Part 2: How Social Media Support and Expand Teaching and Learning
All post-secondary faculty and students use educational technology– whether for classroom-based, blended or fully online learning and teaching.
This three-part series, Three Pillars of Educational Technology: Learning Management Systems,
Social Media, and Personal Learning Environments, explores the learning management system (LMS), social media, and personal learning environments – and how they might best be used for enhanced teaching and learning.
Successful innovation policies and practices are tied to nations’ distinctive histories, societies and attitudes—but sharing them can galvanize fresh thinking and new approaches across national borders. This was the foremost lesson from the conference “Optimizing Canada’s innovation system: Perspectives from abroad” that the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada hosted in Ottawa in October 2014.
To write well, college students need to read to deepen their understanding of language. And they need to write. The 24 essays in this collection will prompt teachers to help their students grasp changes in what is acceptable language, explore the mysteries
of word usage, and learn strategies to improve their writing. The essays are drawn from Lingua Franca, The Chronicle’s free blog about language in academe. Students can read these posts and new ones at chronicle.com/blogs/linguafranca.
Increased demands in professional expectations have required online faculty to learn how to balance multiple roles in an open-ended, changing, and relatively unstructured job. In this paper, we argue that being strategic about one’s balance of the various facets of online teaching will improve one’s teaching efficiency and effectiveness. We discuss the balancing issues associated with four key online teaching facets: course design/development, delivery of the course content, assessments/feedback, and professional development. We conclude with a template for a strategic professional development plan that addresses these key facets.
Canada's ranking in the newest How Canada Performs: Innovation report card is good news. Canada ranked 9th among 16 countires , comparied to 13th in the previous Conference of Canada ranking.
The closing of residential schools did not bring their story to an end. The legacy of the schools continues to this day
day. It is reflected in the significant educational people and other nd more troubled lives. The legacy is also reflected in the intense racism some people harbour against Aboriginal people and the systemic and other forms of discrimination Aboriginal people regularly experience in Canada. Over a century of cultural genocide has left most Aboriginal languages on the verge of extinction. The disproportionate apprehension of Aboriginal children by child welfare agencies and the disproportion- ate imprisonment and victimization of Aboriginal people are all part of the legacy of the way that Aboriginal children were treated in residential schools.
Canada's post-secondary institutions are not producing enough graduates with the right skills to drive future economic growth, warns the head of one of the country's largest banks.
CIBC chief executive Victor Dodig told The Canadian Press in an interview Tuesday that much of the country's eventual economic success will be generated by entrepreneurs who commercialize new ideas and technologies.
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.
Most universities still offer Learning Management Systems (LMS) as the ‘one size fits all’ technology solution for all teachers across all disciplines. Using LMS across diverse campuses has resulted in efficiencies-of-scale for administrators, however LMS integration into teacher practices is minimal (e.g., Conole & Fill, 2005) and teachers’ creative space can be limited for discipline-based innovation. Together, these realities indicate that there are significant barriers to the effective use of LMSs, especially for teaching and learning purposes.
To overcome such barriers, the complex and less visible internal space of teacher beliefs must be understood in relation to teachers’ pedagogical contexts and the affordances they can identify. This paper reports on the findings of six qualitative case studies of teachers at different stages of LMS integration and the extent to which teachers reconciled their beliefs. The results highlight the need for technology environments that better accommodate teacher diversity.
Keywords: teacher beliefs, teacher diversity, affordances, LMS, university teacher education
The advent of online learning has created the medium for cyber-bullying in the virtual classroom and also by e-mail. Bullying is usually expected in the workplace and between students in the classroom. Most recently, however, faculty members have
become surprising targets of online bullying. For many, there are no established policies nor is training provided on how to react. The current research defines the problem, reviews the findings of a cyber-bullying survey, and explores recommendations for addressing cyber-bullying through policies, training, and professional development.
The Canadian Council on Learning (CCL) has been engaged through a competitive process by the Ontario Ministry of Education (hereafter “the Ministry”) to evaluate the extent to which the Student Success/Learning to 18 Strategy (hereafter “the SS/L18 Strategy”) as currently implemented is aligned with the Ministry’s three overarching goals and is producing the intended
outcomes related to its specific five goals. The evaluation process is composed of two main phases. This Stage 1 report provides a description and chronology of the SS/L18 Strategy-related changes; a catalogue and preliminary analysis of source documents relevant to the initiative; the results of an analysis of interviews with 39 respondents identified for the initial stage of the evaluation; the results of four focus groups conducted with Student Success Leaders (SSLs); preliminary
observations about the conduct of the SS/L18 Strategy, its strengths and vulnerabilities, as well as some preliminary recommendations for the future of the Strategy.
The overarching message of this report is that equality does not happen by accident.
The research reviewed suggests that education policy makers should ensure that gender equality is a
real rather than a rhetorical priority and that change is substantively resourced in teacher
education and in school practices.
