Attraction and retention of apprentices and completion of apprenticeships are issues of concern to all stakeholders involved in training, economic development and workforce planning. The Canadian Apprenticeship Forum (CAF) has forecast that by 2017 there will be a need to train 316,000 workers to replace the retiring workforce in the construction industry alone (CAF, 2011a). In the automotive sector, shortages are expected to reach between 43,700 and 77,150 by 2021. However, shortages are already widespread across the sector, and CAF survey data show that almost half (48.1%) of employers reported that there was a limited number of qualified staff in 2011 (CAF, 2011a). Given this, retention of qualified individuals in apprenticeship training and supporting them through to completion is a serious issue. There is some indication that registration in apprenticeship programs has been increasing steadily over the past few years, but the number of apprentices completing their program has not kept pace (Kallio, 2013; Laporte & Mueller, 2011). Increasing the number of completions would result in a net benefit to both apprentices and
employers, minimizing joblessness and skills shortages.
This study assesses the economic and financial benefits for individuals and the province of Ontario of implementing a coordinated, province-wide credential and credit recognition and transfer system for Ontario college graduates enrolling in a university undergraduate degree program in the province. The study demonstrates that there are solid economic and financial reasons to develop such a system. It also recognizes that the current patchwork transfer framework results in significant instances of inequity for students and that an enhanced system will encourage more students to pursue the higher education that matches their interests and skills. It will also reduce the number of students who feel compelled to leave Ontario to continue their education. The study recommends a Made-in-Ontario solution to address the fundamental equity and fairness concerns of students, to simplify administration for post-secondary institutions, and to strengthen our economy by providing educational opportunities for the workforce this province will need to compete and prosper in the global economy.
The potential impacts and implications of technology on the professional lives of instructors in higher education, and the role of leadership in integrating educational technology, present a variety of complexities and challenges. The purpose of this paper is to identify the reasons why faculty members are not fully embracing technology and what leadership exists in those institutions to help instructors adapt to technology in the teaching and learning process. The authors examine instructor’s perceptions and attitudes related to educational technology as it applies to the learning process and investigated the organization-wide view of leadership in the education institutions. The authors also developed a theoretical model for how leadership can be applied in the use of educational technology in higher education. The model contains five major blocks. In addition to the concerns of higher education faculty, this paper also considers the impact educational technologies have on instruction itself and why many faculty members view the technology as being too difficult to apply to existing technology infrastructure.
This report is the first by StudentsNS to focus principally on the organisation’s quality value. This paper conceptualizes quality in post-secondary education (PSE), examines the tools used by PSE institutions in Nova Scotia to uphold and enhance quality,
and finally, recommends policies to develop a more student-centred approach to quality measures and assessments. Our understanding of quality in PSE has shifted overtime from the traditional notions of excellence and exclusivity to a focus on
access, accountability, learning outcomes, and the student experience. This shift, however, has not been fully realized within the different mechanisms for supporting and measuring PSE quality. As a result, many of these mechanisms do not effectively
address the real factors affecting learning, institutions are insufficiently accountable for students’ learning, and student voice is not adequately supported. More research is needed to better understand the state of teaching and learning, especially within
universities. However, it is clear that, across the system, a greater emphasis needs to be placed on continual improvement in instruction and pedagogy, on learning outcomes, and on effective quality assurance. Recommendations in the report address
these three themes, envisaging a more student-centred, evidence-based, teaching and-learning-driven PSE system for our province. The report does not provide StudentsNS last word on PSE quality, but represents the first of many projects to explore
ways that Nova Scotia’s PSE institutions can better meet students’ expectations
and support their lifelong success.
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.
LAMBTON COLLEGE VISION/MANDATE
Lambton College fosters innovation and entrepreneurship among our faculty, staff, and students, and in the local and global communities we serve. As the sole provider of higher education in our region, and as a mobile learning college, we are committed to providing teaching and learning excellence in a broad range of program offerings, and a full range of credentials in alignment with our areas of specialization.
It should be noted that our Strategic Mandate was developed within the context of the Lambton College Strategic Plan, and was developed and received with and by the Lambton College of Applied Arts of Technology Board of Governors.
Arguably, the greatest barrier to the academic development and functioning of Ontario's twenty-two Colleges of Applied Arts and Technology (CAATs) is the hostile and suspicion laden relationship which exists between management and the union which represents the academic staff of the CAATs - the Ontario Public Service Employees Union (OPSEU). This was the conclusion of the commission on workload in the CAATs which I chaired in 1985 (IARC, 1985) and was corroborated in a study of CAAT governance by a Special Adviser to the Minister of Colleges and Universities the following year (Pitman, 1986). An indication of the degree of concern felt by the Ontario Government regarding management union relations in the CAATs is that the largest (in terms of time and resources) public commission on the CAATs to date has been the Colleges Collective
Bargaining Commission (Gandz, 1988).
There is currently no shortage of debate about post-secondary education policy in Canada. This reflects widespread agreement regarding the importance of skills, knowledge and innovation in a modern economy and society. As the
respective heads of two of the country’s leading academic and business organizations have put it: “Ensuring our country’s long-term economic growth and continued prosperity—and realizing this country’s promise—will depend heavily on the education and skill levels of Canadians and their success in creating and applying ideas and knowledge” (Beatty and Morris,2008)
This commentary discusses the problem of bullying as it relates to Muslim students. The authors posit that teacher education programs can impact how Muslim students are treated in schools. In doing so, they provide practical avenues teacher educators can use to prepare pre-service teachers to address the problem.
