The labour force participation rate of 15- to 24-year-olds (the percentage who are employed or seeking employment) declined from 67.3% in 2008 to 64.2% in 2014, reflecting a 3.8-percentage- point drop from 2008 to 2012 followed by a slight increase (Chart 1). The decline was particularly pronounced among youth aged 15 to 19, whose participation rate fell 6.2 percentage points to 49.8% in 2014.
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.
Significant investments are made in PSE at the provincial and federal level in Canada every year. At the federal level, the government spent over $12 billion on PSE in 2013-14.1 Annual federal investments in PSE are primarily made through the Canada Social Transfer, research support, various tax programs and the federal student financial aid system. CASA advocates on diverse issues related to improving student financial aid because it is an important mechanism for increasing access to PSE for all Canadians.
Student ratings of teaching have been used, studied, and debated for almost a century. This article examines student ratings of teaching from a statistical perspective. The common practice of relying on averages of student teaching evaluation scores as the primary measure of teaching effectiveness for promotion and tenure decisions should be abandoned for substantive
and statistical reasons: There is strong evidence that student responses to questions of “effectiveness” do not measure teaching effectiveness. Response rates and response variability matter. And comparing averages of categorical responses, even if the categories are represented by numbers, makes little sense. Student ratings of teaching are valuable when they ask the right questions, report response rates and score distributions, and are balanced by a variety of other sources and methods
to evaluate teaching.
On the one hand, a growing amount of research discusses support for improving online collaborative learning quality, and many indicators are focused to assess its success. On the other hand, thinkLets for designing reputable and valuable collaborative processes have been developed for more than ten years. However, few studies try to apply thinkLets to online collaborative learning. This paper introduces thinkLets to online collaborative learning and experimentally tests its ffectiveness with participants' responses on their satisfaction. Yield Shift Theory (YST), a causal theory explaining inner satisfaction, is adopted. In the experiment, 113 students from Universities in Beijing, China are chosen as a sample. They were divided into two groups, collaborating online in a simulated class. Then, YST in student groups under online collaborative learning is validated, a comparison study of online collaborative learning with and without thinkLets is implemented, and the satisfaction response of participants are analyzed. As a result of this comparison, YST is proved applicable in this context, and satisfaction is higher in
online collaborative learning with thinkLets.
One of the advantages of academic-occupational integration is that it provides an opportunity to teach reading and writing skills in
the context of the workplace applications, permitting literacy skills and content knowledge to develop simultaneously. This
approach, a form of contextualized instruction (Mikulecky, 1998) is distinctly different from traditional approaches which see
literacy skills as a prerequisite to learning content (Sticht, 1995). The purpose of this segment is to provide descriptions of a variety of ways in which instructors in community colleges are contextualizing literacy instruction in occupational content. The
instructional activities are discussed in Perin (2000a).
This paper is an enquiry into the unpredictability of the liberally educated mind. We are all familiar with the value placed on the word critical when it figures prominently in justifications for liberal arts pedagogy, as in “a liberal arts education should foster the capacity for critical thinking.” However, de- pending on the milieu in which “critical thinking” is habituated, the mean- ing of the term may degrade into a theoretical conformity and passive assent to established routines which are inevitably expressions of disapproval. This trajectory is described as disenchantment. Its origins are traced to representations of the intellectual as a
distinctly secular creature and, in contemporary philosophical developments, associated with political liberalism—both of which, it is argued, are dominated by fear. Drawing on the recent Catholic “Communio” theology of David Schindler as a way to unveil the repressed theologies and hidden ontologies of liberal neutrality, the paper concludes with a brief examination of liberal arts scholarship that is increasingly open to various models of enchantment.
The curriculum should pay particular attention to ethnic, gender, and other forms of social difference and inequality. At the same time, it should stress the importance of studying, ideals and experiences of what it means to be a teacher. Courses should be designed to explore these issues in both historical and contemporary settings. Although the concentration needs to be on the content, a good curriculum needs to be designed to foster a community of learning among people and at the same time to offer considerable flexibility and intellectual diversity (J. Yalden, Long, Micheal H., Richards, Jack C. 2001). In this paper we will analyze key aspects of, and changes in, the curriculum, social and economic development in South Eastern Europe in the last twenty years. Major issues covered in this paper will be: the impact of communism on society; political and education reform; the problems of people with special needs; the changing role and status of minority groups and the introduction of a service learning project in the curriculum.
