The primary factors that shape the health of cal treatments or the conditions they experience. Th conditions have come to be known as the social determinants of health.The importance to health of living conditions was established in the mid-1800s and has been enshrined in Canadian government policy documents since the mid-1970s. In fact, Canadian contributions to the social determinants of health concept have been so extensive as to make Canada a “health promotion powerhouse” in the eyes of the international health community. Recent reports from Canada’s Chief Public Health Officer, the Canadian Senate, and the Public Health Agency of Canada continue to document the importance of the social determinants of health.
Postsecondary education systems around the world are rapidly transforming in response to evolving economic, social, and student learning realities. A number of factors are converging to bring about this reconfiguration of higher learning economies and are adjusting to heightened competition and to increased labour market demand for great levers of knowledge and skills; increasingly diverse and mobile learners are expecting ever-increasingly high quality in return for what they pay; and the broader public is looking for concrete results from the investment of scarce public resources.
There was no substantial deterioration in the earnings and employment patterns of young postsecondary graduates between 2005 and 2012—a period that included the economic recession of 2008 and 2009. A new study found that this outcome held even when graduates from specific fields of study were examined. Using linked data from the 2006 Census, the 2011 National Household Survey, and tax data from 2005 to 2012, the study examined Canadian-born 25- to-34-year-old men and women with a high school diploma, college certificate or bachelor's degree. Annual wages and salaries as well as full-year, full-time employment rates were compared before and after the recession of 2008 and 2009. Full-year, full-time employment involves at least 49 weeks worked per year, mainly for 30 hours or more per week. The dollar figures are expressed in 2012 constant dollars to account for inflation.
In the fall of 2014, then Minister of Employment and Social Development Canada, the Honourable Jason Kenney,
appointed the Panel on Employment Challenges of New Canadians to consult with immigrant-serving organizations,
regulators, employers and other stakeholders.
The Panel was asked to identify and report on successes, innovative approaches and promising practices on the licensing, hiring and retention of recent immigrants, as well as the challenges of this process faced by employers. This work will help to shape strategies for better integrating newcomers into the workforce.
In-person consultations were held in Vancouver, Calgary, Saskatoon, Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal and Halifax. During
these events, the Panel met with over 150 organizations closely involved in the issue of employment for new Canadians.
The Panel also posted an online survey open to all Canadians and received input from over 600 respondents—including
many immigrants themselves.
While a wide variety of publications have suggested that the development of student creativity should be an important objective for contemporary universities, information about how best to achieve this goal across a range of disciplinary contexts is nonetheless scant. The present study aimed to begin to fill this gap by gathering data (via an electronic survey instrument) about how the teaching and learning of creativity are perceived and enacted by instructors in different disciplines at Ontario universities. Results indicated points of both convergence and divergence between respondents from different fields in terms of their understandings of the place of creativity within courses and programs, and in terms of strategies they reported using to enable creativity in their students. We discuss the implications of these findings, including the ways in which the data speak to ongoing debates about the role of disciplines within teaching, learning, and creativity more broadly.
Students are paying higher tuition than ever. Why can’t more of that revenue go to the people teaching them?
A leader is assumed to be someone entrusted by his/her followers to lead, behave responsibly and be accountable for his actions. He/she would be someone righteous, with a high level of moral judgement and a good reputation, and thus, be held to a higher moral standard.
Keywords
leadership, performance, responsible, framework
Research on role congruity theory and descriptive and prescriptive stereotypes has established that when men and women violate gender stereotypes by crossing spheres, with women pursuing career success and men contributing to domestic labor, they face back- lash and economic penalties. Less is known, however, about the types of individuals who are most likely to engage in these forms of discrimination and the types of situations in which this is most likely to occur. We propose that psychological research will benefit from supplementing existing research approaches with an individual differences model of sup- port for separate spheres for men and women. This model allows psychologists to examine individual differences in support for separate spheres as they interact with situational and contextual forces. The separate spheres ideology (SSI) has existed as a cultural idea for many years but has not been operationalized or modeled in social psychology. The Sepa- rate Spheres Model presents the SSI as a new psychological construct characterized by individual differences and a motivated system-justifying function, operationalizes the ideology with a new scale measure, and models the ideology as a predictor of some important gendered outcomes in society. As a first step toward developing the Separate Spheres Model, we develop a new
measure of individuals’ endorsement of the SSI and demonstrate its reliability, convergent validity, and incremental predictive validity. We provide support for the novel hypotheses that the SSI predicts attitudes regarding workplace flexibility accom- modations, income distribution within families between male and female partners, distribu- tion of labor between work and family spheres, and discriminatory workplace behaviors. Finally, we provide experimental support for the hypothesis that the SSI is a motivated, system-justifying ideology.
Preamble
This investigation arose as a result of the Brock University Administration’s handling of a series of complaints laid under the University’s Respectful Work and Learning Environment Policy [RWLEP]1 against five members of Brock University (henceforth referred to as the respondents), namely Drs. Ana Isla and Cathy Van Ingen (members of the Brock University Faculty Association), Dr. June Corman (then Associate Dean of Social Studies and hence not a member of the Faculty Association), and teaching assistants Ian Wood and Tim Fowler (members of CUPE Local 4207). The complaints were filed by Brock University Roman Catholic Chaplains, Brs. Raoul Masseur and German McKenzie.
It is a fundamental responsibility and obligation of government and of institutional leaders to assure that postsecondary institutions are sustainable and capable of providing a high quality academic experience.
This paper offers a conceptual framework for examining the sustainability of Ontario’s public postsecondary institutions. It discusses the definition of the term “sustainability,” how it can be measured and the various tools and strategies available to both institutions and government to meet sustainability risks when they are identified.
