Collège Boréal has a dual mandate: to be a postsecondary college institution and a vital community development organization. Collège Boréal is a hub of education, innovation, culture, and community serving a diverse francophone clientele: Franco-Ontarians, French immersion students, immigrants, French-speaking First Nations and Métis persons, and international students, among others. Its purpose is to produce a highly skilled bilingual workforce that is active in French-speaking communities and contributes to the economic, social, and cultural vitality of the province and country.
The following statements are part of the College’s 2010-15 Strategic Plan:
Vision
To foster knowledge and stimulate culture.
Mission
Collège Boréal provides a high-calibre personalized education to a diverse clientele and practises community leadership to foster the sustainable development of the francophone community of Ontario.
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.
On the basis of national surveys conducted in 1998, 2004 and 2010, about half of Canadian adults were found to participate in further education courses annually. The vast majority of adults were participating in informal learning related to paid employment, housework and general interests. About 20 percent express unmet demand for further education. Older and working class people may have somewhat lower rates of participation in further education courses but not in informal learning. There are also suggestions of a trend toward increasing underutilization of educational qualifications and continuing underuse of computer skills in paid workplaces.
Teaching and assessment in higher education institutions are increasingly supported by digital tools and services. Students, however, perceive and value the importance of such e-learning offerings in very diverse ways. The goal of this article
is to examine which predictors significantly influence students’ perceptions of the value of digital learning formats. Based onKu¨pper’s acceptance model, we generate hypotheses that are subsequently tested using data from a German student survey.
The results show that individual-related characteristics, especially motivation and orientation patterns of students, have a high impact on the perceived importance of digital learning formats. Our analyses indicate that besides individual performance
and motivation, the practical orientation of a student is also a key predictor for a high rating of the importance of digital learning formats. An analysis of characteristics regarding the field of study shows that students who major in economic sciences, especially those who frequently work with digital learning formats in their classes, find them significantly more important than students who major in social science. Regarding innovation-based characteristics, students who express a need for flexible course offerings rate the use of digital learning formats as particularly important. The discussion provides an evaluation of the results of the student study based on the hypotheses and presents further implications.
Keywords: digital learning formats; online learning; online learner characteristics;
motivation; perceived benefit
It’s something many graduate students have heard: “You must be very intelligent.” It’s also the title of a new novel about academic life that asks if going to grad school really is a smart choice -- or even a sane one.
Author Karin Bodewits, co-founder of NaturalScience.Careers, an advice website, started writing You Must Be Very Intelligent: The Ph.D. Delusion (Springer), between the submission and defense of her doctoral thesis (biochemistry and microbiology) in 2011, while backpacking around South America. The first scribbles of it remain in the back of her travel guidebook. While people who read the first chapters encouraged her to continue, she said, she was scared of the potential consequences. Why? Take the prologue, to start.
In a recent Center for Digital Education (CDE) survey, 74 percent of responding higher education decision- makers said improving student retention and graduation rates is the top goal of their college or institution. The ability to retain and promote students not only influences college rankings, reputation and recruitment of top talent, but also impacts the bottom line. Enrolled students provide a steady revenue stream via tuition and other purchases (e.g., books, parking passes and food services). Student retention also allows recruitment dollars to go further by decreasing the need to continually replace students who have dropped out.
There are a number of studies that classify governing boards into different types. Some classifications are based on management form. Some are based on the form in which authority is exercised. Some are based on the form of institution that the board serves. Most of these classifications include "working boards" but few offer a clear definition of them. Even those that
do attempt to define this type of board acknowledge that little is known about how they actually function. This study examines a small public not-for-profit institution with a "working board" to determine how that type of board functions, where it succeeds and where it fails, and how it is different from other types of boards.
Older workers’ (aged 50-64) job retention in the paid labour force has come to the fore because of the shortfall in availability of skilled labour now and in Canada’s future and the projection of a ‘greying population.’ Employing mixed methods, the research focused on the unique approaches and challenges experienced by older professionals in informal learning, the everyday experiences in which people learn. In addition, the research focused on the practices of documenting (methods for keeping track of learning), assessing (making judgements about learning), and supporting (methods that facilitate learning) that are helpful for older workers’ informal learning practices. The project focused on Certified Management Accountants (CMAs), knowledge workers whose continuous learning is urgent in Canada’s ‘hot economy’ and whose professional associations have made learning a priority.
In an effort to improve writing skills, the Writing Centre at Wilfrid Laurier University developed a series of free online resources and tools for students. However, a recent study by the Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario (HEQCO) found that even when integrated into the classroom experience, only a small number of students actually used the tool as they felt it was not relevant to them, and those who did saw no impact on their grades. The authors feel further research is needed into how to best
integrate the service into the classroom, including potentially assigning grades for its use.
