Canada has enjoyed exceptional and sustained economic growth for the past 15 years – strong commodity prices have created a currency advantage in export markets, the R&D collaboration between universities and the private sector is strong, post-secondary education attainment is one of the highest amongst OECD countries, the overall unemployment rate has fallen, and the number of small and medium enterprises have risen in the last decade. However, as international competition for talent and capital continue to intensify, now may be the time to review one of the critical elements for any economy – skills and learning.
The Canadian Graduate and Professional Student Survey (CGPSS) is a national survey that was completed by over 51,000 students across 48 universities in 2013. This comprehensive survey includes questions covering a broad array of topics including students’ satisfaction with their departments, programs and advisors, availability of funding, use and quality of university services, and satisfaction with professional development supports (CAGS, 2010). This report uses data and opinions collected from graduate students through the CGPSS in an effort to contribute to the conversation on graduate student education in Canada.
Academic preparation is an important part of being ready for college or university. Taking the right courses in high school, and succeeding in them, is vital for admission into the post-secondary programs of your choice as well as success in those
programs. There are, however, many other facets of your college or university life that you should also be prepared for.
Remember to study what you love – if you didn’t obtain a very good mark in 12U Biology, you will
not like or succeed in university biology classes.
Understand credit and finances – talk to your parents about money, credit, and budgeting.
Be aware of the services and resources that are and will be available to you – in your research of
academic programs, also seek out what student services are available like health and counseling
services, academic skills support, financial aid advising, academic advising, etc.
VISIT the schools you are considering applying to – there is no better way to determine how you
feel about a particular institution.
Campus tours
On-campus events – fall open houses, March break, etc. University and College Fairs
High School information sessions
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.
Leadership is to this decade what standards-based reform was to the 1990s. Put another way, if you want to boost achievement scores from poor to good levels, a strong standard-based reform strategy can take you so far; but if the aim is to accomplish deeper, continuous improvement, leadership at many levels of the system is required.
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.
School leaders are faced with the daunting task of anticipating the future and making conscious adaptations to their practices, in order to keep up and to be responsive to the environment. To succeed in a rapidly changing and increasingly complex world, it is vital that schools grow, develop, adapt and take charge of change so that they can control their own futures.This paper will examine the tension that exists for school leaders in relation to data about their schools and their students, arguing that the explicit connections between data and large-scale reforms make it impossible to avoid a critical approach to data, drawing on research in Ontario and Manitoba in Canada, and examining parallels with evidence from research in England, to highlight the challenges involved in using data effectively in different political contexts and mandated policies on the uses of data.
This research uses the Youth in Transition Survey (YITS) to compare participation in postsecondary education (PSE) in Ontario to such participation in other Canadian regions. We begin by presenting access rates by region, which reveals some substantial differences. University participation rates in Ontario are in about the middle of the pack, while college rates are relatively high. We then undertake an econometric analysis, which reveals that the effects of parental income are quite strong in the Atlantic provinces but much weaker elsewhere, including within Ontario. We also find that the relationship between high school grades and Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) test scores (measures of academic “performance” and “ability”) differ by region and are generally strongest in Ontario. From this perspective, Ontario would appear to have a relatively “meritocratic” system, where those who are more qualified are more likely to go to university and where overall attendance rates are less affected by family income. Interestingly, the effects of parental education, which are generally much stronger than family income, are similar across provinces. Understanding the reasons underlying these patterns might warrant further investigation.
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.
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.
Most organizations are awash in data – too much of it. And as many have learned, the ability to make effective, fact-based decisions is not dependent on the amount of data you have. Success is based on your ability to discover more meaningful and predictive insights from all the data you capture.
That’s where predictive analytics and data mining come into play. Data mining looks for hidden patterns in your data that can be used to predict future behavior. Businesses, scientists and governments have used this approach for years to transform data into proactive insights. The same approach applies to business issues across virtually any industry.
Research in commercial organizations has provided a multitude of examples on how leadership development can effectively foster employees’ performance and work-related attitudes such as commitment or satisfaction. In contrast, to date systematic leadership development is largely lacking for employees in higher education. However, we suggest that the positive effects of leadership development in commercial organizations also apply to the academic context. Thus, the purpose of this applied article is to present two approaches to the development of
leadership in higher education. More specifically, we provide a detailed description of two different programs offered to researchers at a large German university. The first program constitutes a leader development initiative for junior faculty on an individual level, whereas the second focuses on the development of leadership within university departments on a group level. We provide recommendations for establishing and evaluating effective leadership development in higher education.