The need for a reliable strategic planning framework for distance educators and their institutions has never been greater than it is now. Increased government regulations, accreditation standards, and competition are converging with decreased funding from federal, state, and private sources, and administrators require better strategic planning. A strategic planning model known as the Balanced Scorecard has met with widespread adoption and sweeping success among the business community, but, surprisingly, has not been widely adopted among institutions of higher and distance education. In this article the authors share what they have learned about this strategic planning model through a review of the available literature and their own early efforts to introduce it to their institution, the Division of Continuing Education at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah.
Public concern over the employability of youth has reached pandemic levels. Over the last several years, whole storehouses of ink have been spilled exploring the challenges facing a “lost generation” of highly educated, jobless youth, struggling under the yoke of student debt and low wages. Over time, this public concern has given rise to public doubt over the value of sending a generation of youth to post-secondary education.
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.
When Ontario began to expand its higher education system in the mid-1960s, it made an important choice: to provide public funding to universities on the basis of a formula. Many jurisdictions, in Canada and beyond, do not use such formulae in their higher education systems. But there are clear advantages to such an arrangement. A funding formula supports the distribution of funding in a predictable, equitable way, that can be easily understood by those who study and work within our universities.
Nevertheless, no formula can remain functional forever, especially as the world changes and our expectations of universities shift. For this reason, OCUFA welcomes the University Funding Formula Review, initiated by the Government of Ontario in early 2015. We particularly welcome the opportunity to provide feedback into this process on behalf of the province’s professors and academic librarians.
The university funding formula is deeply important to the success and vitality of Ontario’s universities. It cannot therefore be treated as a laboratory to play with the latest fads in university finance. A measured and responsible approach to reforming the university funding formula should retain its greatest strengths, while correcting its flaws. The Government of Ontario, as the steward of the university sector, has the important task of working with the sector to identify these weaknesses and strengths, and rejecting harmful policy proposals masquerading as innovations.
This submission makes the case that the basic mechanic of the existing formula is sound, but needs to be updated and streamlined. It is also important to consider how the existing formula does not serve some universities – such as those in Northern Ontario – and how changes can be made to address these challenges.
We also argue that performance funding – currently a cause célèbre south of the border, chiefly among those who do not actually work in universities – is not the right approach for Ontario. There is no evidence that performance funding improves student outcomes, but there is growing evidence that it actually has a variety of negative effects. It also violates numerous principles outlined by the University Funding Formula Review team, while cutting against beneficial and collaborative processes for improving quality.
Finally, we suggest that the goals of transparency, accountability, and quality are best served by a new higher education data system. Such a system would be created and run collaboratively by the sector, with the goal of fueling meaningful policy discussions through the provision of timely and useful data.
Once again, OCUFA appreciates the opportunity to provide input into the University Funding Formula Review. We look forward to working with the government to build a university system that promotes quality while protecting the important principles that have allowed our institutions to be so successful.
Training packages are based on the divorce of learning outcomes from processes of learning and curriculum. Policy insists that training packages are not curriculum, and that this ‘frees’ teachers to develop creative and innovative ‘delivery strategies’ that meet the needs of ‘clients’. This paper argues that training packages deny students access to the theoretical knowledge that underpins vocational practice, and that they result in unitary and unproblematic conceptions of work because students are not provided with the means to participate in theoretical debates shaping their field of practice. Tying knowledge to specific workplace tasks and roles means that students are only provided with access to contextually specific applications of theoretical knowledge, and not the disciplinary framework in which it is embedded and which gives it meaning. The paper illustrates this argument by comparing the current Diploma of Community Services (Community Development) with a previous
qualification that preceded training packages in the same field.
Ontario firms and organizations are being challenged to increase productivity through innovation in order to compete on the fiercely competitive world stage and improve the quality of life of Ontarians. Yet, Ontario suffers from innovation gaps
that place its productivity and prosperity goals at risk.
Another semester is over, and it's always a bitter sweet moment! Nevertheless, I'm glad that my students' - at least
most of them - successfully completed my courses. However, I'm also sad that another group is gone; it's a kind of a
proud parent moment --- no matter the age of my students.
Usually for a few days after a semester ends, I reflect on the things that went well and anything that could be
improved. It's in this critical examination of the latter that my teaching and classroom learning environment evolves
toward reflections of organizational growth and team-based results. My progression as an educator is driven by
continuous feedback from multiple sources. Throughout the semester, students are encouraged to provide me with
honest and candid feedback, which can be used to make my teaching along with my courses better.
Instructors of large classes must contend with numerous challenges, among them low student motivation. Research in evolutionary biology, echoed by work in other disciplines, suggests that aspects of the classroom incentive structure – such as grades, extra credit, and instructor and peer acknowledgment – may shape motivations to engage in studies and to collaborate with peers. Specifically, the way that incentives are distributed in relative quantity (the slope of competition; the proportion of benefits earned through performance relative to peers) and space (the scale of competition; the proportion of peers with whom one is competing) may affect strategies to cooperate or to compete with others.
Instructors of large classes must contend with numerous challenges, among them low student motivation. Research in evolutionary biology, echoed by work in other disciplines, suggests that aspects of the classroom incentive structure – such as grades, extra credit, and instructor and peer acknowledgment – may shape motivations to engage in studies and to collaborate with peers. Specifically, the way that incentives are distributed in relative quantity (the slope of competition; the proportion of benefits earned through performance relative to peers) and space (the scale of competition; the proportion of peers with whom one is competing) may affect strategies to cooperate or to compete with others.
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.