This study examines online and offline political engagement and pays special attention to the role of social networking sites in people's political activities.
The past few years have ushered in more strident calls for accountability across institutions of higher learning. Various internal and external stakeholders are asking questions like "Are students learning what we want them to learn?" and "How do the students' scores from one institution compare to its peers?" As a result, more institutions are looking for new, more far-reaching ways to assess student learning and then use assessment findings to improve students' educational experiences.
However, as Trudy Banta notes in her article An Accountability Program Primer for Administrators, “just as simply weighing a pig will not make it fatter, spending millions simply to test college students is not likely to help them learn more.” (p. 6)
While assessing institutional effectiveness is a noble pursuit, measuring student learning is not always easy, and like so many things we try to quantify, there’s much more to learning than a number in a datasheet. As Roxanne Cullen and Michael Harris note in their article The Dash to Dashboards, “The difficulty we have in higher education in defining and measuring our outcomes
lies in the complexity of our business: the business of learning. A widget company or a fast-food chain has clearly defined goals and can usually pinpoint with fine accuracy where and how to address loss in sales or glitches in production or service. Higher education is being called on to be able to perform similar feats, but creating a graduate for the 21st century workforce is a very
different kind of operation.” (p. 10)
This special report Educational Assessment: Designing a System for More Meaningful Results features articles from Academic Leader, and looks at the assessment issue from a variety of different angles. Articles in the result include:
• The Faculty and Program-Wide Learning Outcome Assessment
• Assessing the Degree of Learner-Centeredness in a Department or Unit
• Keys to Effective Program-Level Assessment
• Counting Something Leads to Change in an Office or in a Classroom
• An Accountability Program Primer for Administrators
Whether you’re looking to completely change your approach to assessment, or simply improve the
efficacy of your current assessment processes, we hope this report will help guide your discussions
and eventual decisions.
Rob Kelly
Editor
Academic Leader
Some provincial governments are taking notice of and responding to growing public concern over student debt loads, economic and employment uncertainty, and the long-term ramifications being felt by students and their families.
These responses have not resulted in across-the-board fee reductions; provincial governments have largely preferred to go the route of directed assistance measures, either before (two-tiered fee structures or nearly-universal targeted grants or bursaries) or after-the-fact (tax credits, debt caps and loans forgiveness) directed at in-province students as part of a retention strategy, and to mitigate the poor optics of kids being priced out of their local universities. While this does impact in-province affordability, it undermines any commitment to universality because it creates a situation where the only students
who leave the province to pursue a degree are the ones who can afford to.
The increasing number of exceptions and qualifiers makes the system of university finance far more difficult to navigate, and makes it harder to compare provincial policies. Additionally, the system becomes much more unpredictable.
Financial assistance applied in this manner is anything but certain; programs can change or be eliminated at any time, while the only thing students can be relatively certain of is that fees will likely continue to increase.
School Finder
Review of Colleges and Universities and other educational issues.
This document attempts to provide useful advice for graduate students, particularly Ph.D. students, just starting out on their research careers at the Autonomous Networks Research Group, Dept. of Electrical Engineering-Systems, USC. It should also be useful for graduate students at other institutions working in similar research areas.
Students with no prior experience often have several misconceptions about the nature of research. For example, they may think that doing research is similar to or requires the same skill as acing courses; that research projects are like homework sets - the advisor will assign well-formulated problems and provide the student with the tools to solve them. Hopefully, this document will help clear some of these misconceptions and help them get started on the right foot in their research.
Many of the pointers here may seem like common sense, but as they say, common sense is by no means common… and very little of it is taught in a classroom.
This is an active document, and as such is subject to modifications. To begin with, I have just listed my main points under each heading. I will be working to convert this into a coherent narrative over the course of the next couple of months.
Efforts to reduce harmful alcohol use by university students require a concentrated examination of the culture of alcohol use on campus and within the broader community. Drinking heavily among young people, even before university, is often viewed as normal and expected behaviour by youth and frequently condoned by their parents and the community because it is viewed
as a rite of passage. Adults can turn a blind eye to the practice, frequently hoping or feeling relieved that their
children aren’t using something “worse”.
The traditional pathway into postsecondary education (PSE) is to enter college or university directly after graduating from high school. Not all students follow the traditional pathway into PSE. The Ontario government recently set a goal “to raise the postsecondary [attainment] rate to 70 per cent” (Speech from the Throne, 2010). In 2011, 64 per cent of Ontario residents aged between 25 and 64 held a PSE credential.1 One way to help reach the target educational attainment rate of 70 per cent is for Ontario colleges and universities to attract and retain learners who follow non-traditional pathways. Therefore, one of the priorities of the Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario (HEQCO) is to evaluate the adequacy and efficiency of non-traditional pathways in obtaining a PSE credential. This study mainly examined one non-traditional pathway, delayed entry into PSE. Graduates who have taken more years than expected to graduate are also included in the discussion. The purpose of this paper is to address the following research questions:
• What is the demographic profile of these non-traditional graduates?
