Kennett, Mo.
Drive 90 miles north on Interstate 55 from Memphis, then 20 miles west on Route 412, cutting through seemingly endless fields of cotton, rice, and soybeans. You’ll know you’ve arrived when you see the sign: Welcome to Kennett. Hometown of Sheryl Crow.
This small town in southeastern Missouri used to greet visitors with a different motto: "Service. Industry. Agriculture." But the machine-parts-maker closed and the trailer manufacturer left and the aluminum smelter went under. There’s not nearly as much industry around here as there used to be. Sheryl Crow’s Grammys aren’t going anywhere.
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.
This report describes a study exploring the impact of academic community-based learning (CBL), course community-service learning (CSL) and other in-course learning activities (ICLA) on student learning. Informed by Kolb’s (1984) experiential learning cycle, the study used a survey instrument, adapted from several existing survey instruments, examining students’ self-reporting in a number of areas such as:
• Student engagement
• Depth of learning
• Perceptions of course environment including teaching quality and course workload
• Educational outcomes
The study, conducted over a two-year period (July 2011 to July 2013), surveyed 485 York University undergraduate students enrolled in a variety of introductory and upper-year courses across various academic disciplines. In addition, faculty members who taught these courses were also invited to take part in focus group sessions. The focus groups provided additional qualitative data about instructors’ motivations, strategies and challenges associated with incorporating experiential
education approaches to their teaching and instructors’ perceptions of how CBL, CSL and ICLA impact student learning and
experience.
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 movement of students between postsecondary institutions is becoming increasingly common and has created a need for greater emphasis on postsecondary education (PSE) pathways. This report outlines the available data on postsecondary student mobility within Ontario, with a focus on mobility between Ontario’s colleges and universities.
Abstract
We exploit the Youth in Transition Survey, Cohort A, to investigate access and barriers to postsecondary education (PSE). We first look at how access to PSE by age 21 is related to family characteristics, including family income and parental education. We find that the effects of the latter significantly dominate those of the former. Among the 25% of all youths who do not access PSE, 23% of this group state that they had no PSE aspirations and 43% report no barriers. Only 22% of the 25% who do not access PSE (or 5.5% of all youths in our sample) claim that “finances” constitute a barrier. Further analysis suggests that
affordability per se is an issue in only a minority of those cases where finances are cited, suggesting that the real problem for the majority of those reporting financial barriers may be that they do not perceive PSE to be of sufficient value to
be worth pursuing: “it costs too much” may mean “it is not worth it” rather than “I cannot afford to go.” Our general conclusion is that cultural factors are the principal determinants of PSE participation. Policy implications are discussed.
Résumé
Nous avons scruté les données de l’Enquête auprès de jeunes en transition (cohorte A) afin de comprendre les facteurs qui mènent aux études postsecondaires et ceux qui y font obstacle. Pour ce faire, nous avons d’abord
analysécomment l’accès aux études à l’âge de 21 ans était lié aux caractéristiquesfamiliales, comme le revenu familial et le niveau de scolarité des parents. Nous avons alors constaté que les effets de cette dernière caractéristique l’emportaient sur le revenu familial. En outre, parmi le quart de tous les jeunes qui n’ont pas eu accès à des études postsecondaires, 23 % ont indiqué
The world has more graduates than ever before. In an era of mass expansion, the proportion of the population with
degrees is at a historical high across many nations, both developed and developing. The world also has more
newspaper and magazine articles, thinktank reports and academic papers than ever before questioning the value of
that expansion.
In recent years, policymakers have been driven by a human capital theory approach to higher education expansion:
their belief has been that as graduate numbers are grown, individual graduates with higher skill levels will boost
national productivity and be rewarded with an “earnings premium”. And universities have been happy to expand to
meet the demand for places on the basis that governments foot the bill, either through grants or student loans.
Rapid scientific and technological advancement, globalization, cross-cultural encounters and changes in the balance of economic and political power show no sign of slowing down (Association of American Colleges & Universities, 2007). Canada has also been subject to these trends, which has resulted in greater demand for individuals with higher levels of education and skill (OECD, 1996). For example, Statistics Canada found that in Canada the number of high-knowledge businesses (such as those providing services in engineering, sciences and related disciplines) increased by 78% between 1991 and 2003, while the number of low-knowledge businesses (such as accommodation, and food and beverage services) grew by just 3% (Lapointe et al., 2006).
