The problem with textbooks is that they’re expensive. They’re sort of a hidden educational fee.
Like a lot of students, James Tait was supposed to buy the online component to his textbook. Buying used to save a bit of money, he didn’t get the online access code that comes with a new book.
“I needed it for my chemistry class, it was called Mastering Chemistry, but I never bought it,” he said.
The online component is an addition to the textbook, for homework, self-tests, and tutorials. Textbook companies include these platforms with the sale of new textbooks as an additional service, but also to reduce used textbook sales. The access code for Mastering Chemistry is about $70.
Since 2012, the Education Policy Research Initiative (EPRI) has supported Mohawk College in its efforts to collect and use administrative and other data on students held by Mohawk as part of a broader initiative to improve student success based on the principle of evidence‐based decision making. This is the third research report resulting from this partnership and the second related to the Predictive Modelling and Advising project.
This project has two phases of investigation. The first phase of this project (Finnie, Poirier, Bozkurt, Fricker, & Pavlic, 2017) focused on the development of a predictive model of student retention and examined how advising participation rates and retention rates differ across different risk groups identified by the predictive model.
This is the final evaluation report for the Blended Synchronicity (BlendSync) Project as required by the project reporting requirements of the Office for Learning and Teaching.
The evaluation addresses the broad evaluation question: “To what extent was the BlendSync project successful at meeting its stated outcomes and producing its deliverables?”
Revenues and expenses
• In 2012-13, college system revenues totaled almost $3.7 billion. Grant revenue from all sources accounts for half of college system revenue.
• College system expenses amounted to about $3.5 billion. Like other organizations in both the public and private sectors, salaries and benefits are by far the largest expense item for colleges.
Trends in college funding
• In 2013-14, real operating funding per student (FTE) was about five per cent higher than in 1998-99 – but 16 per cent lower than during the peak in 2007-08.
• Per student revenue from operating grants and tuition fees for Ontario colleges continues to be the lowest among the provinces. Funding per student for Ontario colleges continues to be significantly lower than that for secondary schools and universities.
• Space per student is much lower for Ontario colleges (90 square feet per student) in comparison to universities and secondary schools.
• In current dollars, the apprenticeship per diem has decreased slightly since 1998-99. However, after inflation is taken into account, the per diem has decreased by 28 per cent. The student in-school fee, which was implemented in 2002-03, has not been increased since its introduction.
Human resources
• Colleges employ more than 43,000 people. From 1997-98 to 2012-13, the number of full-time staff employed at colleges increased by 28 per cent, while enrolment increased by 31 per cent.
Student financial aid
• In 2012-13, almost 125,000 college students were OSAP recipients. This represents about two-thirds of the total full-time post-secondary enrolment.
• The default rate for student loans for all post-secondary institutions in 2012 was 9.8 per cent. For the college system, it was 13.4 per cent.
Universities have a major role to play in closing Canada’s Indigenous education gap and supporting the reconciliation process. The Indigenous community in Canada is young, full of potential and growing fast – but still underrepresented at universities across the country. Our shared challenge is to ensure that all First Nations, Métis and Inuit students can achieve their potential through education, which will bring meaningful change to their communities and to Canada as a whole.
Women represent the majority of young university graduates, but are still underrepresented in science, technology, engineering, mathematics and computer science (STEM) fields. This article provides more information on women with STEM university degrees, and examines whether mathematical ability in high school is related to gender differences in STEM university programs.
The Survey on College Student Health Literacy was a pilot study conducted during the spring 2013 semester at the Ohio State University Columbus campus. The survey was developed from the results of a 2012 qualitative study regarding college student health literacy related to prescription medications, which was conducted in collaboration with the Wilce Student Health Center Pharmacy. The survey expanded upon the qualitative study to include health literacy and numeracy skills such as the ability to interpret tables, nutrition labels, and prescription label instructions. The survey was piloted with a stratified random sample of Ohio State students on the Columbus campus to ensure the inclusion of international students within the sample. A total of 2,000 students were invited to participate, of which 277 students responded, yielding a 14% response rate.
In an effort to measure the effectiveness of faculty development courses promoting student engagement, the faculty
development unit of Penn State’s Online Campus conducted a pilot study within a large online Bachelor of Science in Business (BSB) program. In all, 2,296 students were surveyed in the spring and summer semesters of 2014 in order to seek their perspectives on (1) the extent of their engagement in the courses and (2) the degree to which their instructors promoted their
engagement. The survey comprised three sub-scales: the first and third sub-scales addressed instructional design aspects of the course, and the second sub-scale addressed attitudes and behaviors whereby the instructors promoted student engagement. The results showed a significant difference on the second sub-scale (sig = 0.003) at the .05 level, indicating that students rated instructors with professional development higher on instructor behaviors that engaged them in their
courses than those instructors who received no professional development. There were no significant differences found for the first and third sub-scales indicating that the instructional design aspects of the courses under investigation were not influenced by instructors’ professional development. Qualitative data showed that three quarters of the students who had instructors whose background included professional development geared to encouraging student engagement felt that their courses had engaged them. Future research will focus on increasing the response rate and exploring in more depth both the instructional design and qualitative aspects of student engagement.
Since the turn of the 21st century, universities in Canada have undergone significant changes. Student enrolment has exploded. Between 2000/01 and 2012/13, the number of full-time equivalent students in universities grew from 676,000 to 1,050,000, an
increase of 55%. The number and proportion of international students in universities have doubled during the same period, from 45,800 to 132,000, or from 5% to 10% of total university students. The number of academic staff has also increased, but the growth in full-time positions has not matched the increase in student numbers. Between 2000/01 and 2012/13, the number of full-time permanent university professors increased by 32%.Meanwhile, the number of part-time and temporary academic staff grew by 69% and 49% respectively, and the number of international visiting professors or lecturers increased by 66% since 2004.