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).
With so many classroom research studies published daily, you can be forgiven for missing some. The techniques below are super-tactical and, for the most part, unsung strategies that you’ll be excited to try tomorrow.
Today's students increasingly expect ubiquitous lecture capture so they can review lectures to improve their understanding
of the material or catch up on a class they missed. "Lecture capture in general is becoming very quickly an
expectation of students," said Chris Edwards, assistant vice president at the University of Cincinnati in Ohio.
O ne characteristic that distinguishes academics from professionals in the corporate world is the former don’t necessarily aspire to climb the management ladder. Many professors — perhaps most, and especially the tenured — are content to spend their lives focusing on teaching and research, with no desire to become a department chair or dean.
That said, some faculty members do want to scale the ladder of academic administration, the first rung of which is usually department chair. Others may not have pursued a management job but nevertheless find it extended to them. And still others may feel some obligation to "take their turn" at the helm, for the good of their department or simply to share the burden. Professors in all three of those groups, at some point, face the same dilemma: "Should I do this, or not?"
Instructors have temporary experiences with groups of students each semester. Even so, these brief moments have the power to change lives. As professors, we decide the impact of our semester-long relationships. We decide to what degree we will work towards student engagement and transformation within our courses. If you would like to create a community of engaged learners within your classroom, it takes more than regurgitating the most compelling content, and it goes beyond collaborative pedagogical practices. The secret to inspiring and transforming students rests in the power of building a community of learners.
There is a global trend toward improving programs and student experiences in higher education through curriculum review and mapping of degree programs. This paper describes an action research approach to program improvement for a course-based MEd degree. The driver for continual program improvement came from actions and recommendations that arose from an
institutionally mandated, year-long, faculty led curriculum review of professional graduate programs in education. Study findings reveal instructors’ perceptions about how they enacted the recommendations for program improvement,
including (1) developing a visual conceptualization of the program; (2) improved connections between the courses; (3) articulation of coherence in goals and expectations for students and instructors; (4) an increased focus on action research; (5) increased ethics support and scaffolding for students; and (6) the fostering of communities of practice. Study findings highlight strengths of the current program and course designs, action items, and research needed for continual program improvement.
Universities Canada members voted to uphold seven “inclusive excellence” principles and to undertake an action
plan from 2017 to 2022.
At Universities Canada’s fall membership meeting, university presidents endorsed a set of principles to advance
diversity, equity and inclusion on their campuses, and committed to a five-year action plan to measure their progress
and outcomes.
“It’s the coming together of a number of things that have led us on this path,” said Mike Mahon, the president and
vice-chancellor of the University of Lethbridge, who was voted in as the new board chair of Universities Canada at
the meeting on Oct. 25. On top of the many conversations over the years in the university community around
creating inclusion, “there is this landscape around us – the commitment of the federal government to be as
inclusive, diverse and equitable as possible,” he said, and that includes efforts to increase equity and diversity in the Canada Research Chairs program.
Will community colleges be prepared to accept the changes ahead, from economic difficulties and fast-changing technology, to the public’s distrust and disenchantment with academic credentials?
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.
Abstract - The earliest studies of undergraduate retention in the United States occurred in the
1930s and focused on what was referred to at the time as student mortality: the failure of students to graduate (Berger & Lyon, 2005). Historically higher education research has had an eye toward pathology with a focus on repairing students’ problems (Shushok & Hulme, 2006). To this end, much research exists on why students fail to persist as opposed to why they succeed. Strength-based approaches to the study of undergraduate retention involve studying successful students. Studying
what is right with students may illuminate new aspects of successful student experiences which can in turn be applied to supporting all students. This paper will provide a brief historical overview of undergraduate retention followed by factors commonly related to undergraduate retention. Finally, an overview of the recent application of motivational theories to understand undergraduate retention including attribution theory, expectancy theory, goal setting theory, self-efficacy
beliefs, academic self-concept, motivational orientations and optimism will be provided. Considerations for the future of motivational theories in undergraduate retention will be discussed with particular emphasis on the value of strength-based approaches to study and practice.
One of the core principles of the Ontario Undergraduate Student Alliance (OUSA) is that all willing and qualified students should be able to attend post-secondary regardless of their ability to pay. However, students in Ontario face the highest tuition fees in the country and the cost and perceived costs of post-secondary education are consistently identified as barriers to post-secondary education. These barriers are contributing factors to the persistently high attainment gaps for various vulnerable groups
in pursuing an undergraduate degree.