• Are their program choices and pathways through PSE different from those of direct entrants?
• Do their labour market outcomes differ from those of direct entrants?
CACUSS is pleased to support the second edition of this guide to “Researching Teaching and Student Outcomes in Postsecondary Education.”
The first edition was a useful resource for our members in working collaboratively to understanding academic and co-curricular learning in postsecondary contexts. The guide offers an accessible introduction to the issues and techniques in conducting research and we believe that it is a good resource for student affairs staff who are considering a research project to measure outcomes in their departments, programs, or campus.
Student affairs professionals are involved in various research and assessment projects seeking to understand the student experience. We are asked more and more frequently to provide evidence of how our work impacts student learning, wellbeing, development and success rates. In addition, the need to refine programs, build outcomes-based plans and engage with faculty on academic initiatives to support student success also persists.
We congratulate the authors and collaborators on their work in updating this useful tool.
One of my primary research interests is the design of higher education systems, a subject on which I did background papers for recent commissions on postsecondary education in Ontario and British Columbia. I am interested in both factors that influence the design of higher education systems and in the implications of different system designs for accessibility, quality, innovation, and the effectiveness of higher education in meeting societal needs. An example of analysis of the design of a higher education system is found in a recent book that I co-authored (Clark, Moran, Skolnik, and Trick, 2009). We concluded that the design
employed in Ontario for the provision of baccalaureate education is inefficient, because it attempts to provide almost all baccalaureate education through a system of publicly funded research universities, the most expensive model for the provision of bachelor’s programs. In our recommendations we emphasized the need for greater institutional differentiation among
providers of baccalaureate credit activity. This would include having a few predominantly teaching universities that concentrate on baccalaureate programming; an open university; and making credit transfer a major function of the colleges.
When building an online program, there are certain big questions that need to be answered. Among them are: What kind of program you want it to be – high tech or low tech? Professor intensive or adjunct driven? Blended learning or fully online? What kind of technology will be used to deliver course content? What about opportunities for collaboration? Indeed, even though distance learning is no longer in its infancy, and there are a whole discipline-full of best practices learned by those who blazed the trail before you, it’s easy to get overwhelmed by the questions and the possibilities of what you want your program to look like today and five years from now. We created this special report to suggest some responses to the big questions about distance education: About pedagogy, technology, philosophy and administration of distance learning programs. In this report, you will find concise, informative articles on distance education administration and policy that have appeared in Distance Education Report. Titles include:
• Seeing Where the Distance Education Opportunities Lie
• Dumb is Smart: Learning from Our Worst Practices
• Building a Distance Education Program: Key Questions to Answer
• Eight Steps to On-Campus/Online Parity
• Creating a Business Continuity Plan for Your Distance Education Program
• Integrating Distance Education Programs into the Institution
• Solving the Problems of Faculty Ownership with Online Courses
The mass of program and policy issues confronting distance education administrators grows every day. We hope this special report will help you conceptualize, manage and grow the distance education program at your school.
Study shows faculty members remain skeptical of digital course materials and generally unfamiliar with open educational resources.
Introducing the drivers for whole system reform
‘Whole system reform’ is the name of the game and ‘drivers’ are those policy and strategy levers that have the least and best chance of driving successful reform. A ‘wrong driver’ then is a deliberate policy force that has little chance of achieving the desired result, while a ‘right driver’ is one that ends up achieving better measurable results for students. Whole system reform
is just that – 100 per cent of the system – a whole state, province, region or entire country. This paper examines those drivers typically chosen by leaders to accomplish reform, critiques their inadequacy, and offers an alternative set of drivers that have been proven to be more effective at accomplishing the desired goal, which I express as … the moral imperative of raising the bar (for all students) and closing the gap (for lower performing groups) relative to higher order skills and competencies required to be successful world citizens.
With a population of 13 million people, the province of Ontario covers a significant geographic distribution of 917,741 square kilometres (Statistics Canada, 2005). Fourteen per cent of the population is categorized as living in a rural, remote or northern area (Statistics Canada, 2011). Within this land mass is a rich diversity of people, systems and institutions that are privileged to call it home - including Francophone persons and First Nations, Inuit and Métis people. There are unique challenges that exist within these communities that affect access to health services: geographic distance, socioeconomic status, availability of health human resources and infrastructure. These factors have an impact on health status, wellness and the ability to offer person-centred health care.
