The research PhD was created to support the development of individuals able to use the power of rigorous scholarly inquiry to advance society. If the academy is committed to ensuring the relevance of the degree for the 21st century, we need to understand how our graduates are, or could be, contributing to the world today. This information will help tremendously in raising awareness of, and increasing the transparency about, potential careers, and in informing our educational endeavours.
As midcareer professors, we often hear newcomers to the tenure track worry about having to choose between academe and family life. Likewise among graduate students, the general perception is that, to succeed, they will have to be 100-per cent consumed with work.
Combining parenting with any job is not for the faint of heart. But from our perspective — as tenured professors and parents of, between the two of us, five kids, aged 8 to 11 — you do not have to sacrifice family life to succeed in an academic career.
But you may well have to sacrifice everything else. Both of us are in a phase of life that leaves little time for anything outside of our work and our kids.
"I feel like I am going crazy and need to run some things by you," said an administrative colleague. When we met, he began to describe a series of unsettling incidents. He wondered: Were they intentionally designed to signal that he was no longer wanted? Aimed at making him and the people in his program feel nervous and disoriented?
In recent years educators and policymakers have set a goal that students graduate from high school ready for college and careers. However, as a nation we are far from achieving this goal, particularly for low-income and minority students. For example, in states where all eleventh-graders take the ACT®, only 27 percent of low-income students in 2010 met the ACT College Readiness Benchmark in reading, with 16 percent meeting the Benchmark in mathematics, and 11 percent meeting the Benchmark in science.
Efforts to improve students’ academic preparation have often been directed at the high-school level, although for many students, gaps in academic preparation begin much earlier. Large numbers of disadvantaged students enter kindergarten behind in early reading and mathematics skills, oral language development, vocabulary, and general knowledge. These gaps are
likely to widen over time because of the “Matthew effects,” whereby those who start out behind are at a relative disadvantage in acquiring new knowledge.
Every generation has a transformative effect on the economy, but the actions of Generation Y, also known as the Millennial Generation, promise to carry special impact. Gen Y, the largest generation in U.S. history, comprises young, educated, ethnically diverse, and economically active individuals. These Gen-Yers, or Millennials, as they are known, are entering the labor force as the “powerhouse of the global economy” and arriving at critical points of financial decision making in their adult lives
(Deloitte, 2009).
This white paper reviews the BCcampus Competency to Credential approach to flexible learning in trades training in British Columbia. First, it considers the broader notion of competency-based education and the development of the Competency to Credential concept in response to current education and training challenges. The paper then considers at a high level how the concept may also be applied to other competency-based education and training programs, such as in health care education. In particular, though, this paper describes how the Competency to Credential approach brings system stakeholders together in a collaborative and unified effort to improve trades training and education system-wide in British Columbia and shows how a broader application to other jurisdictions and trades sectors in Canada might occur.
To exemplify the Competency to Credential approach, the paper focuses on the first two phases of a pilot project targeting certification challengers within the Professional Cook trade in British Columbia.
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 higher education world is getting smaller as more and more students are choosing to study abroad. Students are looking to universities to provide an international experience, the opportunity to study alongside students from all over the world, and to give them a truly global higher education community in which to study.
As part of the data collected for the World University Rankings, Times Higher Education asks all institutions to provide figures on the percentage of international students they have. THE has extracted these data and compiled a list of the top 200 universities.
Three of the universities featured in the top five were founded in the past 30 years – perhaps suggesting that younger universities are more appealing to international students.
Sixteen universities from London feature in the top 200, making it one of the most represented cities in the ranking. In fact, the UK as a whole was the most represented country with 72 universities present in the top 200 in total,
compared with 27 from the US and 22 in Australia.
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 Canadian university over a two-year period. It recommends an integrated approach, combining ssessment, 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.
For many young women and girls in Canada, their opportunity to participate equally in Canadian society and their right to lead successful and fulfilling lives may be disrupted by acts of gender-based violence. Acknowledging the serious impact of such violence on young women and girls, the House of Commons Standing Committee on the Status of Women (“the Committee”) agreed on 8 March 2016, to conduct a study on violence against young women and girls in Canada.
OUSA asked students to answer questions about their experience with high-impact learning, active and participatory learning, work-integrated learning, and online courses. Students were also asked to provide their impressions about what
resources should be prioritized within their university, as well as how they viewed the balance between teaching and learning at their institution.
