Here’s a question to ponder in the wee hours of the morning – or right now. How can a government respond to the following societal dynamic?
1. A persistent and growing demand for more availability of public postsecondary education.
2. Fewer public dollars to sustain or grow public postsecondary education, especially in Canada
with the insatiable financial appetite of the health care system.
3. A political imperative to minimize tuition increases.
4. Greater scrutiny and accountability around everything governments and public institutions do.
This report analyzes the economic impact of post-secondary education (PSE) in Canada. It is one of three foundational studies by The Conference Board of Canada’s Centre for Skills and Post-Secondary Education. The report considers three kinds of economic impact: spending in the economy (either directly by PSE institutions or indirectly through tourism and other channels), human capital formation, and intellectual capital formation. The report develops a bottom-up approach to understanding impacts, from the PSE institutions to the broader economy.
Slides dealing with social media basic categories.
Two of five Canadians would have difficulty reading this sentence, following the instructions on a prescription bottle,
finding out information about how to vote, or filling out a permission form for their child’s upcoming school trip. Although for nine of the past 14 years, Canada has ranked first on the United Nations Human Development Index (HDI), a measure of a country’s relative wellbeing, complacency would be a serious mistake. Low levels of literacy – especially among adults and vulnerable groups – remain a significant challenge to Canada’s continued wellbeing. As our performance on the HDI and other international rankings confirms, we have a solid foundation on which to build; but we must not underestimate the significance
of literacy problems in this country. The groups most vulnerable to low literacy are the poor; persons of Aboriginal ancestry; persons whose native language is neither English nor French; persons in rural and isolated communities; and persons with certain disabling conditions. Given the rise in skill levels demanded throughout the labour market, the ubiquity of new technologies in daily and work life, and the desire of people to engage with public issues, those with poor literacy will become even further marginalized.
• To set out a conceptual design for a new accountability framework for Ontario PSE
• Framework intended as ppart of HEQCO’s advice on new multi‐year accountability aggreements
• Complements other HEQCO work on this topic
The landscape of higher education has significantly changed. Methods of instructional delivery, student profiles and degree offerings have transformed traditional brick and mortar institutions. Distance educational courses and programs, either fully online or hybrid, have been a major contributing factor in this shift. While a high percentage of students take classes online, adult learners particularly benefit from the flexibility and accessibility offered by online education. Yet, adult learners are more likely to be intimidated because of their lack of familiarity with this new learning paradigm. This article examines online and adult learners programming as well as strategies to address their needs, and presents the results of an evaluation that examined the effectiveness of an Online Adult Learner-Focused Program. The program was developed at a small public college in the southeast area of the United States and consisted of 97 respondents. The results of the study found various levels of student satisfaction with online adult the objectives of the program. Implications and recommendations for instructors, program coordinators and administrators are also discussed.
Post-secondary education is a cornerstone of Ontario’s continued prosperity. The Ontario government realizes this and confirmed its commitment to expanding post-secondary education in the 2010, 2011 and 2012 provincial budgets. The government announced funding allocations in all three budgets to support enrolment growth in the post-secondary sector. The 2011 budget committed the province to creating 60,000 more spaces in colleges and universities.
Colleges have a strong role to play in this equation, ensuring that students are not only attracted to post-secondary education, but also retained until graduation. However, Ontario colleges play an even more vital role in that they tend to attract students who do not usually pursue post-secondary education due to real or perceived barriers and challenges in accessing and succeeding in higher education. These students often come from underrepresented groups and, due to their unique circumstances, face a number of risks to completing their credential, unless they receive additional support through services and programs.
For over a century, the central goals of Canada’s Aboriginal policy were to eliminate Aboriginal governments; ignore Aboriginal rights; terminate the Treaties; and, through a process of assimilation, cause Aboriginal peoples to cease to exist as distinct legal, social, cultural, religious, and racial entities in Canada. The establishment and operation of residential schools were a central element of this pol- icy, which can best be described as “cultural genocide.”
Physical genocide is the mass killing of the members of a targeted group, and biological genocide is the destruction of the group’s reproductive capacity. Cultural genocide is the destruction of those structures and practices that allow the group to continue as a group. States that engage in cultural genocide set out to destroy the political and social institutions of the
targeted group. Land is seized, and populations are forcibly transferred and their movement is restricted. Languages are banned. Spiritual lead- ers are persecuted, spiritual practices are forbidden, and objects of spiritual value are confiscated and destroyed. And, most significantly to the issue at hand, families are disrupted to prevent the transmission of cultural values and identity from one generation to the next.
International graduates of Canadian universities are “the perfect candidates” for citizenship, says immigration
minister
Canadian-educated international students are exactly the sort of would-be immigrants this country should be courting, the federal government has said as it moves on election promises to make immigration policy friendlier to international graduates of Canadian postsecondary institutions.
The government’s first step came in late February when it introduced legislation repealing changes made under the previous Conservative government’s controversial Bill C-24 of 2015. Although the Conservatives had made adjustments over time that generally made immigration policy more favourable to international students, Bill C-24, enforced in their last year in office, made it harder for international graduates of Canadian postsecondary programs to qualify for citizenship.