How College Shapes Lives: Understanding the Issues explains some of the ways the payoff of postsecondary education can be measured and provides insights into why there is confusion about that payoff, despite strong evidence. Focusing on the variation in outcomes across individuals helps to clarify that the existence of the high average payoff, and the reality of significant benefits for most students, is not inconsistent with disappointing outcomes for some. We hope to put the disturbing stories of this relatively small segment of students into context and to direct attention to improving opportunities for all
students.
Much has been written about the challenges of teaching an online course. While not discounting the unique (and sometimes frustrating) aspects of the online learning environment, it could be said that, despite the numerous differences, many of the same course management strategies that are essential to success in a traditional classroom also apply in the online classroom. These strategies include the importance of a strong syllabus, clear directions, well-organized materials, and timely feedback.
Of course, the big challenge for online instructors is that the very nature of online education amplifies the importance of properly addressing these management issues, while throwing a few more additional obstacles into the mix. Choosing the right communication tools and protocols, addressing technology problems, managing student expectations, and building community are just some of issues that can stretch online instructors to the breaking point.
11 Strategies for Managing Your Online Courses was created to help online instructors
tackle many of the course management issues that can erode the efficiency and effectiveness
of an online course. It features 11 articles pulled from the pages of Online Classroom,
including:
• Syllabus Template Development for Online Course Success
• The Online Instructor’s Challenge: Helping ‘Newbies’
• Virtual Sections: A Creative Strategy for Managing Large Online Classes
• Internal or External Email for Online Courses?
• Trial by Fire: Online Teaching Tips That Work
• The Challenge of Teaching Across Generations
It’s important to keep in mind that you’re not the only one who may be a little anxious
about going online. Students often have anxiety when taking their first online course. It’s
up to you to help them feel more confident and secure, all the while keeping your
workload at a manageable level. The course management tips in this report will help.
Rob Kelly
Editor
Online Classroom
Responding to trends in research, National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) institutional data and curriculum renewal processes, several recent initiatives at the University of Toronto focus on the complementary role of the teaching assistant (TA) as part of a teaching team. Particularly, these initiatives focus on the establishment of learner-centred environments, support for deep student learning, and the development of core skills and competencies for both undergraduate and graduate students.
This study examined the influence of two teaching assistant (TA) models – the Advanced University Teaching Preparation Certificate (AUTP), offered by the University of Toronto’s Teaching Assistants’ Training Program (TATP), Centre for Teaching Support & Innovation, and the Writing Instruction for TAs (WIT) Program, offered in the Faculty of Arts & Science. Both of these TA models aim to improve undergraduate student learning by ensuring that TAs are integral members of the teaching team and that they receive sufficient training and guidance in order to effectively support deep student learning. Both of these TA models utilize peer training as a core dimension.
ABSTRACT. I argue in this article that responsible leadership (Maak and Pless, 2006) contributes to build- ing social capital and ultimately to both a sustainable business and the common good. I show, first, that responsible leadership in a global
stakeholder society is a relational and inherently moral phenomenon that cannot be captured in traditional dyadic leader–follower relationships (e.g., to subordinates) or by simply focusing on questions of leadership effectiveness. Business leaders have to deal with moral complexity resulting from a multitude of stakeholder claims and have to build enduring and mutually beneficial
relationships with all relevant stakeholders. I contend, second, that in doing so leaders bundle the energy of different constituencies and enable social capital building. Social capital can be understood as actual or potential resources inherent to more or less institutionalized relationships of mutual recognition (Bourdieu 1980). By drawing on network analysis I suggest,
third, that responsible leaders weave durable relational structures and ultimately networks of relationships which are rich in ties to otherwise unconnected individuals or groups.
Organizations depend upon capable leadership to guide them through unprecedented changes. Yet, there is ample evidence in
the news and in recent research reports that even some of the best and most venerable organizations are failing to adapt to
change, implement their strategic plans successfully or prepare for a more uncertain future. We believe the turmoil we
are currently observing has something to do with leadership, and that if we don’t change our current approach to leadership
development, we will see even more of the same.
Analyses of the 49th annual administration of the CIRP Freshman Survey find substantive variation across levels of institutional selectivity and control in students’ intentions to transfer. Students also increasingly place greater importance on early admissions programs in the college search process, perhaps signaling a new strategy for those attempting to enroll in the most selective institutions. As the Obama administration finalizes its plans to measure performance outcomes for colleges and universities, more freshmen appear to be aspiring to graduate degrees.
Vincent Tinto (1993) identifies three major sources of student departure: academic difficulties, the inability of individuals to resolve their educational and occupational goals, and their failure to become or remain incorporated in the intellectual and social life of the institution. Tinto's "Model of Institutional Departure" states that, to persist, students need integration into formal (academic performance) and informal (faculty/staff interactions) academic systems and formal (extracurricular activities) and informal (peer-group interactions) social systems.