Programs that allow foreign workers to occupy positions in Canada have existed since the 1960s and were formally introduced in legislation in the 1970s. While they generally focused on skilled workers, they were expanded to lower-skilled occupations in 2002.
While generally considered beneficial from an economic perspective, foreign workers have received significant public attention in recent years. This is the case especially in relation to foreign workers occupying low-skilled positions, considering that most unemployed Canadian workers would meet the minimum requirements to fill these jobs satisfactorily.
Student ratings of teaching have been used, studied, and debated for almost a century. This article examines student ratings of teaching from a statistical perspective. The common practice of relying on averages of student teaching evaluation scores as the primary measure of teaching effectiveness for promotion and tenure decisions should be abandoned for substantive
and statistical reasons: There is strong evidence that student responses to questions of “effectiveness” do not measure teaching effectiveness. Response rates and response variability matter. And comparing averages of categorical responses, even if the categories are represented by numbers, makes little sense. Student ratings of teaching are valuable when they ask the right questions, report response rates and score distributions, and are balanced by a variety of other sources and methods
to evaluate teaching.
The purpose of this study was to document the implementation of an intergenerational literacy program that incorporated authentic literacy activity with the goal of raising low-English literacy levels of the parent and the English emergent literacy levels of their non-English speaking young children.
Dan Lang
Can all the universities that claim to be “world-class” actually live up to the claim? If they could be, would that be desirable public policy? It could be that there are so many different meanings of “world-class” that the term in practical effect is an oxymoron: the definition of “world” is determined locally when conceptually it should be defined internationally.
This paper discusses different kinds of institutional quality, how quality is formed and how it can be measured, particularly by comparison. It also discusses the subtle but fundamental differences between quality and reputation. The paper concludes with the suggestion that world-class comparisons of research quality and productivity are possible, but that any broader application to the “world-class” quality of universities will be at best futile and at worst misleading.
Effective Practices to Enhance the Educational Quality of Structured Work Experiences Offered through Colleges and Universities
THIS GUIDE IS INTENDED TO SERVE AS A RESOURCE TO ENHANCE STUDENT LEARNING AND DEVELOPMENT IN HIGHER EDUCATION THROUGH THE STRUCTURED WORK EXPERIENCE
An early consensus in the ongoing discourse about graduate student preparation for diverse careers was that graduates lacked competencies relevant to non-academic professional settings. Lists of missing “skills” were developed that universities and agencies sought to address, most commonly by the offering of generic (transferable) skills workshops or courses. In this paper, we critique this framing of the issue and discuss the limitations of the common approaches taken to address it. We propose a more integrated approach, where students’ thesis research itself is oriented to their possible futures (a practice already occurring in many areas), and where assessment of the competencies so developed is integral to the awarding of the degree. We illustrate the concepts through the stories of two students, and discuss policy ramifications and
the substantial challenges to its realization presented by a highly competitive research
environment and established ways of assessing success in faculty and students.
Vision
Enriching lives and fulfilling dreams
Mission
Providing outstanding applied education and training for a changing world
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 July 2016, the Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario (HEQCO) published Understanding the
Sustainability of the Ontario Postsecondary System and its Institutions: A Framework (Weingarten,
Hicks & Moran, 2016). The key messages of the report were:
1. Sustainability is about more than just money. It also relates to the quality of education and the academic experience institutions can offer.
2. The best sustainability regimes are those that look forward and are designed to predict future challenges.
3. Overcoming sustainability challenges requires collaboration between government and institutions.
The tools available are inextricably linked to other policies and practices, such as
enrolment planning, tuition policy, funding formulas, differentiation and institutional autonomy.
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.
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?"
Any seasoned academic who has been involved with job searches knows there are two sets of criteria for some positions: the ones in the published ad and the "hidden" ones.
"The dean says we must hire a woman this time," reports the chair. Or the dean says: "The department’s lack of racial diversity is becoming a problem, you’ve got to fix that with this year’s search." Or the department’s star faculty member tells the chair, "If you don’t hire my spouse into a permanent line finally, we will take jobs elsewhere next year." All of those fall into the hidden-criteria column.
Le projet Comprendre le concept de force en sciences est né de l’initiative des ministères de l’Éducation de l’Ontario et du Québec dans le cadre d’une entente de collaboration signée par les deux Premiers Ministres de ces provinces concernant le secteur de l’éducation ainsi que d’autres secteurs d’activité.
C’est une étude comparative, de nature collaborative et de type exploratoire, qui s’est déroulée de mai 2007 à mai 2008. Elle pourrait être suivie d’une étude plus approfondie et de plus d’envergure selon l’intérêt des résultats présentés ci-dessous de même que la disponibilité des ressources disponibles.
Educational decentralization is a worldwide phenomenon, but as a concept it hides more than it reveals. It often refers to the devolution of some authority to the local school and community level, but two large problems remain. First, in all cases, key aspects of authority are retained at the regional and central level. In this sense, decentralization is a misnomer. Second, when decentralization does occur, it usually refers to structural elements (such as site- based councils), thereby missing the day-to-day capacities and activities that would make it work for school improvement.
impact on education at all levels. In the past, new technologies such as the telephone, radio, television, cassettes, satellites, and computers were all predicted to bring about a revolution in education. However, after the initial hype, these new technologies left a marginal impact on the general practice of education, each finding a niche, but not changing the essential process of a teacher
personally interacting with learners.
However, the Internet and, especially, the World Wide Web are different, both in the scale and the nature of their impact on education. Certainly, the web has penetrated teaching and learning much more than any other previous technology, with the important exception of the printed book. Indeed, it is possible to see parallels between the social and educational influence of both mechanically printed books and the Internet on post-secondary education, and these parallels will be explored a little further in this chapter.
The application of the Internet to teaching and learning has had both strong advocates and equally strong critics. Electronic learning has been seized upon as the next commercial development of the Internet, a natural extension of ecommerce.
John Chambers, the CEO of the giant American Internet equipment company, Cisco, described education as the next Internet “killer application” at the Comdex exhibition in Las Vegas in 2001 (Moore and Jones, 2001). Chambers linked several concepts together: e-learning is necessary to improve the quality of education; e-learning is necessary to improve the quality of the workforce; and a highly qualified technology workforce is essential for national economic development and competitiveness.
No one wants their writing to be the subject of ridicule and disdain, but that’s the lot of many academics, whose turgid, clumsy, lumpy prose is deemed unapproachable by readers outside the halls of academe. What’s the harm in writing for the few? Many good ideas that might be of public benefit are cloistered away. The articles in this collection describe what’s wrong with academic prose and how it could be improved.
As the provincial government releases new strategies for strengthening international student recruitment and retention, concerns have arisen about the stresses on international students.
The goals of Education for All (EFA) are centrally concerned with equality. If children are excluded from access to education, they are denied their human rights and prevented from developing their talents and interests in the most basic of ways. Education is a torch which can help to guide and illuminate their lives. It is the acknowledged responsibility of all governments to ensure that everyone is given the chance to benefit from it in these ways. It is also in the fundamental interests of society to
see that this happens – progress with economic and social development depends upon it.
On may 16th. 2011, IBM, Baycrest and the Public Policy Forum convened Innovation and the Human Brain. This conference was convened, in part, at the request of the Minister of Research and Innovation in an effort to bring together business, academia and government to tackle one of the main issues which will define Ontario's innovation agenda over the coming decade - brain research.