Canada’s universities are committed to working with all parliamentarians to build a more prosperous,
innovative and competitive nation. We do this through research that drives economic growth and addresses pressing social problems, and education that provides students with the advanced skills needed to thrive in a dynamic, global job market.
Budget 2014 included important investments in research and innovation, as well as support for internships. The Finance Committee is to be commended for its role in promoting them.
The university community’s recommendations for Budget 2015 focus in three areas: enhanced funding for research and innovation; an opportunities strategy for young Canadians; and initiatives to attract more Aboriginal Canadians to postsecondary education. Together, these recommendations contribute to three themes outlined in the Committee’s request for submissions
It would be a shame if the lesson learned is simply to remove the controversial bits from your course.
The issues of freedom of speech and transgender rights, highlighted by recent events involving a teaching assistant at Wilfrid Laurier University, remind me of my first year as a university instructor in the late 1990s, when I taught a communications course on advertising at York University. (Yes, I understand that the status of a TA is different than that of an instructor, but I think for the purposes of this anecdote, the principles are similar.)
While teaching the course, I saw an ad for Sauza tequila in the campus newspaper. It featured a photo of an attractive, swimsuit-wearing woman, with the phrase, “She’s a He,” written across her chest. The ad’s tag line read: “Life is Harsh, Your Tequila Shouldn’t Be.” (The ad didn’t identify the model, who in fact was Caroline Cossey, a transgender model.)
In 2009, a 50-year-old worker could expect to continue working for an average of 16 more years, which means retiring at the age of 66. In the late 1990s, expected working life at age 50 was 13 years. Workers have therefore increasingly been delaying their retirement. These findings from a previous study are analyzed at greater length in this article, as are the unexpected personal and economic factors that push some workers to retire early. When such ‘involuntary’ retirements are taken into account, are workers still more likely to retire later than in the late 1990s?
Ontario ranks among Canada’s top-performing provinces on equity of outcomes in kindergarten to Grade 12 education and high school attainment.1 The province also earns an “A+” for college attainment in the Conference Board of Canada’s How Canada Performs rankings.2 What makes Ontario such a strong performer in these areas?
In part, these good results are due to special programs targeting individuals who are at high risk of dropping out of school. One such initiative is the School Within a College (SWAC) program. SWAC helps struggling students complete high school and get a head start on a college or apprenticeship credential. Other jurisdictions can take a page from the SWAC program’s model of transitioning struggling students into college-ready learners.
Ontario’s colleges are eager to partner with the Government of Ontario to expand college capacity by at least 10 percent and double the number of apprentices over the next five years. Assuming that Government will continue to fund enrolment growth, colleges are fully prepared to improve access to applied education and increase enrolment levels. Ontario’s colleges are also committed to working with the Government of Ontario to improve the quality of applied education and to make postsecondary
education more affordable.
PowerPoint Presentation
Canada is now a digital society. Decades of evolving digital technologies have changed how we interact, the amount of cultural content we create and exchange, and the methods we use to create and exchange this content. This reality has profoundly affected the established ways in which memory institutions, such as libraries, archives, museums, and galleries, have been
managing Canada’s documentary heritage for future generations. Indeed, the sheer volume of digital content necessitates new ways of locating, maintaining, and accessing digital holdings that must coexist alongside the continued need for the preservation
of non-digital content.
Many adolescents are experiencing a reduction in sleep as a consequence of variety of behavioral factors, even though scientific evidence suggests taht the biological need for sleep increases during maturation. Consequenlly, the ability to effectively interact with peers while learning and processing novel information may be diminished in may sleep-deprived adolescents.
