This white paper reviews the BCcampus Competency to Credential approach to flexible learning in trades training in British Columbia. First, it considers the broader notion of competency-based education and the development of the Competency to Credential concept in response to current education and training challenges. The paper then considers at a high level how the concept may also be applied to other competency-based education and training programs, such as in health care education. In particular, though, this paper describes how the Competency to Credential approach brings system stakeholders together in a collaborative and unified effort to improve trades training and education system-wide in British Columbia and shows how a broader application to other jurisdictions and trades sectors in Canada might occur.
To exemplify the Competency to Credential approach, the paper focuses on the first two phases of a pilot project targeting certification challengers within the Professional Cook trade in British Columbia.
In February 2014, Getting Smart and Fuel Education™ (FuelEd™) came together to release Fueling a Personalized
Learning Revolution in Secondary Education. The paper highlighted how personalized, blended learning can improve access to high-quality learning opportunities by focusing on various experiences of high school students in districts across the country.
Our first paper contended that the ultimate goal of blended learning is to create opportunities for student learning to be personalized along unique pathways. We described the way in which personalization revolutionizes how students learn and teachers teach in schools and districts across the country. Benefits include increased engagement as a result of powerful learning experiences, access to tools that support quality work products, and choices in learning opportunities beyond the traditional school day. This personalized approach provides students ownership of the learning experience, flexibility in path, and opportunities to progress at an individual pace.
In this follow-up paper, we shift our focus from individual classrooms and courses to explore the question of scale. Specifically, we were interested in learning how schools and districts successfully scale online and blended programs so that a growing number of students have access to the potential of personalized learning.
This paper is about school reform for the purpose of improving student academic achievement. More specifically the paper provides an insight into the concept of ‘School Readiness for Teaching Improvement’ by providing an account of an underpinning theory complete with an examination of an associated process and report format. The paper concludes with a sample of an associated ‘Readiness Report’ and an explanation of its key elements and how such a report is read for key points of reference.
Social Media Usage Trends Among Higher Education Faculty
The numbers surrounding social media are simply mind boggling.
750 million. The number of active Facebook users, which means if Facebook was a country it would be the third-largest in the world.
90. Pieces of content created each month by the average Facebook user.
175 million. The Twitter accounts opened during Twitter's history.
140 million. The average number of Tweets people sent per day in February 2011.
460,000. Average number of new Twitter accounts created each day during February 2011.
120 million. LinkedIn members as of August 4, 2011.
More than two per second. The average rate at which professionals are signing up to join
LinkedIn as of June 30, 2011.
All of these stats, which come from the respective companies’ own websites, serve as proof points to what we already knew: social media is growing at breakneck speed. Yet the story of social media is still being written as organizations and individuals alike continue to evaluate the benefits and drawbacks of social media in the workplace. When that workplace is a college or university, there’s a cacophony of opinions in terms of the most effective uses, if any.
For the past two years, Faculty Focus conducted a survey on Twitter usage in higher education, this year we expanded the survey to include Facebook and LinkedIn, while changing a number of the questions as well. Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn are considered "the big three" in social media, and we thank those who recommended we take a broader look at the landscape.
All three platforms have their strengths and weaknesses, and are better used for some things than others. But how are the three being used in higher education today? It’s our hope that these survey results provide at least some of the answers while lending new data to the discussion.
Mary Bart
Editor
Faculty Focus
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.
One of the first things I saw this morning was a Toronto Star article concerning more First Nations kids taking their lives, and chiefs calling for help to deal with the suicide crisis. In conversation with a friend about it, she said to me “I wish I could help, but as a student I just don’t know how.”
Talking about it more with her, she expressed that she felt as if she couldn’t do anything because she’s non-Indigenous, but also far away both socially and physically from the issues at hand.
But that’s simply not true. It needs to be known that we are all treaty people, and reconciliation needs to be a national movement with 100 per cent of Canadians being a part of it, both non-Indigenous and Indigenous.
Everyone has a role to play, especially young people.
This paper examines the implications of expanding the number and scope of college-to-university transfer arrangements as a means of meeting the demand for undergraduate degrees in Ontario. It focuses on two research questions:
1. What are the differences in the learning outcomes of students in college-to-university transfer arrangements compared with those in four-year university programs?
2. What are the differences in the cost per student for college-to-university transfer arrangements compared with four-year university programs?
Successful innovation policies and practices are tied to nations’ distinctive histories, societies and attitudes—but sharing them can galvanize fresh thinking and new approaches across national borders. This was the foremost lesson from the conference “Optimizing Canada’s innovation system: Perspectives from abroad” that the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada hosted in Ottawa in October 2014.
Background: To persistently engage in academic tasks and efficiently process cognitively demanding material in school, successful learners must employ various selfregulatory systems—including the regulation of emotional experiences and expressions—in response to social and taskspecific demands. Furthermore, emotional information helps students derive meaning from and assign causal attributions to events such as academic and social experiences, which influence motivation for action. Thus, it is important to understand the interplay between learners’ emotions and the school environment.
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.
