In a traditional face-to-face class, students have many opportunities to interact with their instructor and fellow students. Whether it’s an informal chat before or after class, or participating in the classroom discussion, interaction can be an important factor in student success.
Creating similar opportunities for participation and collaboration in an online course is one of the biggest challenges of teaching online. Yet, opportunities for meaningful interaction online are plentiful, provided you design and facilitate your course in the correct manner and with the proper tools.
Critics have suggested that the practice of psychology is based on ethnocentric assumptions that do not necessarily apply to non-European cultures, resulting in the underutilization of counselling centres by minority populations. Few practical, culturally appropriate alternatives have flowed from these concerns. This paper reviews experiences from a doctoral-level practicum in
counselling psychology that targeted aboriginal and international university students outside of the mainstream counselling services at a western Canad- an university over a two-year period. It recommends an integrated approach, combining assessment, learning strategy skills, and counselling skills while incorporating community development methodology. The paper concludes with recommendations for counsellor training that will enhance services to both international and aboriginal students.
Social networking sites (SNSs) have gained substantial popularity among youth in recent years. However, the
relationship between the use of these Web-based platforms and mental health problems in children and adolescents
is unclear. This study investigated the association between time spent on SNSs and unmet need for mental health support, poor self-rated mental health, and reports of psychological distress and suicidal ideation in a representative sample of middle and high school children in Ottawa, Canada. Data for this study were based on 753 students (55% female; Mage = 14.1 years) in grades 7–12 derived from the 2013 Ontario Student Drug Use and Health Survey. Multinomial logistic regression was used to examine the associations between mental health variables and time spent using SNSs. Overall, 25.2% of students reported using SNSs for more than 2 hours every day, 54.3% reported using SNSs for 2 hours or less every day, and 20.5% reported infrequent or no use of SNSs. Students who reported unmet need for mental health support were more likely to report using
SNSs for more than 2 hours every day than those with no identified unmet need for mental health support. Daily SNS use of more than 2 hours was also independently associated with poor self-rating of mental health and experiences of high levels of psychological distress and suicidal ideation. The findings suggest that students with poor mental health may be greater users of SNSs. These results indicate an opportunity to enhance the presence of health service providers on SNSs in order to provide support to youth.
The Ohio State University Undergraduate and Master's/ Professional Graduation Surveys were first administered in the spring term of 2011 and are administered at the end of each term by the Office of Student Life. The surveys gather information about the career and education plans of potential graduates, as well as students’ satisfaction with Ohio State. In recent years, data from
the academic terms comprising the academic year (summer, autumn, and spring) have been compiled. This report presents the results from the spring 2012, autumn 2012/spring 2013, the 2013-2014, and 2014-2015 administrations. Please note that the surveys have changed over time and this report compares findings when direct comparisons are available across years.
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
Based on principles that look to improve overall wellbeing amongst student populations, this policy on student health and wellness takes a broad look at a range of health concerns felt by Ontario’s post-secondary students, as identified by the student membership of OUSA. These policy recommendations seek to bring greater attention to the current mental and physical health care needs amongst our students regardless of their current health or socio- economic standing, or physical and mental ability. With this policy, OUSA hopes that students will be provided with the resources and service
their overall
wellbeing and success.
The growth of transnational education, or TNE, must go hand in hand with an increase in quality, according to a panel of experts taking part in a webinar on the future of cross-border higher education.
With countries hosting TNE programmes tightening up on regulations, the webinar heard universities in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries providing transnational education were withdrawing from the riskier end, such as franchising and validating, and focusing instead on distance learning, branch campuses and joint or dual degrees where they have greater quality control.
Ontario’s 20 publicly assisted universities offer graduate and undergraduate degree programs in a wide variety of fields. In 2010/11, these universities enrolled the equivalent of about 390,000 full-time students, excluding about 44,000 foreign and other students taking courses not eligible for provincial assistance. These universities employed approximately 15,000 full-time faculty members. Faculty include tenure-stream staff, who have both teach- ing and research responsibilities; teaching staff, who
generally have no research responsibilities; and part-time sessional instructors, who are under contract to teach one or more courses.