The publication of this report is part of our ongoing commitment to promoting gender equality in European schools and societies. A complementary report on gender and educational attainment will be published by Eurydice in November 2009. Also in November, a conference on gender and educational attainment organised by the Swedish Presidency of the European Union will bring together many of the key actors with the aim to providing an improved basis for further European policy
cooperation in this field.
One of the biggest challenges to face universities in an era of globalisation is the increased reliance on part-time instructors. Recent PhD graduates are less and less likely to find full-time, permanent work and are forced into casual teaching positions with low salaries and no benefits.
Hosting international students has long been admired as one of the hallmarks of internationalization. The two major formative strands of internationalization in Canadian universities are development cooperation and international students. With reduced public funding for higher education, institutions are aggressively recruiting international students to generate additional revenue. Canada is equally interested in offering incentives for international students to stay in the country as immigrants after completing their studies. In its 2011 budget, the Canadian federal government earmarked funding for an international
education strategy and, in 2010, funded Edu-Canada—the marketing unit within the Department of Education and Foreign Affairs (DFAIT)—to develop an official Canadian brand to boost educational marketing, IMAGINE: Education in/au Canada. This model emulates the Australian one, which rapidly capitalized on the recruitment of international students and became an
international success story. Given current Canadian higher education policy trends, this paper will address the cautionary lessons that can be drawn from the Australian case.
In this chapter, Kelly Foley and David Green challenge the conventional wisdom that increasing the level of education is the perfect antidote to rising income inequality. They investigate two key questions. First, how has rising educational attainment shaped the structure of wages and earnings in Canada over time? Second, what role has education and more broadly “human capital” policy played in either exacerbating or reducing inequality?
The authors warn against relying on human capital policy — at least in its current form — as a stabilizer for inequality. They find that changes in the returns to education and the educational composition of the workforce fail to explain the increases in earnings inequality observed in recent decades. The forces driving changes in the Canadian wage structure will not be offset by
simply increasing the education level of the workforce, they argue. In particular, directing more resources toward university education would benefit children from middle- and upper-income households the most and could in fact increase inequality. Increasing spending on college and apprenticeship programs appears to be no better as a solution, unless core issues such as low female participation and the low completion rates of participants are effectively addressed. In contrast, targeting expenditures on early childhood development and secondary school toward low-income households has greater potential to reduce inequality both in the long term and across generations. But even in these cases, the ultimate impact on wage differences between middle- and high-earners is unclear. Education and training policy is not a silver bullet for solving inequality.
This series of reports explores new forms of teaching, learning and assessment for an interactive world, to guide teachers and policy makers in productive innovation. This fourth report proposes ten innovations that are already in currency and are having an increasing effect on education. To produce it, a group of academics at the Institute of Educational Technology in The Open University collaborated with researchers from the Center for Technology in Learning at SRI International. We proposed a long list
of new educational terms, theories, and practices. We then pared these down to ten that have the potential to provoke major shifts in educational practice, particularly in post-school education. Lastly, we drew on published and unpublished writings
to compile the ten sketches of new pedagogies that might transform education. These are summarised below in an approximate order of immediacy and timescale to widespread implementation.
nternational students have become an increasingly important dimension of Canada‘s educational and immigration policy landscape, which has led to the development of pathways from educational to working visa status. In this report we present an analysis of international student numbers, visa transition rates, processes and government policy evolution with regard to international student entry to Ontario between 2000 and 2012. The report’s findings suggest four major areas of change: increasing male dominance in the number of student entries; the rise in international student entries into the college sector; the increasing importance of international students as temporary workers post-graduation; and the profound shift in source countries for Ontario-bound international students. Policy knowledge in areas related to these issues is vital to Ontario's ability to compete for international students, who can become potential immigrants, while maintaining high-quality postsecondary educational institutions.
Learning Study is a collaborative, action-research approach to improve the effectiveness of student learning by enhancing the professional competence of teachers. This is achieved through the collaborative construction of the pedagogical content knowledge enabling them better to teach specific objects of learning. Through inquiry and authentic learning by the teachers, it takes account of students’ prior knowledge in the lesson planning and so creates an authentic learning environment for the students. This paper explains how the Learning Study approach relates to the set of approaches known as “Lesson Study” and how it incorporates the principles for high quality learning proposed by the OECD project on Innovative Learning Environments (ILE) in its design and implementation. It examines how Learning Study helps to integrate the factors comprising innovative learning environments. It analyses the critical conditions that support its development and practice in schools and in professional learning networks and education systems in general.
A teacher’s prime directive is to help students learn. So what is learning? There are a variety of definitions. Figure 1 contains 21 definitions of learning. Read through this list and choose two to three with which you feel most comfortable. (Note: There is no “correct” definition.)
In 2014, the Government of Ontario signaled its intent to review the formula by which Ontario’s universities are funded. In Premier Kathleen Wynne’s Mandate letter to Reza Moridi, Minister of Training, Colleges, and Universities (MTCU), she asked him to:
“[Work] with postsecondary institutions and the Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario to improve the consistency and availability of institution-level and system-level outcome measures. These measures will help inform the allocation of graduate spaces, updated program approval processes and the implementation of a reformed funding model for universities.”