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
The comparative performance of education systems is attracting more attention than ever before. In Canada, questions have been raised about whether we are keeping pace with the world’s leading education systems, and whether our performance has been eroding over time. There are also concerns about whether too many students from less advantaged backgrounds are being left behind. This report reviews the latest international evidence regarding achievement and equity in education. It shows that, in terms of achievement, Canada consistently places among an elite group of high performing countries and economies.
Moreover, Canada continues to be a leader in terms of equity: public schools in Canada are among the best in the world at helping to level the playing field between rich and poor children, and Canada is one of only a very few high-immigration countries that show no significant achievement gap between immigrants and non-immigrants. In fact, Canada distinguishes itself by its ability to combine high levels of achievement and high degrees of equity in education.
At the same time, Canada is not without its challenges. There has been a modest decline in Canada’s performance over time, and Canada’s relative advantage is diminishing as a number of other rapidly modernizing countries are catching up. And while the education attainment of Aboriginal peoples in Canada is increasing, the achievement gap between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal peoples at the higher end of the education attainment spectrum is still getting wider. No matter how well Canada may have performed to date in any given international study, there is will always be a need to strive for improvement.
It may seem strange to say that professional development—educators going to workshops and conferences, and taking courses—bears little relationship to classroom and school improvement. Similarly teachers toiling away as individuals do not add up to school or system success. What really counts is what happens ‘in between workshops’ or what I call learning is the work (Fullan, 2008).
The purpose of this study is to estimate the effects of organizational attributes on social integration in particular, and more generally on the student withdrawal process. Theory elaboration (the application of new concepts borrowed from other theoretical perspectives to explain the focal phenomenon) is used to help with the revision of Tinto's interactionalist theory of individual student departure. The existence of empirical evidence supporting the importance of organizational attributes in the persistence process makes the addition of organizational characteristics a logical choice as a possible source of social integration in an elaboration of Tinto's theory. The results from this study provide strong supp elaborating the revised version of Tinto's theory through the inclusion of concepts from organizational theory.
Colleges and Institutes Canada’s (CICan’s) 2015 Survey of Institutional Capacity, Facilities and Equipment Needs confirms that colleges and institutes continue to be in great need of infrastructure support.
Researchers say that discrimination at colleges and universities may have negative impact on black students' mental health.
Since 2008, an intensive national campaign has sought to boost the number of college graduates. Early in his first term, President Obama laid out an ambitious goal, promising that “by 2020, America will once again have the highest proportion of college graduates in the world.” Foundations have offered significant funding for work in this area. New organizations, such as Complete College America, have also emerged. Federal student aid and college preparation programs have been generously funded as well.
This study was a phenomenological study examining the experiences of faculty in an online learning environment in order to identify the factors that could produce job burnout and stress in master’s programs in education. The challenges and related stress-producing factors were also explored to identify best practices for online faculty and attributes most suited for the demands and expectations required in the online teaching environment. The study’s insights and findings are based on perspectives from online faculty who have been teaching in the modality for three or more years. These findings may be useful to stakeholders such as administrators, faculty mentors, faculty trainers, and faculty interested in employment in the modality so that identifiable and realistic criteria may be available upon which to base future hiring standards, employment practices, training, and decisions about teaching online. Insights about procedures and practices have been identified that may be effective in helping to develop initial training programs, faculty mentor supports, administrative decisions, and on-going faculty training. Based upon the findings, institutional leaders have information that could help identify best practices for online faculty and attributes most suited for the demands and expectations required in an online teaching environment. Institutions and administration can seek out and recruit the best possible online faculty who have the necessary skills, abilities, and characteristics required in this modality rather than hiring based merely upon academic credentials that would fail to identify specific attributes necessary for online teaching. Finally, those specific characteristics can then be applied to alleviate job burnout challenges online faculty would experience. The study will help institutional leaders (a) identify faculty earlier who will be better suited to the modality; (b) identify how to offer relevant, on-going faculty supports and training practices; and
(c) prevent online faculty job burnout.