Throughout this past decade, scholars and higher education practitioners have asked: Who will lead the nation’s community colleges in the future? This question is especially critical today since at no previous time in the nation’s history have community colleges confronted such an array of monumental challenges. Presidents and key leaders are departing in droves; in a recent survey by the AACC (2012), as many as 40% of presidents plan to retire within the next five years. This phenomenon occurs at a time when our colleges are faced with a variety of previously unimagined threats, many resulting from the impact of conflicting socio-economic changes. Further, colleges must address the American education and skills gap in an effort to meet the emerging needs of the new knowledge economy, while simultaneously struggling with the task of educating those students with the greatest needs during a time of dwindling funds.
Work-integrated learning (WIL) has been identified as a key strategy for supporting Canada’s postsecondary education (PSE) system in responding to an increasingly dynamic, globalized, knowledge-based economy. Ontario in particular has been described as a “hot bed” of co-operative education (Ipsos Reid, 2010). However, while there is a common belief that WIL improves employment outcomes (see Gault, Redington & Schlager, 2000; Kramer & Usher, 2010), research on this topic has generally been specific to certain programs and types of WIL (Sattler, 2011).
Education is vitally important to a person’s personal, social and academic development. Achieving one’s education potential affects a person’s ability to take part in the labour market, live independently, participate meaningfully in society, and realize their full potential.
The Ontario Human Rights Code (Code) recognizes the importance of creating a climate of understanding and mutual respect for the dignity and worth of each person, so that each person can contribute fully to the development and wellbeing of the community and the Province. The Code guarantees the right to equal treatment in education, without discrimination on the ground of disability, as part of the protection for equal treatment in services. This protection applies to elementary and secondary schools, and colleges and universities, both public and private.
Research and experience have demonstrated that early childhood development (ECD) is integral to future outcomes. Quality ECD programming contributes to healthy growth and development, as well as school readiness and success. Given the legacy of colonialism in Canada, access to culturally relevant ECD programs can play a key role in bridging gaps in life-chances between Indigenous and non-Indigenous children.
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.
September 1987 and Blaine Favel was sitting in a lecture hall at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ont., a long way from his home on Poundmaker Cree Nation, northwest of Saskatoon. Already he had an advocate’s leanings honed from growing up in a family of chiefs and protected by the thick skin he’d developed facing racial intolerance in Saskatchewan. So when his professor opened her lecture on property law with the pronouncement that all land in Canada belonged to the Queen, Mr. Favel’s hand shot up. “I asked her, ‘How did the Queen get the land?’”
The question left the rookie professor so flustered that she cancelled the rest of the class to reconsider her curriculum. Some students hissed at Mr. Favel, but he had made his point. When class resumed the next day, the professor began by teaching about aboriginal title.
In this study, the authors’ determined the individual learner characteristics of educators enrolled in online courses that influenced social presence (affective social communication). Findings reveal that the number of online courses taken, followed
by computer‐mediated communication proficiency, are significant predictors of social presence. Recommendations for the effective use of online learning recognize that instructors must deliberately structure interaction patterns to overcome the potential lack of social presence of the medium. Similarly, quality instructional design and course development strategies need be incorporated with supportive pre‐course instructional activities provided to acquaint novice learners with online learning
expectations.
Key words: online learning, social presence, learner characteristics, computermediated
communication
OCUFA traditionally has been a strong advocate for academic quality in the Ontario university system. OCUFA’s position is that academic quality is usually reflected by the presence of a number of fundamental factors: a high proportion of qualified tenure- stream and tenured faculty conducting teaching, research, and community service as tenure indicates a mutual
commitment by the administration and faculty to both the institution and its academic health; sound physical facilities and a sufficiency of other physical components necessary to program delivery (e.g. laboratory facilities); sufficient academic and administrative support staff so that programs can be delivered effectively; and ready access to adequate research and library resources staffed by appropriately qualified academic librarians.
During this latest recession the enormous losses being incurred by university endowment funds received extensive media attention. Ontario university administrators were sounding the alarm, warning that their institutions would have to cut expenses and take a hard line at thebargaining table as a result of endowment fund losses.
In the span of a week, the future of three Alberta colleges was set. On February 22, Minister of Advanced Education Marlin Schmidt announced that Grande Prairie Regional College (GPRC) had been approved for degree-granting status, with a view to becoming a university. On March
1, Premier Rachel Notley appeared at an event to announce that Red Deer College (RDC)
also had been approved to grant its own degrees. That same day, the education minister again
went before the cameras to confirm that the Alberta College of Art + Design (ACAD) had
achieved university status.