Keywords: Service-learning; education, curriculum, creativity
Almost 40 per cent of the most highly rated private career colleges in Ontario appear to be failing to prepare students for the labour market, with a third of graduates at 58 out of 159 campuses unable to find any work six months after graduation.
The numbers, released by the provincial government this spring and analyzed by The Globe and Mail, raise renewed questions about whether public money should be used to help students attend the private institutions. Data were made public only for the schools the province has approved as eligible for financial aid.
Michael Skolnik
Although research on Canadian higher education has advanced considerably over the past few decades, the opportunities for university level study of higher education in Canada are still quite limited. Only four universities offer higher education programs; only one has a higher education department; and only a handful of other institutions offer even a course
in higher education. The number of students enrolled in higher education programs in Canada is about 200, compared to about 6,000 in the United States; the number of faculty about 15 compared to 700 in the U.S. Moreover, while American higher education journals have, since the early 1970's, regularly featured articles about university higher education programs, there has not been a single article on this subject in The Canadian Journal of Higher Education. This paper attempts to fill some of that gap by providing some basic information about the study of higher education in Canadian universities and by examining the role of these programs in the overall development of higher education research and the possible reasons for the very limited scale of such programs in Canada.
The author's conclusion is that the factor which has most limited the development of higher education studies in Canadian universities is neither insufficient student demand nor limited employment opportunities of graduates, but reluctance of Canadian universities to allocate resources for this area of study.
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.
Student pathways increasingly rely on transfer between postsecondary institutions as greater numbers of students move between institutions, pursue multiple credentials, or return to postsecondary education. In a 2011 survey of Ontario college students, 41% reported having some post-secondary experience; the same survey also found that 19% of respondents said their main goal in applying for their current program was to “prepare for further university or college study.” Transfer of credit for prior learning is clearly an increasingly mainstream educational activity, and institutions are under increasing pressure to improve the processes by which this occurs.
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.
The main players in First Nations’ public finance agree on one thing: The present fiscal regime is
broken, and needs to be fixed. Many of the arrangements that govern aboriginal communities’
revenues, borrowing and spending date back to the 19th century, and remain riddled with
paternalism, uncertainty and inefficiency.
First Nations finances are on a far more fragile footing than other levels of government in
Canada. The provinces and territories obtain a significant portion of their revenues through
federal transfers -- such as the Canada Health Transfer, the Canada Social Transfer and
equalization payments -- based on negotiated and pre-determined formulas. These
jurisdictions, as well as municipalities, also generate substantial tax revenues from a variety of
sources.
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.
Big Data and Analytics1 are under pressure. Bold promises have been made: exceptional customer insights; better decision-making; improved productivity and performance; and product and service innovation. Positive public and social outcomes have been proposed: improved health care, social services, public safety, and infrastructure; and strengthened research and development, commercialization, and economic growth. Now, it’s time to deliver.
Adoption of the learning management system can affect areas of higher education such as student engagement, classroom anagement, and online courses. Likewise, lack of adoption can impede the success of using the tools available to higher education. This whitepaper will explore Roger’s Theory of Diffusion use with adoption among faculty.
D2L believes when one faculty adopts the technology, another faculty member who might resist will soon follow. Students, in turn, will use the platform for classes and are usually not the issue when adopting technology.
The paper presents a discussion of faculty development in 22 of Ontario's Colleges of Applied Arts and Technology. We report the findings of a survey which collected information on administrative structure, funding, mandate, faculty development activities, publication, incentives for faculty participation, assessment of faculty needs and evaluation. We conclude by raising a number of questions which faculty developers might address as changes in the social, political and economic environment present new challenges to colleges and universities.
Each year the Ontario Undergraduate Student Alliance releases its Habitats project: a series of case studies on municipal-level issues affecingundergraduate students. These case studies are written by OUSA campus researcher from our member institutions.
Since 1977, we’ve been recommending that graduate departments partake in birth control, but no one has been listening,” said Paula Stephan to more than 200 postdocs and PhD students at a symposium in Boston, Massachusetts, in October this year. Stephan is a renowned labour economist at Georgia State University in Atlanta who has spent much of her career trying to understand the relationships between economics and science, particularly biomedical science. And the symposium, ‘Future of Research’, discussed the issue to which Stephan finds so many people deaf: the academic research system is generating progeny at a startling rate. In biomedicine, said Stephan. “We are definitely producing many more PhDs than there is demand for them in research positions.”