International Ph.D. students at U. of Western Ontario say their program can't be completed in four years, and that without fifth year of funding they risk having to leave empty-handed.
For many years the blessings of the auto and industrial economy in Michigan – where one could earn a good living without a postsecondary education degree, or other credential —created an environment where higher education was desirable, but not essential. All that has changed, with huge implications for the education, skills, and preparation most relevant for individuals to succeed in the labor market.
Queen’s University will strengthen its international reputation by emphasizing what has built its enviable national reputation, namely the transformative student learning experience it delivers within a research-intensive environment. The overarching goal of the university’s Strategic Framework (2014-2019) is to support Queen’s vision as Canada’s quintessential balanced academy.2
Internationalization is one of the four strategic drivers of the Strategic Framework, which builds upon the university’s Academic Plan and Strategic Research Plan.
Most organizations are awash in data – too much of it. And as many have learned, the ability to make effective, fact-based decisions is not dependent on the amount of data you have. Success is based on your ability to discover more meaningful and predictive insights from all the data you capture.
That’s where predictive analytics and data mining come into play. Data mining looks for hidden patterns in your data that can be used to predict future behavior. Businesses, scientists and governments have used this approach for years to transform data into proactive insights. The same approach applies to business issues across virtually any industry.
There is a significant debate in Nova Scotia respecting student finance. Students Nova Scotia is a key contributor to this debate, voicing concerns about unmet need, student debt, tuition and other fees. Like others, we do not always effectively communicate how these different factors or different policies are impacting concretely on real, individual human beings, nor have we successfully situated students’ current circumstances in time. This means many do not understand the real circumstances
of students, the debate often remains superficial, and few appreciate the negative and positive
changes that have taken place.
To demonstrate changes in the circumstances and challenges facing students since StudentsNS was created in 2004, StudentsNS has conducted a number of case studies on the resources and costs that students must meet to attend post- secondary education in Nova Scotia. These case studies are not perfect and certainly cannot capture all the circumstances of the more than 50,000 students attending post-secondary education in the province. They do, however, provide a picture of how circumstances have changed, the impact of different policy decisions made by government, and the impact of policies advanced by StudentsNS.
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.
In 2003 Ontario’s schools were in a troubled state. The achievement of students was ‘good’ but flat lined — stagnant results year after year. Morale of teachers was low; the schools as a whole could be characterized as ‘loosely-coupled’ and without focus. The system was downtrodden.
Now in early 2013, the overall performance of the almost 5,000 schools in the province has dramatically improved on most key measures, and continues to improve. According to international measures and independent expert assessment, Ontario is recognized as and is proven to be the best school system in the English-speaking world — and right up at the top with Finland, Singapore and South Korea.
A few years ago my teaching life had reached what felt like a dead end. Daily, I would see newspaper announcements about the retirement of public school educators who had the same number of years of experience as I had. Subsequently, I found myself longing to be in those photographs or articles. A significant challenge existed in that I was not old enough to touch my retirement funds plus I lacked another viable source of income—a major financial dilemma. At the time it seemed that I was going through the motions of my teaching job, and I had definitely lost a sense of joy.
Executive Summary
Ontario is Canada’s largest provincial destination for immigrants. Language barriers, lack of recognition for foreign credentials and lack of work experience in Canada prevent many from gaining employment in their field of expertise.
There is an urgent and growing need for occupation-specific language training in Ontario. Immigrants cannot apply their experience, skills and knowledge without the level of language proficiency needed in the workplace, but there are not enough language training opportunities to meet their needs. Shortages of skilled workers in many sectors will increasingly hinder
Ontario’s economic prosperity.
This paper presents the findings of a research study on a complete course re-design of a large first-year class, which changed the learning environment and reduced boundaries to allow for more meaningful student engagement and improved student learning. The specific purpose of this study was to determine if a blended course design can increase student engagement and influence students’ approach to learning in a large first-year course.