An Leadership PowerPoint Presentation
Becoming a new faculty member is seldom easy. Whether the instructor is simply transitioning to a new university or stepping into the classroom for the very first time, there are questions large and small that arise every day about policies, procedures, techniques, and technologies. For online instructors, many of whom teach only part-time, this sense of disorientation
is made even more difficult by their off-site location and the growing list of tools and technologies they need to learn in order to create a rich learning environment.
Current discussions about literacy often focus on how economic changes are raising expectations for literacy achievement. The emergence of a so-called knowledge economy or learning economy requires more people to do more things with print. Less attention has been given, however, to how the pressure to produce more literacy affects the contexts in which literacy
learning takes place. This article looks at the literacy learning experience of an autoworker turned union representative, a blind computer programmer, two bilingual autodidacts, and a former southern sharecropper raising children in a high-tech university town. It uses the concept of the literacy sponsor to explore their access to learning and their responses to economic and
technological change. Their experiences point to some directions for incorporating economic history into thinking about cultural diversity and for using resources in school to addresseconomic turbulence and inequality beyond the school.
While much literature has considered feedback and professional growth in formative peer reviews of teaching, there has been little empirical research conducted on these issues in the context of summative peer reviews. This article explores faculty members’ perceptions of feedback practices in the summative peer review of teaching and reports on their understandings of why constructive feedback is typically non-existent or unspecific in summative reviews. Drawing from interview data with 30 tenure-track professors in a research-intensive Canadian university, the findings indicated that reviewers rarely gave feedback to the candidates, and when they did, comments were typically vague and/or focused on the positive. Feedback, therefore, did not contribute to professional growth in teaching. Faculty members suggested that feedback was limited because of the following: the high-stakes nature of tenure, the demands for research productivity, lack of pedagogical expertise
among academics, non-existent criteria for evaluating teaching, and the artificiality of peer reviews. In this article I argue that when it comes to summative reviews, elements of academic culture, especially the value placed on collegiality, shape feedback practices in important ways.
Faculty are the critical labor element in the pursuit of the economic goals of community colleges, yet they are not central to institutional decision-making. Their views and values are not consistent with the goals and actions of their colleges. Instead, these goals and actions are aligned with business and industry, directed by government and college administrators. Although there is a misalignment of faculty values and institutional actions, faculty do not comprise an oppositional culture within their colleges. This multi-site qualitative study addresses the presence of tensions between educational values of faculty and the economic values of faculty work.
A large majority of first-time international graduate students are master’s and certificate students. • Over three-fourths (77%) of first-time international graduate students in Fall 2015 were enrolled in master’s and certificate programs; however, shares vary by country/region of origin and field of study. • First-time Indian (91%) and Saudi Arabian (80%) graduate students were most likely to pursue master’s and certificate programs, while South Korean (47%) graduate students were most likely to pursue doctoral programs.
Based on princiiples that look to improve overall wellbeing amongst student populations, this policy on student health
and wellness takes a broad look at a range of health concerns felt by Ontario’s post-secondary students, as identified by the student membership of OUSA. These policy recommendations seek to bring greater attention to the current mental and physical health care needs amongst our students regardless of their current health or socio- economic standing, or physical and mental ability. With this policy, OUSA hopes that students will be provided with the resources and service their overall wellbeing and success.
According to data released by Statistics Canada in 2014, the years of 2000 - 2010 have seen significant increases in large and private debt among graduating students, and skyrocketing private debt among graduates with doctoral degrees. Although the
percentage of graduates in debt appears to be decreasing overall in this decade, this is both because of the introduction of the Canada Student Grants Program (which turns a portion of student loans into non-repayable grants) and because enrollment growth has outpaced increases in student loan borrowing. Even so, those who are borrowing are taking on much higher debts,
and increasingly from private sources.
When it comes to assessment, there are enough perspectives, stakeholders, tools and methodologies to make your head spin. To be sure, despite the admirable goal of improving student learning by assessment, the trend toward greater accountability is often viewed as something that is imposed upon higher education institutions; infringing on an institution’s autonomy and stifling faculty members’ academic freedom without providing truly meaningful data to justify the additional workload it generates.
Meanwhile, others accept the fact that assessment is here to stay and strategies that, with careful planning, it’s entirely possible to design exactly the type of assessment systems you need to get precisely the type of information required for an accurate picture of learning outcomes.
This chapter examines how the three most common types of engagement found among adolescents attending high-performing high schools relate to indicators of mental and physical health.