Despite professors’ education and socialization and the significant rewards they receive for research activities and output, the 80/20 rule seems to apply; that is, there exists a system of stars who produce a disproportionate volume of research such that most research tends to be undertaken by a small percentage of the academy (Erkut, 2002). Although a growing body of research seeks to address this imbalance, studies of research productivity have tended to reveal its institutional and non-behavioural antecedents. As a result, there exists very little re- search that considers the strategies that individuals employ to improve their personal research productivity. This exploratory, questionnaire- based study of a sample of Canadian
professors attempts to address this gap by examining the relationship among a number of strategies, what professors report as being their average annual number of publications over the past five years, and their perceptions of their level of research productivity. Not surprisingly, in this study, we found that the amount of time that individuals invested in research activities
predicted their level of research productivity. Additionally, strategically focusing one’s research positively influenced journal publication levels, both directly and through its interaction with seeking resources (such as research grants). A strategic focus
also positively predicted self-perceived re- search productivity through its interaction with managing ideas. Fi- nally, although the perceived need to free up time from teaching and committee work was negatively related to journal publication levels, it was positively related to perceptions of productivity.
Social networking became the rallying cry for a generation that connects over the Internet as easily as previous generations communicated over the telephone. In fact, many Millennials entering the workforce actually prefer social media to spoken conversations.
About a third of tenured faculty age 50 or older expect to retire by “normal” retirement age,1 while fully two-thirds anticipate working past that age or have already done so. This latter group is sometimes called “reluctant retirees,” and when their numbers swell on campus, it can lead to productivity declines, limited advancement opportunities for junior faculty, a lack
of openings for new hires, and difficulty reallocating institutional resources. To address a reluctant retiree pheno- menon and better manage faculty retirement patterns, college and university leaders need to understand the thought process among senior faculty regarding whether and when to retire.
It is either ironic or absolutely unsurprising that while instructors love peer-review sessions for student writing, students mostly do not.
Having undergrads read and respond to each others' drafts is such a promising pedagogical idea: Students receive feedback on their writing, they get to see how others have tackled the same writing project, and the instructor doesn't have to do all the heavy lifting for once.
An in-class peer-review workshop is a part of the process for every major essay I assign. But I've made it a habit to ask my students about their previous experiences with such workshops, and their answers are almost uniformly negative. My students tell me these workshops are never useful and are a waste of time for both reader and writer. Through some combination of trial and error, dumb luck, and doing some reading on the subject, I think I've evolved some ways to ensure that peer-review sessions are helpful to students. I thought I'd share my advice here.
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.
In Seven Essentials for Family-Professional Partnerships in Early Intervention, Bonnie Keilty explores the intricacy of the relationship-building process between early intervention (EI) professionals and the families they work with. EIs are called upon as a part of a team of specialists to work with families of young children with a range of medical and/or developmental concerns so as to foster progress toward developmental goals. Keilty positions family members as experts within this team, drawing on research from the family systems intervention approach that suggests families more fully engage in the goal-achievement process when collaborative relationships and participatory practices serve as the foundation of the family-professional partnership (FPP). Recognizing that the work of developing meaningful relationships between EIs and families is both essential and complex, this book looks at how to create and sustain relationships that enhance the FPP. In line with Auerbach’s (1995) suggestion that the movement towards familial partnerships that invoke an additive approach and that draw on families’ funds of
knowledge must be intentional, Keilty’s book provides a framework for EI practitioners to shift away from approaching families through a deficit lens and move towards relationships that resituate families as authentic partners in early interventions.
In this follow-up study, college students who transferred to one Ontario university in 2008–2009 were compared to non-transfer students using several different measures of academic success at university. When compared to non- transfer students, college transfer students earned fewer credits each year, had lower GPAs, and were less able to earn credits from course attempts. The differences were small for students’ first and second years but larger in years three and four. Despite the
lower GPA, college transfer students were not more likely than non-transfer students to be eligible for academic suspension. College transfer students also attempted fewer courses and were much less likely to persist to Year 4. By spring 2012 (after four years of university), the college transfer students were more likely than non-transfer students to have graduated, but their degree of choice was a 15-credit three-year degree (as opposed to a 20-credit four-year honours or
non-honours degree). Policy implications are discussed.
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.
For some employers and commentators, the skills gap problem is one involving too few highly skilled workers in the Canadian labour market. For others, it is a problem related to weak essential skills, such as working with others, oral communication and problem solving. Still others use the term “skills gap” to refer to what might better be described as an “experience gap” – a shortage of “work-ready” employees possessing those skills that employers claim can only be acquired through work experience. To address the conflicting views on Canada’s skills gap and to argue that a better understanding of Canada’s skills problem is hindered by disagreement over what actually constitutes a skills gap, HEQCO recently published The Great Skills Divide: A Review of the Literature.
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 seeks to offer a comprehensive vision of a strategy to address the multiple barriers that face groups of people who are currently underrepresented in Ontario’s post-secondary education system. This paper seeks to give an over- view of the groups that are currently underrepresented, and to explore the barriers they face, including but not limited to: financial, informational/ motivational and academic barriers. We seek to acknowledge that the complex and multi-faceted nature of barriers that effect access require a holistic package of interventions, that address the unique needs of individuals and communities.