One of the most intriguing expressions of human behavior is the leader-follower phenomenon. Since the beginning of civilization, people have sought answers to the questions of who becomes a leader and why. Philosophers, political scientists, and psychologists have produced extensive literature on leaders and leadership, but despite this, there is still no consensus as to why and under what circumstances some become leaders and others remain followers. There is no universal theory of leadership and no precise formula for producing leaders, and the answers are elusive. Furthermore, the debate continues about whether effective leadership and successful management are synonymous. Perhaps one of the best ways to answer
some of these questions is to describe some of the views about leadership. This provides a beginning for defining leadership, for explaining the power associated with it, for discussing the various current theories about it and for determining where theories coalesce and diverge.
The Council of Europe (since the mid-1960s), the European Commission (since the late 1980s) and many European states and civil society organisations (in the aftermath of the Second World War) have long fostered programmes and strategies to enhance the mobility of young people.
The prevailing notion of such programmes is that the process of economic and political integration in Europe will indeed remain fragmentary and unstable without accompanying social and educational measures. Instead of a Europe with non-transparent
bureaucratic institutions, a “Europe of Citizens” was meant to develop wherein people would get to know each other,
appreciate their mutual cultural differences and, at the same time, form a European identity by saying “yes” to core European values. As such, mobility is considered important for the personal development of young people, contributing as it does to their employability and thus their social inclusion.
Legal uncertainty is a topic often raised in discussing unresolved Aboriginal land claims, such as those in British Columbia. Mining and Aboriginal Rights in Yukon examines legal uncertainty on Aboriginal rights in a different way, and in an under-examined Northern context. We examine what we identify as growing legal uncer-tainty in Yukon. This topic is not one that would have been expected a few years ago. In Yukon, modern land claims agreements with 11 out of the territory’s 14 First Nations once seemed to have established a high degree of certainty on Aboriginal claims. This certainty was even seen as a significant advantage for Yukon in the global competition for mining investment.
(Toronto, August 19, 2016) – For the first time in Ontario, McDonald’s employees can now receive credits towards
a college business diploma, thanks to a new agreement between Colleges Ontario and McDonald’s Restaurants of
Canada Limited.
The agreement will create a provincewide partnership with McDonald’s Canada, a leading Canadian business, to
establish a prior-learning recognition system. McDonald’s employees, who have completed specific McDonald’s training, will be eligible to be granted the equivalent of first-year credit for a business or business administration program at one of twenty-four (24) public colleges in Ontario. This may lead to significant cost-savings for eligible employees by reducing the number of courses and time required to earn a diploma – with potential savings of up to $4,500.
Although research on Canadian higher education has advanced considerably over the past few decades, the opportunities for university level study of higher education in Canada are still quite limited . Only four universities offer higher education programs; only one has a higher education department; and only a handful of other institutions offer even a course in higher education. The number of students enrolled in higher education programs in Canada is about 200, compared to about 6,000 in the United States; the number of faculty about 15 compared to 700 in the U.S.
Leadership is to this decade what standards-based reform was to the 1990s. Put another way, if you want to boost achievement scores from poor to good levels, a strong standard-based reform strategy can take you so far; but if the aim is to accomplish deeper, continuous improvement, leadership at many levels of the system is required.
I was looking at one of my old teaching and learning books, Kenneth Eble’s 1988 book The Craft of Teaching. Some parts are now a bit dated, but many are not. It was one of those books that greatly influenced how a lot of us thought about teaching and learning back then.
But I found something in the book that was even older. Eble includes a discussion of and several quotes from an 1879 book actually the ninth edition) by Josiah Fitch titled The Art of Questioning. Eble writes that it’s a small book and was originally aimed at British Sunday school teachers.
This guide contains practical steps that will help public sector agencies and departments develop a social media strategy and policy to gain maximum value from social media efforts. It also outlines some smart records retention practices—so you’ll be better prepared to respond to open records requests or other e-discovery needs when they arise.
In this article we describe our experiences with using small-group instruction in college settings for a combined total of 60 years. Since others, including Johnson and Johnson (1989), Kagan (1994, 2009), Sharan (1994), and Aronson (2011), have developed specific forms of group work, such as structured controversy, jigsaw, and group investigation, we will focus on how we have used group work as a core technique and have developed additional procedures that seem to potentiate the power of group work, regardless of the specific procedure and discipline.
The relationship between academia and technology is notoriously complicated. Faculty often view IT staffers as gadget-mongers eager to roll out new tech regardless of its value to teaching and learning, while technology specialists are certain they could make life easier for those on the other side — if they'd only listen!