All of us have had major classroom disruptions that try our patience and push our limits. These incidents can threaten our sense of control and generate fear of looking weak to other students. We fear that other students might do the same thing if we don't take a strong stance. Couple these feelings with the possibility of taking the disruption personally, and we have a recipe for disaster. It's important that we divide our response into two parts:
1. Immediate stabilization
2. Intervention to resolve these issues
Confederation College president Jim Madder delivers his state of the college address on Wednesday; May 24; 2017
(Leith Dunick; tbnewswatch.com)
Thunder Bay school might be celebrating its 50th anniversary, but it's certainly not standing pat says, President Jim
Madder.
Blended learning is on track to become the new normal in education. The approach combines the best of in-person and online learning, offering students the information they need in the method they need to receive it. According to a recent report from Arizona State University’s Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College, “blended learning significantly outperforms face-to-face classroom instruction.”
OCUFA’s 2015-16 pre-budget recommendations are directed toward enhancing the quality and affordability of university education in Ontario through increased government investment. We are sensitive to the province’s fiscal circumstances, but believe that investment – at any level – will help build a thriving university sector and a more prosperous Ontario. When the provincial government invests in higher education, the entire province will enjoy the benefits.
The Ontario government has indicated its intention to negotiate individual mandate agreements with each of Ontario’s 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 advance the conversation by examining differences among Ontario’s 24 colleges
on key variables related to programmatic diversity and participation in degree granting.
In October of 1979, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Barbara Tuchman delivered al ecture at West Point in which she decried the “persistence of unwisdom” among politicians across the ages. Reflecting on how American presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon had embroiled the United States more deeply in the Vietnam War, Tuchman bemoaned a perennial “wooden-headedness” -- a tendency for politicians to act wishfully, while not allowing themselves to be “confused by facts.”
Prior work has established robust diversity in the extent to which different moral values are endorsed. Some people focus on values related to caring and fairness, whereas others assign additional moral weight to ingroup loyalty, respect for authority and established hierarchies, and purity concerns. Five studies explore associations between endorsement of distinct moral values and a suite of interpersonal orientations: Machiavellianism, prosocial resource distribution, Social Dominance Orientation, and
reported likelihood of helping and not helping kin and close friends versus acquaintances and neighbors. We found that Machiavellianism (Studies 1, 3, 4, 5) (e.g., amorality, controlling and status-seeking behaviors) and Social Dominance Orientation (Study 4) were negatively associated with caring values, and positively associated with valuation of authority. Those higher in caring values were more likely to choose prosocial resource distributions (Studies 2, 3, 4) and to report reduced likelihood of failing to help kin/close friends or acquaintances (Study 4). Finally, greater likelihood of helping acquaintances was positively associated with all moral values tested except authority values (Study 4). The current work offers a novel approach to characterizing moral values and reveals a striking divergence between two kinds of moral values in particular: caring values and authority values. Caring values were positively linked with prosociality and negatively associated with Machiavellianism, whereas authority values were positively associated with Machiavellianism and Social Dominance Orientation.
Dr. Auld welcomed the participants to our forum on college/university partnerships in Ontario.
Dr Auld suggested that in the future, historians of education will look at the current period as a watershed in the emergence of a new structure of higher education in Ontario. From the 1960s to the early 1990s, colleges and universities advanced their own agendas within a general framework of very significant growth. The community colleges had not been structured as an alternative route to university study; but even so, colleges began to develop linkages as students looked to extend their educational opportunities. Some of these linkages were formal, some not. Initially some colleges created links with American universities but by the mid 1990s sufficient interest developed between colleges and universities in Ontario toward credit transfer that the Government agreed to provide funding for the College-University Consortium Council. The mandate of CUCC is to conduct research on credit transfer both in Ontario and elsewhere, to develop and maintain a transfer guide and encourage the development of articulation. The environment continues to change as applied degrees for colleges have recently been approved and there is speculation that in the near future polytechnic institutions may appear.
This paper presents the findings from a research study on the implementation of an alternative evaluation strategy into a third-year class, which changed the learning environment by allowing students to choose how they would be evaluated. The specific objective of the study was to determine if the implementation of this evaluation strategy would improve student engagement, the quality of the learning experience and address challenges associated with increased diversity in student capabilities.
During the Winter 2012 and Winter 2013 semesters, PSY3523: Psychologie de la famille (Psychology of the Family) was taught at the University of Ottawa as a course offered to a maximum of 100 students per semester. The course incorporates various teaching methods, including traditional lectures, the use of documentaries and group discussions, as well as student-led mini-classes. The course implemented an evaluation strategy that combined traditional examinations (midterm and final exams) with the option of completing a term project. If students elected to complete a term project, they could choose from two different options (i.e., to prepare a mini-class or to participate in the Community Service Learning program at the University of Ottawa). Additionally, teaching assistant (TA)-led tutorials were scheduled throughout the semester to help students succeed in both the traditional examinations and the term project. Finally, material presented in the tutorials, as well as weekly quizzes, were made available online for students to consult as needed throughout the semester to support their engagement and success in the course.
This report presents the latest results from the Future to Discover project. It is the first in a new series that will be produced for New Brunswick, evaluating new ways to tackle a key challenge provinces face in meeting their future needs for skilled workers: engaging enough young people in post-secondary education. Promotion of high school students’ access to post-secondary education is a major goal of Canadian governments, in part because of its increasingly important role in helping individuals attain social and economic success. Yet uncertainty remains as to the best policy interventions to encourage students to make the transition.