Most graduate research degrees culminate in a thesis. Thesis students require supervisors. There are few relationships more important to these students than their relationship with their supervisor. The centrality of this relationship requires that it be entered into and maintained with great care. It is incumbent on the University to do everything possible to provide guidance in how to maximize the likelihood of excellent supervision. The School of Graduate Studies (SGS) is charged with the responsibility of providing that guidance for the University graduate community. The previous version of this document is now 10 years old. It is time for the update that follows.
The national high school graduation rate has continued to rise – but do students feel prepared for what comes next?
To help answer this question, YouthTruth analyzed survey responses from over 55,000 high school students. The data was gathered between September 2015 and December 2016 through YouthTruth’s anonymous online climate and culture survey administered in partnership with public school districts across 21 states. Our analysis looked at a subset of questions relating to college and career readiness and uncovered some key insights.
We in higher education now serve more students with more stress than ever before, yet we have done little to learn about the strategies to help them better manage it, argues Karen Costa.
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 managementunion 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).
This article presents a case study of a technology-enhanced face-to-face health sciences course in which the principles of Universal Design for Learing (UDL) were applied. Students were offered a variety of means of rep- resentation, engagement, and expression throughout the course, and were surveyed and interviewed at the end of the term to identify how the UDL- inspired course attributes influenced their perceptions of course accessibility. Students responded very positively to the
course design, and felt that the weaving of UDL throughout the course resulted in increased flexibility, social presence, reduced stress, and enhanced success. Overall, students felt more in control of their own learning process and empowered to make personal choices to best support their own learning. This course design also led to in- creased satisfaction from the perspective of the instructor and reduced the need for intervention by the campus disability services department.
The growth of competency-based education in an online environment requires the development and measurement of
quality competency-based courses. While quality measures for online courses have been developed and standardized, they do not directly align with emerging best practices and principles in the design of quality competency-based online courses. The purpose of this paper is to provide background and research for a proposed rubric to measure quality in competency-based online courses.
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.
The goals of Education for All (EFA) are centrally concerned with equality. If children are excluded from access to education, they are denied their human rights and prevented from developing their talents and interests in the most basic of ways. Education is a torch which can help to guide and illuminate their lives. It is the acknowledged responsibility of all governments to ensure that everyone is given the chance to benefit from it in these ways. It is also in the fundamental interests of society to
see that this happens – progress with economic and social development depends upon it.
The study of leadership has been an important and central part of the literature on management and organization behavior for several decades. Leadership is a topic of interest, study and debate in almost every professional community worldwide.
Organizations are constantly trying to understand how to effectively develop leaders for long term success within their organizations. The systemic problem with this endeavor is that there are many different leadership theories and styles. These options make it virtually impossible for professionals to agree concerning which one theory and or style can best help organizations to develop great leaders. Indeed, “no other role in organizations has received more interest than that of the leader” (Schwandt & Marquardt, 2000,p. 177).
There is a growing body of research demonstrating that there have been major changes in the work and working conditions of university teachers in many countries over the last few decades. In some cases this has led to the increasing employment of non-full-time university instructors, and questions have been raised, especially in the United States, concerning the working conditions of part-time faculty and the implications of these changes on educational quality. The number of full-time faculty at Ontario universities has not increased at the same pace as the massive growth in student enrolment, raising questions about whether universities have employed non-full-time faculty in larger numbers and whether the balance between full-time and non-full-time instructors is changing. However, very little empirical research has been conducted on non-full-time instructors in Ontario. This study offers a preliminary exploration of the issue by addressing four key questions
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.
Background: Low community college completion rates are an area of concern for policymakers and practitioners. Although many students require developmental education upon entry, research suggests that even students who are deemed “college-ready” by virtue of their placement test scores or completion of developmental coursework may not earn a credential, suggesting that college readiness encompasses more than academic skill.