small, in the order of -1%. Further analysis revealed that students with high academic standing were successful regardless of course mode, while students with low GPAs performed slightly worse in hybrid classes. Course mode did not have an effect on withdrawal from the course, suggesting that the format does not impact course completion.
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 2014, the Government of Ontario signaled its intent to review the formula by which Ontario’s universities are funded. In Premier Kathleen Wynne’s Mandate letter to Reza Moridi, Minister of Training, Colleges, and Universities (MTCU), she asked him to:
“[Work] with postsecondary institutions and the Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario to improve the consistency and availability of institution-level and system-level outcome measures. These measures will help inform the allocation of graduate spaces, updated program approval processes and the implementation of a reformed funding model for universities.”