All of us have had major classroom disruptions that try our patience and push our limits. These incidents can threaten our sense of control and generate fear of looking weak to other students. We fear that other students might do the same thing if we don't take a strong stance. Couple these feelings with the possibility of taking the disruption personally, and we have a recipe for disaster. It's important that we divide our response into two parts:
1. Immediate stabilization
2. Intervention to resolve these issues
The college classroom lies at the center of the educational activity structure of institutions of higher education; the educational encounters that occur therein are a major feature of student educational experience. Indeed, for students who commute to college, especially those who have multiple obligations outside the college, the classroom may be the only place where students and faculty meet, where education in the formal sense is experienced. For those students, in particular, the classroom is the crossroads where the social and the academic meet. If academic and social involvement or integration is to occur, it must occur in the classroom.
So much of what determines the overall success or failure of a course takes place well in advance of the first day of class. It’s the thoughtful contemplation of your vision for the course— from what you want your students to learn, to selecting the instructional activities, assign-ments, and materials that will fuel that learning, to determining how you will measure learning outcomes.
To compete in an interconnected and global marketplace, Canadian companies require an increasingly strong and skilled workforce.
However, a lack of comprehensive labour market data, particularly on employment trends and skill requirements, makes it difficult to identify and analyze the current state of the Canadian job market.
Administrators at many colleges and universities have had online courses at their institutions for many years, now. One of the hidden challenges about online courses is that they tend to be observed and evaluated far less frequently than their face-to-face course counterparts. This is party due to the fact that many of us administrators today never taught online courses ourselves when we were teaching. This article provides six "secrets" to performing meaningful observations and evaluations of online teaching,
including how to use data analytics, avoid biases, and produce useful results even if observers have never taught online themselves.
Americans reaching traditional retirement ages during the past two decades and today face a different retirement environment than did prior cohorts. Mandatory retirement has been eliminated for the vast majority of American workers, and important work disincentives (or retirement incentives) in Social Security and in employer pension plans have been eliminated or reduced. Americans are living longer and healthier lives, fewer have physically arduous jobs, and technology has increased the options about where and when people work. In addition, the age of eligibility for ‘full’ Social Security retirement benefits has been increased from 65 to 66 (and will soon increase to 67), which is equivalent to an across-the-board benefit cut, and fewer firms are offering employer-sponsored post-retirement health insurance. There are concerns about the future of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. Some of these changes are good news for older workers and some bad, but they all have altered the relative attractiveness of work and leisure late in life in favor of work.
The onset of economic downturn in late 2008 and early 2009 has had a varied effect on the Canadian economy. While much has been made about Canada’s relatively stable performance during this time, persistently high levels of youth unemployment since the downturn reveal that for a large number of Canadian youth, the impacts of recession have been deeply felt. Panelists and participants at the symposium Employment Challenges for Youth in a Changing Economy pointed to a need to uncover what the specific impacts of downturn have been, why high youth unemployment rates persist, and what can be done by policymakers, the private sector, and academic and community institutions to help youth realize their full potential.
Legal uncertainty is a topic often raised in discussing unresolved Aboriginal land claims, such as those in British Columbia. Mining and Aboriginal Rights in Yukon examines legal uncertainty on Aboriginal rights in a different way, and in an under-examined Northern context. We examine what we identify as growing legal uncer-tainty in Yukon. This topic is not one that would have been expected a few years ago. In Yukon, modern land claims agreements with 11 out of the territory’s 14 First Nations once seemed to have established a high degree of certainty on Aboriginal claims. This certainty was even seen as a significant advantage for Yukon in the global competition for mining investment.
According to data released by Statistics Canada in 2014, the years of 2000 - 2010 have seen significant increases in large
and private debt among graduating students, and skyrocketing private debt among graduates with doctoral degrees. Although
the percentage of graduates in debt appears to be decreasing overall in this decade, this is both because of the introduction
of the Canada Student Grants Program (which turns a portion of student loans into non-repayable grants) and because enrollment growth has outpaced increases in student loan borrowing. Even so, those who are borrowing are taking on much higher debts,
and increasingly from private sources.
They innovate and advance knowledge in all sectors and, more importantly, apply learning to improve the quality of life for the most vulnerable, thereby contributing to the advancement of humanity. They help keep children in school with high-quality and relevant education. They improve incomes, advance food security and protect the natural environment. They champion human rights and engage civil society. They co-create knowledge with communities and keep governments abreast of the latest innovations and techniques, supporting them to develop effective policy frameworks.
The Strategic Mandate Agreement (SMA) exercise was intended to address at least three desired
outcomes:
1. To promote the government’s stated goal1 of increasing the differentiation of the Ontario
postsecondary system by asking each Ontario postsecondary institution to articulate an
institutional mandate statement identifying its distinctive strengths or aspirations and to
identify key objectives aligned with that aspiration.
2. To advance and inform the discussion about how the Ontario system could increase its
productivity to deliver a quality education to more students within the financial constraints
expected in the public sector.2
3. To elicit the best thinking from institutions about innovations and reforms that would support
higher quality learning and, in its most ambitious form, transform Ontario’s public
postsecondary system.