How much of a difference does it make whether a student of a given academic ability enters a more or a less selective four-year college? Some studies claim that attending a more academically selective college markedly improves one’s graduation prospects. Others report the reverse: an advantage from attending an institution where one’s own skills exceed most other students.
Using multilevel models and propensity score matching methods to reduce selection bias, we find that selectivity does not have an independent effect on graduation. Instead, we find relatively small positive effects on graduation from attending a college with higher tuition costs. We also find no evidence that students not attending highly selective colleges suffer
reduced chances of graduation, all else being equal.
Instructors of large classes must contend with numerous challenges, among them low student motivation. Research in evolutionary biology, echoed by work in other disciplines, suggests that aspects of the classroom incentive structure – such as grades, extra credit, and instructor and peer acknowledgment – may shape motivations to engage in studies and to collaborate with peers. Specifically, the way that incentives are distributed in relative quantity (the slope of competition; the proportion of benefits earned through performance relative to peers) and space (the scale of competition; the proportion of peers with whom one is competing) may affect strategies to cooperate or to compete with others.
We hypothesized that students would cooperate with one another more when competition was “global” (i.e., dispersed over the entire population of Introductory Psychology students) than when it was “local” (i.e., concentrated amongst a smaller group of students). We further hypothesized that students would be more motivated when competition was “steep” (i.e., benefits were conditional on relative rather than absolute performance) than when it was “shallow” (i.e., benefits were conditional on absolute rather than relative performance). Moreover, these two variables were expected to interact: cooperation among students was hypothesized to be greatest when competition was both global and steep and weakest when competition was both local and steep.
Here, we designed an experimental test of these hypotheses in a very large, university-level class. Over four semesters, students were randomly assigned, via their tutorial groups, to various competition conditions: global (between-tutorial) competition, local (within-tutorial) competition and asocial (individual) competition. Notably, the global and local competition conditions implied steeper competition than did the asocial competition condition. Within each semester, students were
rotated through each condition, so that all students experienced all conditions over distinct testing phases. Students competed over weekly tests for “bonus” credit that could be applied to reweight the course final exam in their favour. We measured their test performance (i.e., scores on the weekly tests) as well as their evaluations of the learning environment (e.g.,
their reliance on peers and their sense of community in the course).
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.
This handbook is intended to serve as a resource for faculty, staff, academic leaders and education developers engaged in program and course design/review, and the assessment of program-level learning outcomes for program improvement. The assessment of learning outcomes at the program-level can assist in making improvements to curricula, teaching and assessments plans.
Human capital is key for economic growth. Not only is it linked to aggregate economic performance but also to each individual’s labour market outcomes. However, a skilled population is not enough to achieve high and inclusive growth, as skills need to be put into productive use at work. Thanks to the availability of measures of both the proficiency and the use of numerous types of skills, the Survey of Adult Skills offers a unique opportunity to advance knowledge in this area and this paper presents and discusses evidence on both these dimensions with a particular focus on their implications for labour market policy. This paper explores the role played in the labour market by skill proficiency in the areas of literacy, numeracy and problem solving in technology-rich environments. It also shows how skills use, not only proficiency, affects a number
of key labour market phenomena, such as the gender wage gap. Finally, the paper combines information on skill proficiency, educational attainment, skill use and qualification requirements to construct indicators of qualification and skills mismatch and to explore their causes and consequences.
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.
The Instructional Skills Workshop (ISW) is an internationally recognized, peer-based, educational development program involving 24 hours of structured intensive instruction designed to strengthen instructors’ skills in planning, teaching, feedback and critical reflection through a student-focussed process. For over 30 years, the ISW has been offered at more than 100 institutions worldwide as a method of facilitating the development of student-centred, reflective instructors (Day, 2004). Although based on best pedagogical principles for teaching adult learners (Day, 2005), little empirical research has been performed to assess the impact on faculty of participating in the ISW (Macpherson, 2011). Research performed to date has typically shown that individuals who participate in this workshop report that it is transformative to their teaching in the classroom (Macpherson, 2011). The present study sought to extend these findings by conducting a pre-post analysis of ISW and non-ISW participants. The goal of this research was to investigate the influence of the ISW on developing a student-centred approach to teaching in university and college faculty.
Very often, we tend to interpret a person's behavior as an act that reflects their character, however, behaviors don’t always tell us everything we need to know about a person's personality. The desire to classify people and judge them prevents us from seeing things that can explain the reason for that behavior, and according to prominent American psychotherapists, Beck, and Arthur Freeman, authors of "Cognitive Therapy of Personality Disorders," something bigger often hides in abnormal behavior that can indicate a mental illness with the same symptoms. In order for you to try and identify these disorders in their
initial stages and to prevent further development and/or treat it, and especially so as not to rush to judge people because of their behavior, we’ve collected for you eight personality traits that many of you have encountered in a certain person and perhaps interpreted incorrectly.
Mission
•
Confederation College inspires learners to succeed in their lives and careers in Northwestern Ontario and beyond.
Vision
• Confederation College will enrich lives through learning.
The focus of this study was to determine the graduation and employment rates of Indspire’s Building Brighter Futures: Bursaries and Scholarship Awards (BBF) program recipients. Methodologically, the study was structured as a qualitative-quantitative survey. A total of 1,248 Indigenous students who received funding through Indspire’s BBF program between 2000-2001 and 2012-2013 participated in a survey. The report gathers data from a sample of Indigenous students in all provinces and
territories.
One in three students globally is enrolled in private higher education institutions, according to research that reveals the huge growth and wide reach of private providers.
The analysis, the first study based on comprehensive data on the size and shape of private higher education internationally, finds that private institutions have 56.7 million students on their books, or 32.9 percent of the world’s enrollment.