Universities will have to prepare students for multiple career changes and a longer working life if they are to contribute to reducing the global inequality that is a major focus of this week’s discussion at the World Economic Forum in Davos, says the principal of McGill University.
Being admitted to graduate school can feel like a prize — until you actually get there and have to do the work. I’m a full professor now, yet I still vividly recall those daunting first months. And I’m reminded of them each academic year, as I watch so many excellent students make the same missteps.
That got me thinking about how graduate students can better set themselves up for success.
The result is this list of 10 tips.
Higher education institutions around the world face the growing problem of relevance as they enter the twenty-first century. With the international economy evolving toward a global network organized around the value of knowledge , the capacity of people and organizations to use technological developments wisely, effectively, and efficiently has emerged as a critical societal concern. People and nations are relying on colleges and universities to help shape a positive future. However, to capture the advantage of this more central focus and role, higher education institutions will need to transform their structures, missions, processes, and programs in order to be both more flexible and more responsive to changing societal needs.
The Supreme Court of Canada has revolutionized the jurisprudence of aborig-inal rights and title. Various decisions have overturned the doctrine of adverse occupancy, which at one time had been thought to have extinguished aborig-inal title in British Columbia (Delgamukkw); created a governmental duty to consult First Nations regarding use of land to which they have a claim of aboriginal rights or title (Haida Nation); approved a specific claim to aborig-inal title (Tsilhqot’in); and extended the duty of consultation to First Nations whose aboriginal title was previously thought to have been extinguished by treaty (Mikisew). These decisions have created a new range of property rights for First Nations, which they should be able to use to advance their prosper-ity. However, the new jurisprudence has also set up many barriers to volun-tary market transactions by multiplying the number of owners and claimants, and laying down opaque und unpredictable rules for making decisions about lands that are subject to claims of aboriginal title or to treaty rights such as hunting and fishing.
International education is becoming an increasingly competitive sector within the field of postsecondary education. Tomorrow’s leaders will be expected to speak multiple languages, work in foreign countries, and bridge cultural differences to achieve social, economic and political objectives. Governments around the world are responding to this trend by intensifying the internationalization of their higher education systems — both attracting a greater number of international students and ensuring their citizens are able to pursue studies beyond national boundaries. In our globalized world, the demand for international education and experience continues to grow rapidly.
Welcome to the Workshop!
9-11:00 Module I-The Leader in You 11-11:30
11:30-1:00 Module II-Professional Cultures Module III-Leading Professional Capital
2:00-3:15 Module III-Leading Professional Capital (cont’d) Module IV -The Leader and Technology
Module V-Closing
This research was funded by TIAA-CREF to provide a deeper understanding of the issues facing academic institutions when age-eligible professors do not retire, and how those issues can best be addressed. In particular, insight was sought on the reasons why financially-ready, age-eligible professors do not retire; as well as, on the kinds of positive strategies colleges and universities have used and could use to encourage such individuals (“reluctant retirees”) to retire that would be both effective and well-received. To provide qualitative insight on these issues, Mathew Greenwald & Associates conducted one-on-one, in-depth interviews with two types of individuals.
Powerful things happen when leaders from diverse backgrounds gather and commit time to dialogue on a single issue. The results of the dialogue are even more powerful when those leaders are well informed and committed to action. When the issue at hand is central to a whole country’s future, the results of this dialogue must be shared so that others can join in.
The National Working Summit on Aboriginal Postsecondary Education produced important commitments for action from its participants and substantive policy recommendations for the federal government. The summit was held at Six Nations Polytechnic on October 5, 2010. Over 50 participants from universities, colleges, Aboriginal institutes, charities, Aboriginal organizations and the private sector took part.
Abstract
The purpose of the paper is to describe our peer mentorship experiences and explain how these experiences fostered transformational learning during our PhD graduate program in educational administration. As a literature backdrop, we discuss characteristics of traditional forms of mentorship and depict how our experiences of peer mentorship was unique. Through narrative inquiry, we present personal data and apply concepts of transformational learning theory to analyze our experiences. Our key finding was that it was the ambiguous boundaries combined with the formal structure of our graduate program that created an environment where peer mentorship thrived. We conclude that peer mentorship has great capacity to foster human and social capital within graduate programs for both local and international students.
Résumé
Le but de cet article est de décrire nos expériences de mentorat par les pairs et d’expliquer comment ces expériences ont favorisé l’apprentissage transformationnel au cours de notre programme d’études supérieures de doctorat. Avec la littérature comme toile de fond, nous discutons des caractéristiques des formes traditionnelles de mentorat et décrivons comment
notre mentorat par les pairs est unique. Grâce à l’analyse narrative, nous présentons des données personnelles et appliquons les concepts de la théorie de l’apprentissage transformationnel pour analyser nos expériences. L’élément clé de l’étude démontre clairement que les frontières ambiguës, combinées à la structure formelle de notre programme d’études supérieures, créent un environnement favorable au mentorat par les pairs. À la lumière de notre étude, nous concluons que, tant pour les étudiants locaux qu’internationaux, le mentorat par les pairs rehausse le développement humain et social dans les
programmes d’études supérieures.