Among the keys to success in just about any endeavor, preparation is perhaps the most fundamental. Examples of this are plentiful: Musicians practice, athletes train, and actors rehearse long before the concert hall fills, the starting whistle sounds, or the curtain rises. Preparation is a key to success in higher education as well, and a lack of it can be a serious obstacle for students seeking a college credential. Community colleges have a long tradition of open access, but if students who come through the open door are not adequately prepared for college-level work, they have a fairly low chance of graduating. Given this reality, the current national emphasis on college completion – the Completion Agenda – would seem to necessitate an equally strong emphasis on the first step toward that goal: college readiness
In this working paper, Earl and Timperley argue that evaluative thinking is a necessary component of successful innovation and involves more than measurement and quantification. Combining evaluation with innovation requires discipline in the innovation and flexibility in the evaluation. The knowledge bases for both innovation and evaluation have advanced dramatically in recent years in ways that have allowed synergies to develop between them; the different stakeholders can bring
evaluative thinking into innovation in ways that capitalise on these synergies. Evaluative thinking contributes to new learning by providing evidence to chronicle, map and monitor the progress, successes, failures and roadblocks in the innovation as it unfolds. It involves thinking about what evidence will be useful during the course of the innovation activities, establishing the range of objectives and targets that make sense to determine their progress, and building knowledge and developing practical uses for the new information, throughout the trajectory of the innovation. Having a continuous cycle of generating hypotheses, collecting evidence, and reflecting on progress, allows the stakeholders (e.g., innovation leaders, policymakers, funders, participants in innovation) an opportunity to try things, experiment, make mistakes and consider where they are, what went right and what went wrong, through a fresh and independent review of the course and the effects of the innovation. This paper describes issues and approaches to each phase of the cycle. It concludes by outlining the synergies to be made, building capacity for evaluative thinking, as well as possible tensions to be addressed.
NEW YORK, Jan. 13, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Today, The Jed Foundation (JED) and the Steve Fund, two leading mental health organizations, announced a joint plan to provide colleges and universities with recommended practices for improving support for the mental health and emotional well-being of America's college students of color. The announcement is accompanied by the release of new data showing the urgency of improving mental health support for this population.
Canada’s natural resource sector employs 1.8 million people and generates billions of dollars of tax revenues and royalties annually. Hundreds of resource projects are underway and many more are planned for the near future which, according to the federal government, could represent a total investment of $650 billion. Responsible resource management has significant implications for all Canadians, with revenues from projects supporting local and regional infrastructure development and social programs.
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.
During 2008/09 – 2012/13, transfer students constituted about one-third of the student population at the institutions that are members of the Research Universities’ Council of British Columbia, as in 2003/04 – 2007/08. The majority of transfer students moved between Lower Mainland institutions. Three quarters of transfer students brought at least enough credits to transfer to the second year. Among those, 22% of students brought 60-64 credits, which means that they were eligible to transfer to third year.
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.
Partnerships between public and private colleges, which have brought thousands of new international students to Ontario, carried unacceptable risks to the students, the province and the quality of education, says a report for the provincial government that led to a moratorium on the programs.
Since 1977, we’ve been recommending that graduate departments partake in birth control, but no one has been listening,” said Paula Stephan to more than 200 postdocs and PhD students at a symposium in Boston, Massachusetts, in October this year. Stephan is a renowned labour economist at Georgia State University in Atlanta who has spent much of her career trying to understand the relationships between economics and science, particularly biomedical science. And the symposium, ‘Future of Research’, discussed the issue to which Stephan finds so many people deaf: the academic research system is generating progeny at a startling rate. In biomedicine, said Stephan. “We are definitely producing many more PhDs than there is demand for them in research positions.”
ALTHOUGH WE KNOW THAT SEXUAL VIOLENCE OFTEN GOES UNREPORTED, RESEARCH INDICATES THAT THERE ARE 460,000 SEXUAL ASSAULTS IN CANADA EACH YEAR. FOR EVERY 1000 SEXUAL ASSAULTS, ONLY 33 ARE EVER REPORTED TO THE POLICE; 12 RESULT IN CHARGES LAID; ONLY 6 ARE PROSECUTED AND ONLY 3 LEAD TO A CONVICTION.
Very few reach the courts and far too many survivors don’t access support and counselling. This means that survivors aren’t getting the help that they need, and perpetrators of sexual violence are not being held accountable.
Why? Because too many of us have attitudes towards women, men, relationships and rape that towards women, men, relationships and rape that are sexist, misogynist and often just plain wrong.
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.
KSU redefined the MOOC value proposition through collaboration of university leadership and faculty. The new proposition shifts measures of success beyond just course completion to include measures that benefit students, faculty, and the institution. Students benefitted through access to open educational resources, the acquisition of professional learning units at no cost, and the potential of college credit at a greatly reduced cost. Academic units benefited through a mechanism to attract students and future revenue while the university benefited through digital impressions, branding, institutionally leveraged scalable learning environments, streamlined credit evaluation processes and expanded digital education.