Most Ontario universities were established or continued by acts of the provincial legislature that set up their governing structures. University governance is often a shared responsibility between the Board and the Senate. The Board is generally responsible for the university’s corporate side, including management of property, revenues, expenditures and other business affairs. The Sen- ate is responsible for academic matters such as determining the courses of study, setting admission
standards, and awarding diplomas and degrees.
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.
Hindered by video screens, fluctuating schedules, and health regulations, teachers are up
against the odds this school year when it comes to getting to know their students.
Ontario faces significant challenges to its global competitiveness. At the same time, demographic trends point to growing skills shortages and to increased competition worldwide for skilled labour. In the face of these challenges, there is an urgent need to ensure the economy has the skills it needs and individuals have access to recognized, credentialed education and training that meets their individual aspirations and supports their transition to long-term employment.
The proposals contained in this document also address a key priority of the McGuinty government: addressing poverty. For example, with youth unemployment at nearly 14 per cent, Ontario must ensure that at-risk youth, who have even higher unemployment rates, participate in education and training programs such as the Ontario Youth Apprenticeship Program, Job Connect and Learning to 18.
When Ontario began to expand its higher education system in the mid-1960s, it made an important choice: to provide public funding to universities on the basis of a formula. Many jurisdictions, in Canada and beyond, do not use such formulae in their higher education systems. But there are clear advantages to such an arrangement. A funding formula supports the distribution of funding in a predictable, equitable way, that can be easily understood by those who study and work within our universities.
Nevertheless, no formula can remain functional forever, especially as the world changes and our expectations of universities shift. For this reason, OCUFA welcomes the University Funding Formula Review, initiated by the Government of Ontario in early 2015. We particularly welcome the opportunity to provide feedback into this process on behalf of the province’s professors and academic librarians.
The university funding formula is deeply important to the success and vitality of Ontario’s universities. It cannot therefore be treated as a laboratory to play with the latest fads in university finance. A measured and responsible approach to reforming the university funding formula should retain its greatest strengths, while correcting its flaws. The Government of Ontario, as the steward of the university sector, has the important task of working with the sector to identify these weaknesses and strengths, and rejecting harmful policy proposals masquerading as innovations.
This submission makes the case that the basic mechanic of the existing formula is sound, but needs to be updated and streamlined. It is also important to consider how the existing formula does not serve some universities – such as those in Northern Ontario – and how changes can be made to address these challenges.
We also argue that performance funding – currently a cause célèbre south of the border, chiefly among those who do not actually work in universities – is not the right approach for Ontario. There is no evidence that performance funding improves student outcomes, but there is growing evidence that it actually has a variety of negative effects. It also violates numerous principles outlined by the University Funding Formula Review team, while cutting against beneficial and collaborative processes for improving quality.
Finally, we suggest that the goals of transparency, accountability, and quality are best served by a new higher education data system. Such a system would be created and run collaboratively by the sector, with the goal of fueling meaningful policy discussions through the provision of timely and useful data.
Once again, OCUFA appreciates the opportunity to provide input into the University Funding Formula Review. We look forward to working with the government to build a university system that promotes quality while protecting the important principles that have allowed our institutions to be so successful.
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.
Training packages are based on the divorce of learning outcomes from processes of learning and curriculum. Policy insists that training packages are not curriculum, and that this ‘frees’ teachers to develop creative and innovative ‘delivery strategies’ that meet the needs of ‘clients’. This paper argues that training packages deny students access to the theoretical knowledge that underpins vocational practice, and that they result in unitary and unproblematic conceptions of work because students are not provided with the means to participate in theoretical debates shaping their field of practice. Tying knowledge to specific workplace tasks and roles means that students are only provided with access to contextually specific applications of theoretical knowledge, and not the disciplinary framework in which it is embedded and which gives it meaning. The paper illustrates this argument by comparing the current Diploma of Community Services (Community Development) with a previous
qualification that preceded training packages in the same field.