These changes took place while the population, aged between 17 and 24 years, which makes up the bulk of post-secondary
students, grew by only 15% since 2000.
The Blended Synchronous Learning Project sought to investigate how rich-media technologies such as web conferencing, desktop video conferencing and virtual worlds could be used to effectively unite remote and face-to-face students in the same live classes. Increasingly university students are opting to learn from off-campus, often due to work, family and social commitments (Gosper, et al., 2008; James, Krause, & Jennings, 2010). Often universities will cater for remote students by providing access to asynchronous resources via Learning Management Systems, meaning that off-campus students miss out on the benefits of synchronous collaborative learning such as rapid teacher feedback, real-time peer discussions, and an enhanced sense of connectedness.
One of the commitments emerging from the Canadian Education Association's What’s Standing in the Way of Change in Education? workshop in Calgary in October 2013 was to convene a series of Regional Workshops designed to expand the conversation about change in Canada’s education systems. To this end, in the Spring of 2014, similar workshops were held in New Brunswick, Manitoba, Ontario and British Columbia with a final session held in Quebec in August, 2014.
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.
Educators tasked with finding instructional materials for their districts and classrooms face a dizzying array of options these days. Classroom resources are available in print, digital textbook formats, and online. They can be paid for, subscribed to, or downloaded for free. They’re available as comprehensive, yearlong curricula; individual thematic units; and single activities and games.
Several forces have collided to bring the market to this confusing, yet ultimately academically promising point: The majority of states are now using the Common Core State Standards, meaning there are more opportunities to share materials across state lines. States are increasingly letting districts choose their own instructional materials, rather than forcing them to select from an approved list. There’s been a recent push, including from the federal government, to make online instructional materials free and open to the public—known as open educational resources
This commentary discusses the problem of bullying as it relates to Muslim students. The authors posit that teacher education programs can impact how Muslim students are treated in schools. In doing so, they provide practical avenues teacher educators can use to prepare pre-service teachers to address the problem.
A PhD is a prerequisite for an academic career, but fewer than 20 per cent of Canada’s PhDs are employed as full-time university professors. The majority of PhDs are employed in a wide range of rewarding careers outside academia. This report examines the employment opportunities and outcomes of PhD holders. It characterizes the challenges some PhD graduates face when transitioning to careers beyond academia, as well as the state of demand for PhDs among Canada’s employers. The valuable contributions PhDs make in a wide range of careers are highlighted. The report examines the status of professional skills development for PhD students and presents innovative examples of professional development initiatives in Canada and peer countries.
Attainment of a post-secondary education has become a prerequisite to participate in the Canadian workforce. This shift was precipitated by a recession that resulted in the near-collapse of Canada’s manufacturing sector, but it reflects a broader shift that has been happening for the past two decades in Canada and around the world.
Recruitment of participants is a challenging and very important aspect of research on postsecondary education. Many studies founder when students are not interested in participating, when students drop out before finishing a study, or when the students who respond do not represent the diversity of the student population. Recruitment is complex: students must know about the
study, want to participate, be able to participate and, finally, log in or show up.Researchers can improve recruitment by being flexible, explaining how the research is relevant to a diverse student body, devoting extra resources to recruiting students who are less likely to participate, and practicing patience and persistence.
While a wide variety of publications have suggested that the development of student creativity should be an important objective for contemporary universities, information about how best to achieve this goal across a range of disciplinary contexts is nonetheless scant. The present study aimed to begin to fill this gap by gathering data (via an electronic survey instrument) about how the teaching and learning of creativity are perceived and enacted by instructors in different disciplines at Ontario universities. Results indicated points of both convergence and divergence between respondents from different fields in terms of their understandings of the place of creativity within courses and programs, and in terms of strategies they reported using to enable creativity in their students. We discuss the implications of these findings, including the ways in which the data speak to ongoing debates about the role of disciplines within teaching, learning, and creativity more broadly.
There are tens of thousands of options right now with the types of digital “things” of learning – Apps, websites, immersive-environment digital courseware, eBooks, eTextbooks, assessments, projectware, loose content pieces in PDFs or word documents, games, and more are arriving in schools. What’s going on inside the things of digital content and curriculum
has not been defined, and so we’ve set out to do that here in this Special Report. We expect that we’ll hear arguments, some exclamations of delight, confusions, and to have missed some important items.
Trust is important for social and economic well-being, for enhancing social cohesion and strengthening resilience, and for maintaining security and order in our societies. Trust is the foundation upon which social capital is built and it also is intimately related to human capital. This work examines the association between education and levels of interpersonal trust, using data from the OECD’s Survey of Adult Skills (PIAAC). Our analysis demonstrated that education strengthens the cognitive and analytical capacities needed to develop, maintain, and (perhaps) restore trust in both close relationships as well as in anonymous others. It does so both directly, through building and reinforcing literacy and numeracy in individuals, and indirectly, through facilitating habits and reinforcing behaviours such as reading and writing at home and at work. Education and trust are thus fundamentally intertwined and dependent on each other. While all countries across the OECD have been striving to improve their education systems in terms of student achievement levels, this analysis suggests that there are also concrete elements that could be usefully addressed in order to reinforce and strengthen trust.