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.
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.
"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?
During a speech on Thursday, President Trump revealed a striking ignorance of one of the pillars of his country’s educational system. In the course of promoting his infrastructure plan, he, a bit perplexingly, dismissed the country’s community colleges, suggesting he doesn’t know what purpose they serve. “We do not know what a ‘community college’ means,” he told the crowd in an Ohio training facility for construction apprentices, moments after expressing nostalgia for the vocational schools that flourished when he was growing up—schools that offered hands-on training in fields such as welding and cosmetology.
Talking to a graduate student is a little like an old Abbott and Costello routine about a mythical baseball team composed of players named Who, What and I Don’t Know. Career counseling sessions can be, however, more like a double act with just two players: the student and the professional. And unlike a comedy routine, the scenes take place within the context of dollars spent in stipends, fellowships and expectations of intellectual growth
This CERIC-funded study sought to establish the importance publicly funded universities and colleges place on the provision of career development services and to highlight particularly impressive models of career service provision across the country.
Specifically, CERIC’s interest in conducting this project was two-fold:
1. To understand the landscape of career service models across Canada
2. To examine the level of institutional commitment to the provision of career services to students
OUSA’s LGBTQ+ Student Experience Survey was a mixed methods research project conducted in Novem-ber 2014 designed to gain understanding of the opinions and experiences of Ontario university students who identify as Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans, Queer, Questioning, or other orientations or identities that do not conform to cisgender and heterosexual paradigms (LGBTQ+). The purpose of the survey was to identify any gaps that might exist in university services, programming, and supports that can diminish or negatively impact university experiences for these students.
Future economic growth and social progress in knowledge societies rely increasingly on innovation. Innovators and entrepreneurs require skill sets for innovation such as technical skills, thinking and creativity skills, as well as social and behavioural skills. Higher education plays an important role in providing people with skills for innovation, but a number of important questions remain as to what kind of higher education teaching can be conducive to the strengthening of skills for innovation.
On March 12, 2015, the government announced that Ontario would be moving forward with the transformation of its
postsecondary education sector by launching consultations on modernizing the university funding model. The purpose of this
consultation paper is to outline an engagement process and position the review within the context of the government’s overall
plan for postsecondary education. Funding universities in a more quality-driven, sustainable and transparent way is part of the
government’s economic plan for Ontario.
This paper provides a brief review of what is involved in achieving whole school reform on a large scale. There have been two shifts in the last decade that are directly relevant to this question. One has been the issue of how to go deeper to achieve substantial reform that is powerful enough to impact student learning in even the most difficult circumstances. The other is how simultaneously to go wider to achieve reform on a large scale.
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.
An important goal of Ontario’s postsecondary education system is to provide the appropriate level of educational attainment to meet the current and future human capital needs of the province (HEQCO, 2009: 19). This purpose reflects the recognition that education and training contribute to the human capital of individuals and make them more productive workers and better informed citizens. Attainment of further education not only provides for individual returns such as higher earnings and lower levels of unemployment , improved health and longevity, and greater satisfaction with life, but it is also strongly linked to social returns such as safer communities, healthy citizens, greater civic participation, stronger social cohesion and improved equity and social justice (Riddell, 2006). In order for the province to maintain and enhance its economic standing in the changing global economy, and to provide its citizens with the social benefits that higher education affords, it must ensure that the human capital needs of its society are met.
Factors that contribute to post-secondary education participation and persistence, barriers to access, and the relationship between educational attainment and labour market outcomes.
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.
Colleges are under increasing pressure to retain their students. Federal and state officials are demanding that those who enter their public institutions— especially students from underrepresented groups— earn a degree. Over two dozen states disburse some state funding on how many students an institution graduates, rather than how many it enrolls. Students and families are more anxious than ever before about crossing the degree finish line, as the financial burden of paying for college has increased significantly in recent years. And retaining students is becoming more crucial to the university bottom line. As recruiting and educating students becomes increasingly expensive, colleges hope to balance the resources they use to recruit students with revenue generated when those students are retained.
Canada’s natural resource sector employs 1.8 million people and generates billions of dollars of tax revenues and royalties annually. Hundreds of resource projects are underway and many more are planned for the near future which, according to the federal government, could represent a total investment of $650 billion. Responsible resource management has significant implications for all Canadians, with revenues from projects supporting local and regional infrastructure development and social programs.
During the economic doldrums that have followed The Great Recession, employees in the education sector (administrators, staff, and teachers or faculty at both the K-12 level and the post-secondary level) are confident about both their retirement savings behavior and their likely retirement outcomes. African American and white American employees in the education sector are more optimistic about their retirement planning and prospects than are U.S. workers overall. Education sector employees—both African Americans (87%) and white Americans (88%)—are more likely than U.S. workers overall (59%) to currently save for retirement. This fact helps justify their greater confidence that they will have enough money to live comfortably throughout retirement. Seven of every ten black American employees and seven of every ten white American employees are confident (‘very’ or ‘somewhat’) of this, while nearly half of all U.S. workers express this level of confidence.
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.
This report examines skill trends in 24 OECD countries over the past several decades. The skill measures used include broad occupation groups, country-specific direct measures of skill requirements from international surveys, and direct skill measures from the Occupational Information Network (O*NET) database applied to both United States and European labour force surveys. Each kind of data has its own strengths and limitations but they tell a consistent story.
In the last decade, the Canadian province dramatically improved its education system to become one of the best in the world. Its innovative strategy can provide a blueprint for U.S. reform.
Ontario is Canada's largest province, home to over 13 million people and a public education system with roughly 2 million students, 120,000 educators, and 5,000 schools. As recently as 2002, this system was stagnant by virtually any measure of performance. In October 2003, a new provincial government (Canada has no federal agency or jurisdiction in education) was elected with a mandate and commitment to transform it.