• Review what is happening & lessons learned
• Establish a common understanding of FG student success
• Collaborate - World Cafe
o Share best practices & lessons learned
o Discuss FG student success
o Look at assessment of FG student success
o Plan for next steps
Mergers have been a frequent phenomenon in higher education in the last quarter century. The conventional wisdom is that mergers are undertaken mainly for economic reasons, either to expand markets or to reduce costs. About four out of five college or university mergers survive. In the for-profit sector the comparable rate is closer to two out of five. From this one might conclude that the future for mergers among colleges and universities is robust. If, however, the principal purpose of mergers is economic efficiency, there logically ought to be a point beyond which the efficacy of merger will begin to decline. There is, however, another motive for merger, which is unrelated to economic efficiency. Mergers can produce greater diversity of programs and services, both among individual colleges and universities and within systems of postsecondary education.
The purpose of this research study was to map Ontario universities’ strategies, programs and services for international students (IS). In mapping these programs, we aimed to understand the opportunities, challenges and gaps that exist in supporting IS. We focused on services at various levels, including from the first year of study all the way through to graduation, the job search process, entry into the labour market, and students’ transition to permanent resident status.
Canada’s “skills gap” has come to dominate both headlines and policy debates. Employers and business
representatives report a growing mismatch between the skills they need in employees and those possessed by job seekers. These concerns have fostered suggestions that the postsecondary system is not graduating students with the skills required by the labour market.
But not everyone is convinced. A growing chorus of voices questions whether or not such a gap actually exists in the Canadian economy. Nor is it clear when the skills gap is discussed that commentators have the same phenomenon in mind. Some consider the skills gap problem to result from a lack of postsecondary graduates to meet the impending demand for high-skilled workers, while others see it as a problem of students graduating with the wrong credentials for the labour market. Some suggest that Canadian students have the right credentials but not the basic essential skills needed by employers. Still others suggest that
students have the right skills but lack the work experience employers demand.
It’s been said that no one dreams of becoming an academic leader when they grow up. It’s a tough job that’s only gotten more challenging as budgets shrink, public scrutiny rises, and responsibilities continue to grow. It requires a unique skill set – part field general, part mediator, part visionary, and part circus barker – to name just a few. But what does it really take to be an
effective leader?
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.
The primary objectives of the Pan-Canadian Education Indicators Program (PCEIP) are to develop and maintain a set of statistics that provide information about education and learning in Canada and to support evidence-based policy making. PCEIP has been doing this since publishing its first set of education indicators for Canada and its jurisdictions in 1996. In September 2009, a set of international indicators was introduced in the first edition of Education Indicators in Canada: An International Perspective. Each year, this PCEIP series presents indicators for Canada and its provinces/territories, placing them in a broader international context. The report has been designed to complement and expand upon the information for Canada that is provided annually to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) for publication in its Education at a Glance (EAG) report. The international context provided by the report supports the mission of the Canadian Education Statistics Council (CESC) to “create and commit to comprehensive and long-term strategies, plans, and programs to collect, analyze, and disseminate nationally and internationally policy-relevant and comparable statistical information.”
When teachers think the best, most important way to improve their teaching is by developing their content knowledge, they end up with sophisticated levels of knowledge, but they have only simplistic instructional methods to convey that material. To imagine that content matters more than process is to imagine that the car is more important than the road. Both are essential. What we teach and how we teach it are inextricably linked and very much dependent on one another.
In their efforts to foster active engagement in the classroom, instructors are increasingly looking to integrate instructional technologies such as online quizzes and clickers into their large courses. While studies of STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) education have demonstrated that such approaches have the potential not only to enhance the quality of students’ learning experiences generally, but also to help improve their critical thinking skills specifically, much less is known about the effectiveness of instructional technologies in humanities education. This exploratory study seeks to add to our understanding of pedagogical best practices in the humanities by testing the efficacy of engagement strategies in a history course. One main finding of this study is that the adoption of a cluster of engagement strategies similar to those used in physics education did help develop the critical thinking skills of some students in a large first-year history course, but not always to a greater extent than more conventional approaches to instruction.
“We’re not in Kansas anymore, Toto”1—a statement Dorothy made to her dog, Toto, in The Wizard of Oz—sums up reasonably well the point I want to make in this article. That is, as literacy educators no longer con-strained (or protected) by older, more familiar 20th-century print-centric modes of communicating, we may at times feel challenged to keep pace with students’ preferences for producing and learning with multimodal texts that combine moving and still images, sounds, performances, icons, symbols, and the like. Often digitally mediated, these texts are familiar and freely available to youth who have access to the Internet. Indeed, a small but growing body of research suggests that young people’s ways of telling, listening, viewing, and thinking in digital environments may fac-tor into their self-identifying as literate beings (e.g., Alvermann, 2010; Livingstone, Bober, & Helsper, 2005; Ito et al., 2008; McClenaghan & Doecke, 2010; Rennie & Patterson, 2010; Skinner & Hagood, 2008; Thomas, 2007; Walsh, 2008). Although this research on young people’s online literate identities has implications for classroom practice, the liter-ature remains largely untapped by teachers, school library media special-ists, and literacy teacher educators. Why is this so? Just as importantly, what does this literature have to offer?
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.