Over the past year Canadians have borne witness to some of the greatest economic uncertainty in our history. As the global economy fell into a deep recession, many Canadians were laid off or unable to continue to work full-time, while others left the labour market, retiring early or heading back to school.
In hard times Canadians look to their government for leadership. In response to this demand the federal government embarked on one of the most expensive spending programs in Canada’s history. The 2009 budget included over $50 billion in stimulus spending. Despite this massive investment–arguably the biggest re-engagement of the federal government in decades–there was nothing offered to make college and university more affordable or help the thousands of students and graduates with mortgagesized debt loads.
In this article we describe our experiences with using small-group instruction in college settings for a combined total of 60 years. Since others, including Johnson and Johnson (1989), Kagan (1994, 2009), Sharan (1994), and Aronson (2011), have developed specific forms of group work, such as structured controversy, jigsaw, and group investigation, we will focus on how we have used group work as a core technique and have developed additional procedures that seem to potentiate the power of group work, regardless of the specific procedure and discipline.
The Cities Project at the Martin Prosperity Institute focuses on the role of cities as the key economic and social organizing unit of global capitalism. It explores both the opportunities and challenges facing cities as they take on this heightened new role.
The Martin Prosperity Institute, housed at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management, explores the requisite underpinnings of a democratic capitalist economy that generate prosperity that is both robustly growing and broadly experienced.
In 2008-09, Lakehead University undertook a study to examine the effectiveness of its Gateway program, an academic intervention program offered to a select population of incoming students. The Gateway program at Lakehead is designed for students who exhibit academic potential but who do not meet the traditional entrance requirements of the university at the time of application. The program not only provides access to a university education but also provides support for success. The
intentional and holistic programming provided to students admitted through the Gateway program includes special academic support programming and mandatory academic advising.
The use of non-tenure-track and part-time faculty in U.S. colleges and universities is on the rise, altering the composition
of the academic workforce in fundamental ways. Who, then, are contemporary faculty? In what ways do they differ from their predecessors? In which institutions and sectors are the trends most pronounced?
This project investigated the “contingency movement” using a variety of analytic approaches, including extensive literature review, quantitative analysis of over two decades of national institutional data, and onsite interviews with contingent and non-contingent faculty at a research university, a private liberal arts college, and a public masters-level institution.
White flight from the center city to better neigborhood schools in the leafy green suburbs has finally arrived in the nation's ivy-covered campuses. The rackial and ethnic stafification in educational opportunity entrenched in the nation's K-12 education system has faithfully reproduced itself across the full range of American Colleges and Universities.
It was as a secretary in a busy English department at a large state university over 30 years ago that I first learned that full-time and part-time faculty occupied different worlds. Although these worlds intersected in the classroom -- and at times in my very small office -- I wondered even then if better communication and mutual recognition were possible. I saw students served by both forms of faculty. I handled instructional materials created by everyone, and I sensed the degree of commitment -- or frustration -- that both groups brought to their jobs.
In this study, the authors’ determined the individual learner characteristics of educators enrolled in online courses that influenced social presence (affective social communication). Findings reveal that the number of online courses taken, followed
by computer‐mediated communication proficiency, are significant predictors of social presence. Recommendations for the effective use of online learning recognize that instructors must deliberately structure interaction patterns to overcome the potential lack of social presence of the medium. Similarly, quality instructional design and course development strategies need be incorporated with supportive pre‐course instructional activities provided to acquaint novice learners with online learning
expectations.
Key words: online learning, social presence, learner characteristics, computermediated
communication
During the last third of the twentieth century, college sectors in many coun- tries took on the role of expanding opportunities for baccalaureate degree attainment in applied fields of study. In many European countries, colleges came to constitute a parallel higher education sector that offered degree pro- grams of an applied nature in contrast to the more academically oriented pro-
grams of the traditional university sector. Other jurisdictions, including some Canadian ones, followed the American approach, in which colleges facilitate degree attainment for students in occupational programs through transfer arrangements with universities. This article offers some possible reasons why the Ontario Government has chosen not to fully embrace the European mod- el, even though the original vision for Ontario’s colleges was closer to that model to than to the American one.