This report was commissioned by the Canadian Council of Chief Executives (CCCE) as part of a multi-year effort to improve the quality of education and skills training in Canada while enhancing young people’s ability to succeed in the 21st century job market. Opinions in the paper are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the CCCE or its members.
This essay is primarily analytic and historical with respect to the conceptualizations that should guide the contextualization of assessment in education.
In this summary we provide a list of practices for universities to consider when creating or expanding a student retention or degree completion grant program. These practices were gathered from a series of interviews with ten urban-serving institutions. More
comprehensive information from those interviews and additional background information are presented in the full report.
There are tens of thousands of options right now with the types of digital “things” of learning – Apps, websites, immersive-environment digital courseware, eBooks, eTextbooks, assessments, projectware, loose content pieces in PDFs or word documents, games, and more are arriving in schools. What’s going on inside the things of digital content and curriculum
has not been defined, and so we’ve set out to do that here in this Special Report. We expect that we’ll hear arguments, some exclamations of delight, confusions, and to have missed some important items.
Leigh-Ellen Keating, who directs international services for Brock University, in Ontario, just attended a student recruiting fair in Mexico. “The table was flooded with people, which is not historically what I have seen with the Mexican market,” she said. “They just want to go to Canada, and historically I think a lot of them would go to the States.”
“It didn’t hurt,” Keating continued, that the recruitment fair coincided with an anti-Trump rally in front of the hotel where the fair was held. She suspects some of the rally participants might have popped over to check out college options in Canada. President Trump is highly unpopular in Mexico. He kicked off his campaign by depicting some Mexican immigrants as criminals and rapists and has pledged to deport millions of immigrants who are in the country
illegally and build a border wall.
The Canadian Graduate and Professional Student Survey (CGPSS) is a national survey that was completed
by over 51,000 students across 48 universities in 2013. This comprehensive survey includes questions covering a broad array of topics including students’ satisfaction with their departments, programs and advisors, availability of funding, use and quality of university services, and satisfaction with professional development supports (CAGS, 2010). This report uses data and
opinions collected from graduate students through the CGPSS in an effort to contribute to the conversation on graduate student education in Canada.
The ways in which a new university, the University of Ontario Institute of Technology (UOIT), was represented in local, regional, and national newspa- pers highlight the difficulties of identity creation for organizations. Drawing on theories of organizational identity and supplemented by interviews with UOIT’s founding members, a qualitative analysis of newspaper articles about UOIT
published between 2001 and 2004 demonstrates that the words and phrases used in these articles played an important role in establishing an im- age of UOIT that continues to impact its identity. These news reports also illustrate the complex relationships that existed between UOIT and its geographical, educational, and political contexts. Although UOIT was founded as a four-year
baccalaureate degree-granting university, it was linked with its well-established neighbour, Durham College, with which it shared land and services. As a result, UOIT was viewed by some as no more than a “community college with ivory tower pretensions.”
La représentation de l’Institut universitaire de technologie de l’Ontario (IUTO) dans la presse locale, régionale et nationale met en évidence les difficultés de création d’une identité corporative. Une analyse qualitative des articles sur l’IUTO, publiés entre 2001 et 2004, étoffés par des entretiens avec les membres fondateurs de l’IUTO, démontre, en s’appuyant sur les théories
de l’identité organisationnelle, que leur contenu a joué un rôle important dans la définition de l’image de l’IUTO qui affecte encore son identité. Ces reportages illustrent aussi les relations complexes entre l’UOIT et son cadre géographique, éducatif et politique. Bien que l’IUTO soit une université décernant des baccalauréats de quatre ans, il est lié à son voisin bien établile Collège communautaire Durham, car il partage avec lui les terres et les services. En conséquence, on considère parfois l’IUTO comme rien de plus qu’un « collège communautaire enfermé dans une tour d’ivoire ».
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.
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.
The first edition of The Challenge of Change was published in 1997. It turned out that this was precisely the year when the field of educational change began a major shift toward deeper action and large-scale reform.
The occasion was Tony Blair’s first term election in England in May, 1997. He came into power with a clear and explicit education platform in which literacy and numeracy were named as the core priorities. Blair and his government committed in advance to targets of 80% proficiency in literacy and 75% in numeracy for 11-year-olds — starting at a base of 62%. This was an enormous undertaking because it involved the entire system of 20,000 schools and a timeline of essentially four 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.
This is the final evaluation report for the Blended Synchronicity (BlendSync) Project as required by the project reporting requirements of the Office for Learning and Teaching.
The evaluation addresses the broad evaluation question: “To what extent was the BlendSync project successful at meeting its stated outcomes and producing its deliverables?”
A growing number of Canadian universities offer graduate student certificate programs in university teaching. This paper examines such programs at 13 Canadian universities and presents a discussion of program structures and practices. The findings suggest that most programs were offered over one to two years, and upon successful completion, participants were issued a centre-approved certificate paired with a more formalized method of recognition, such as a transcript notation. The core focus of certificate programs appears to be divided between those that emphasize practical skill development (46%) and those that offer practical skill development along with a focus on the scholarship of teaching and learning (54%). Most certificates included ac- tive and authentic assessment methods, such as dossiers (69%), and practice teaching sessions (62%). These findings help to inform the continued evolution of graduate student teaching certificate programs.
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.
Imagine meeting your English professor by the trunk of her car for office hours, where she doles out information like a taco vendor in a food truck. Or getting an e-mail error message when you write your former biology professor asking for a recommendation because she is no longer employed at the same college. Or attending an afternoon lecture in which your anthropology professor seems a little distracted because he doesn't have enough money for bus fare. This is an increasingly widespread reality of college education.
Canadians invest considerable energy, resources, and personal and societal aspiration into postsecondary education. It is good public policy to assess how we are doing and what outcomes we are achieving with that investment. One of HEQCO’s core mandates is to evaluate the postsecondary sector and to report the results of that assessment. To that end, in this report, we have assembled data that assess the performance of Canada’s 10 provincial public postsecondary education systems.
OISE/UT Guidelines for Theses and Orals
University graduates are more likely to be working at a job related to their studies than college. University graduates' earnings are significantly higher than for any other education group, and these earning premiums start early in graduates' careers.
In the second edition of Six Lenses for Anti-Oppressive Education: Partial Stories, Improbable Conversations, editors Bic Ngo and Kevin Kumashiro bring together multiple perspectives that examine, analyze, and bring to the fore systemic oppressive social relations. They investigate racism, (hetero)sexism, white privilege, classism, and the global neoliberal economic system, as well as offer tools—or lenses—for conceptualizing anti-oppressive education.
In recent years, there has been a surge of research into early brain development. As recently as the 1980s, many professionals thought that by the time babies are born, the structure of their brains was already genetically determined. The role of experience on the developing brain structure was under-appreci-ated, as was the active role of babies in their own brain development through interaction with their environment (Shore, 1997). While much of the research examining brain func-tioning has been done with animals, new technologies are enabling more non-invasive research to be done with humans. Although there is still much to learn, we now know much more about the brain’s development and functioning.