Discussions of Canada’s so-called ‘skills gap’ have reached a fever pitch. Driven by conflicting reports and data, the conversation shows no signs of abating. On the one hand, economic indicators commonly used to identify gaps point to problems limited to only certain occupations (like health occupations) and certain provinces (like Alberta) rather than to a general skills crisis. On the other hand, employers continue to report a mismatch between the skills they need in their workplaces and those possessed by job seekers, and to voice concern that the postsecondary system is not graduating students with the skills they need.
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.
Perhaps no other word has been as popular in higher education during the past few years as the term “flipped.” As a result, there is no shortage of ideas and opinions about flipped learning environments. Some consider it another way to talk about student-centered learning. Others view flipped classrooms as an entirely new approach to teaching and learning. Still others see flipping as just another instructional fad that will eventually run its course.
In the summer of 2014, Faculty Focus surveyed its readers to gain a better understanding of their views on flipped learning. The survey also sought to find out who’s flipping, who’s not, and the barriers and benefits to those who flip.
One of the most intriguing expressions of human behavior is the leader-follower phenomenon. Since the beginning of civilization, people have sought answers to the questions of who becomes a leader and why. Philosophers, political scientists, and psychologists have produced extensive literature on leaders and leadership, but despite this, there is still no consensus as to why and under what circumstances some become leaders and others remain followers. There is no universal theory of leadership and no precise formula for producing leaders, and the answers are elusive. Furthermore, the debate continues about whether effective leadership and successful management are synonymous. Perhaps one of the best ways to answer some of these questions is to describe some of the views about leadership. This provides a beginning for defining leadership, for explaining the power associated with it, for discussi g the various current theories about it and for determining where theories coalesce and diverge.
You can’t make people change, and rewards and punishment either don’t work or are short lived—the only thing that works is people’s intrinsic motivation, and you have to get at this indirectly.
So far we have looked at deliberate practice as the crucible of learning, and empathetic resolute leadership committed to making learning better and better. But what is going to motivate the masses? Impressive empathy is a start, but you also need something to actually engage people. The big change problem, then, is how to get people to put in the energy to improve a situation when a
lot of them don’t want to do it. How do you get people to change their minds? Grasping the essence of quality change processes is the focus of this chapter.
When a person enrolled in university in 1967 he or she entered a world barely recognizable to most students today. There were tow mean for every woman student. Many university facilities such as Hart House at the University of Toronto, were off limits to women, as wee many prestigious scholarships such as Rhodes.
Yet while the university world of that era was far more sexist, today's students - 60 per cent of whom are women - can gaze back at it with envey.
Abstract
Using data from two cohorts of Grade 12 students in Toronto, we examined whether the transition to post-secondary education changed between 2006 and 2011, particularly for under-represented groups. We used multilevel, multinomial logistic regressions to examine how the intersections of race and sex affect post-secondary transitions in the two cohorts. Our findings revealed that Black, Latino, and Southeast Asian students were less prepared for postsecondary education than White students. Students in these groups had lower than average GPAs, higher identification of special education needs, or lower
likelihoods of taking academic-stream courses. These differences remained fairly stable between 2006 and 2011. We did, however, find that Black students were more likely than White students to confirm a place in university in 2011—a significant difference. In contrast, Southeast Asian students experienced a decline in university transition but an increase in college confirmation. We also found that race and sex were important intersections for university confirmations in the case of Blacks and for college confirmations in the case of Southeast Asians. We contextualize our findings within the policy
climate of Ontario in the years spanning our two cohorts.
York University is partnering with the Government of Ontario to conduct leading-edge research with the potential to transform educational programming and inform targeted approaches to addressing the needs of students. This research will take the form of a feasibility study into collecting additional province-wide data to further inform understanding of student populations and school communities, as well as address the principles outlined in the Ontario Ministry of Education’s Achieving Excellence: A Renewed Vision for Education in Ontario.
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
According to the Consortium for School Networking's 2015 IT Leadership Survey, 84% of school technology officials expect that at least half of their insructional materials will be digitally based with three years.
This pilot study examines alternative entrance pathways into York University undergraduate degree programs for students who apply from outside the formal education system. These alternative pathways are designed to facilitate university access for students from under-represented populations (for example, low-income, first-generation, Aboriginal, racialized minorities, differently abled, newcomers to Canada, sole-support caregivers, students with incomplete high school education, or some combination of the preceding).
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.
The contemporary university has grown to be a fairly complex institution sustained by many competing interests, not all of which are directly concerned with promoting the work of study, broadly conceived. My concern in the fol- lowing is with the quality of the subjective experience of studying that universities are still meant to provide. By subjective experience I mean the
mindful engagement that is study, and my focus is on such study as it is found in undergraduate programs leading to undergraduate degrees. Given the threat of a growing indifference between professors and students concerning their shared engagement in courses offered at the undergraduate level (offered because of professors’ institutional obligations, taken because of students’ degree requirements), I reconsider the subjective investment of mindful engagement that these courses nevertheless represent.
Technology is gradually replacing cursive instruction—but have we taken stock of what we’re losing?
Should cursive writing still be taught in our schools? The old debate is back with a vengeance as schools shift resources from the intricate, painstakingly rendered script to keyboard skills.
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.
In conjunction with the HEQCO research project “Opportunities for Non-Traditional Pathways to Postsecondary Education in Ontario,” we conducted a series of focus groups to gather qualitative data about non-traditional students entering York through one of the four alternative pathways identified in this study.
The University of Waterloo will decide this fall whether a standardized system for course evaluations can balance
student demands for more feedback on their classroom learning with faculty concerns about the impact of bias and
evidence that such surveys may not improve student outcomes.
A country’s economic strength is enhanced by its ability to win investment from multi-national enterprises (MNEs). Global corporate mandates bestow subsidiaries with resources that are essential for establishing and expanding operations. They also help to spur positive spin-off benefits, including innovation and job growth that benefit stakeholders across industries and sectors. Canadian leaders who understand the factors that drive MNE investment decisions are better positioned for success.
How do successful academics write, and how do they learn to write? What are their daily routines, their formative
experiences, their habits of mind? What emotions do they associate with their academic writing? And where do they
find the “air and light and time and space”, as the poet Charles Bukowski put it, to get their writing done? These
were among the questions that I asked as part of a research project that eventually took me to 45 universities in 15
countries.
Feedback from more than 1,300 academics, PhD students and other researchers from across the disciplines
revealed that successful writing is built on a complex and varied set of attitudes and attributes, including behavioural habits of discipline and persistence, artisanal habits of craftsmanship and care, social habits of collegiality and collaboration and emotional habits of positivity and pleasure.
With major strides in access to postsecondary education for all students in recent decades, it is tempting to assume that such progress has erased disparities in college enrollment and completion in the United States. Yet despite having one of the highest college participation rates in the world, large gaps persist in terms of access to and success in higher education in this country, particularly for low-income, minority, and first-generation students.
Given the pressure to remain competitive in the global knowledge economy, it is in our shared national interest to act now to increase the number of students who not only enter college, but more importantly earn their degrees, particularly bachelor’s
degrees. Due to the changing demographics of the United States, we must focus our efforts on improving postsecondary access and success among those populations who have previously been underrepresented in higher education, namely low-income and minority students, many of whom will be the first in their families to go to college.