There are many strategies for estimating the effectiveness of instruction. Typically, most methods are based on the student evaluation. Recently a more standardized approach, Quality Matters (QM), has been developed that uses an objectives-based strategy. QM, however, does not account for the learning process, nor for the value and worth of the learning experience. Learning is a complex and individualized process that course designers and instructors can capitalize on to increase the
value and subsequent worth of a course for all stakeholders. This article explores the concepts of value, worth, and quality of online education, seeking a method to improve outcomes by increasing a course’s value and worth.
Extrinsic incentives and constraints, such as the promise of a reward or the expectation of an evaluation, have long been used by educators to motivate students. Previous research has consistently found that expected reward consistently undermines intrinsic task motivation and creativity of products and performance in students of all ages. For a majority of learners, the promise of a reward made contingent on engagement in an open-ended task frequently serves to undermine intrinsic task motivation and qualitative aspects of performance, including creativity.
What messages do our students receive from their parents, their high school teachers, their older peers, and siblings before they enter college? When I ask my first-year students the answers are, “Now you are on your own,” or “No one will help you when you are in college!” and “You are responsible for your own work.”
Notice something here? All these messages focus on the individual’s sole responsibility to succeed in college without the help of others. You are independent now.
HIGHER EDUCATION IS IN TRANSITION – one as significant as when Gutenberg’s printing press hastened the transition from a world based on oral communication to one based on the written word. Consider the following challenges higher education faces: ፖ Public funding for higher education provides less than half of what it did at its height in the 1980s1. ፖ College tuition and fees increased 600% since 1980, much faster than real household income, inflation, and healthcare costs2. ፖ 70% of people with high school degrees (or equivalent) seek post-secondary education opportunities, up from less than 40% just a generation ago. The total number of people seeking higher education soon will hit 20 million3. ፖ 85% of higher-education seekers are older than 24, attending part time, seeking a degree other than a baccalaureate, and not living in or around a residential university4. Yet we continue to wedge the majority of students, the so-called “nontraditionals,” into inflexible educational structures that were built for 18-22 year olds and that have changed very little in almost a millennium. ፖ Students and faculty have equal access to today’s “Google world” of ubiquitous information, shifting educational needs from information access to information evaluation, information application to solve complex problems, and creation of new knowledge. Some say that higher education is dead5, the next “bubble” about to burst. At the very least, it’s an enterprise ripe for disruption6.
Do your school reform efforts frequently sputter or stall? In this indispensable sequel to the
bestseller Motion Leadership, Michael Fullan shares the real-life strategies and results of educators who have
used motion leadership to propel entire organizations and systems forward. Success stories from the
US and around the world illustrate how educators can use a small number of specific actions to
generate momentum for lasting change. Motion Leadership in Action addresses:
• Creating and leading movement in the right direction and at the right time
• Implementing a "ready-fire-aim" mindset
• Emphasizing the importance of collaboration
• Forging relationships while handling resistance
• Establishing your change stance in order to get better results
As Canada’s youth consider their increasingly broad and complex array of post-secondary education (PSE) options, they are faced with potentially costly decisions. Moreover, they often do not have the information they need to make appropriate choices, which can negatively impact their participation and persistence in PSE. For many students, it is a challenge to choose, design and follow a post-secondary pathway to its conclusion without deviating from their original plan. Students are increasingly taking non-linear pathways through PSE. Some may need to relocate and attend a different institution. Many students may decide to change the focus of their study, while others may wish to change their program entirely. Some may shift their goals from academic to applied forms of study, or vice versa. However, the structures of post-secondary systems in our provinces, and the various mechanisms that bind them, do not always provide clearly apparent and unobstructed pathways for students, particularly for mobile students. These problems are exacerbated by shifting mandates, roles, and labels of institutions across the Canadian PSE sector.
ecently, I gave a reading at a local independent bookstore for my new book, Trans/Portraits: Voices From Transgender Communities. The book uses an oral history framework to examine the daily lives of 34 transgender and nonbinary individuals
The purpose of this study was to identify how entrepreneurship education is delivered in Ontario colleges and universities. In Ontario, as in the rest of Canada, the increase in the number of entrepreneurship courses at universities and colleges, and the concurrent popularization and maturation of entrepreneurship programming, contribute to fostering entrepreneurial skills and mindsets, and the creation of businesses. The overall aim of this report is to inform debate and decision-making on entrepreneurship education through a mapping and assessment of existing programs in the province.
This study analyzes the three different types of institutions—public schools, independent schools, and home schooling—that provided education to stu-dents in Canada over the 2000/01 to 2012/13 period. Specifically, this study quantifies enrolment numbers by type of education institution in order to better understand how Canadian students are being educated.
It is important to understand enrolment numbers within the context of a declining school-aged population. The number of Canadians aged 5 to 17 declined by 6.4 percent between 2000 and 2013. Every province except Alberta recorded a decline in their school-aged population over this period, affecting enrolment rates.
Aboriginal learners who have followed their passion and found their voice at Ontario universities are spreading the word to their peers in a series of testimonials about the transformative power of a university education in hopes of inspiring other Aboriginal youth to see the benefit of higher education.