Digital resources are changing the ways students engage in learning and provide increased opportunities for student success. New technologies also provide improved assessment tools for measuring learning outcomes and student engagement. These benefits come without an additional cost burden to students.
The Ministry of Training, Colleges, and University’s (MTCU) recently released Tuition Fee Framework and Ancillary Fee Guidelines for Publicly-Assisted Universities (December, 2013) indicates support for the use of digital learning materials, including materials used in assessment. The new framework reflects a change in the Ministry policy concerning ancillary fees and enables the use of digital learning resources. This position paper explains Ontario universities’ support of MTCU’s new guidelines.
According to the most recent Statistics Canada census data (2006), there are 242,000 Aboriginal people living in Ontario, primarily comprising three distinct groups: First Nation (158,000), Métis (74,000) and Inuit (2,000). The remaining 8,000 Aboriginal people classified themselves as “other.” Aboriginal peoples in Ontario have diverse languages, cultures and traditions. The census also identified that approximately 47,000 First Nations people live on reserves in Ontario; these are lands set aside for the use and benefit of a specific band or First Nation. There are a total of 133 First Nation communities in Ontario, each of which has its own government or tribal council. The delivery of education through schools on reserve is the responsibility of the First Nation and the federal government. The federal government is financially responsible for the education of First Nation students living on reserve, whether these students attend First Nation or provincially operated schools.
International students have increasingly become an important part of postsecondary education in Canada. The number of international students has risen 84% between 2003 and 2013, and most precipitously since Canada introduced the
Canadian Experience Class as part of its new immigration policy changes.1 A report published by the Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario (Williams, K., Williams, G., Arbuckle, A., Walton, Roberts, M., & Hennebry, J., 2015) describes the political
and economic climate, as well as the policy changes over that time period. These changes have allowed for an increase in the number of international students being admitted into Canada’s post-secondary institutions by streamlining application
processes and revising policies regulating off-campus work and post-graduation work permits. Students from India and China have had greater ease in accessing Canadian post-secondary education with the introduction of the Student Partners
Program (SPP) in 2009, though financial restrictions have become a potential barrier to access.2 With these changes, according to Williams et al., Ontario has become the primary destination for international students in Canada. This is especially
true at Ontario colleges. “Ontario-bound international students show a growing tendency to study in the college sector, with over 50% of new entrants attending a college in 2012” (Williams et al., 2015). Despite this trend, the discussion on student
characteristics does not distinguish between the two sectors.
There is little debate about the biggest challenge facing Ontario today. It is unemployment, particularly the unacceptably high unemployment rate for Ontario’s young people.The 2014 Ontario Budget must focus on comprehensive measures to produce a more highly skilled workforce to promote economic prosperity and allow greater numbers of people to find meaningful work.
Naturally, a key part of that strategy will be to stimulate economic growth.The government needs to continue working with employers and others to create good- paying new jobs and new opportunities throughout the province.
There is increasing interest, if not demand, from universities and students for faculty to teach using online technologies. However, many faculty members are reluctant to teach online. In this paper, we examine data collected from a broad range of faculty (part-time, tenure track, new and more experienced, in education,business, and liberal arts) to explore the relationship between faculty attitudes, experiences, self-perceived preparedness, and concerns about teaching online courses. In particular, we examine whether faculty who have taught online courses, feel more prepared and more motivated to teach online and have more positive attitudes about online teaching than those who have not taught online. Our findings indicate that while there are a number of concerns about teaching online among the faculty we surveyed, concerns about students are among the most important. We end with some policy and procedural implications for why faculty may or may not usenew technologies to teach.
Step into any college lecture hall and you are likely to find a sea of students typing away at open, glowing laptops as the professor speaks. But you won’t see that when I’m teaching.
Though I make a few exceptions, I generally ban electronics, including laptops, in my classes and research seminars.
That may seem extreme. After all, with laptops, students can, in some ways, absorb more from lectures than they can with just paper and pen. They can download course readings, look up unfamiliar concepts on the fly and create an accurate, well-organized record of the lecture material. All of that is good.