I often wonder if we are not living the reality of the boiling frog metaphor. Drop the frog into a pot of boiling water, and the smart fellow instantly jumps out to save himself. But throw the unsuspecting frog into cool water, he will contently swim, unaware that the water is being slowly heated over a long period. The frog eventually cooks because he is inattentive to the small, incremental changes in temperature and thus goes numb to the realities of the water he’s swimming in until it’s too late.
In 2005, the report issued by the Rae review of college and university education in Ontario, Ontario: A Leader in Learning, re-stated an estimate that 11,000 new university faculty would be required by 2010. No source was cited, nor any of the assumptions that underlie the conclusion. OCUFA subsequently conducted an analysis that showed Ontario universities would have to hire nearly 11,000 full-time faculty between 2003 and 2010 to replace retiring professors and to reduce the student-faculty ratio to a level at comparable US institutions and at which Ontario could be a true leader in learning.
While student data systems are nothing new and most educators have been dealing with student data for many years, learning analytics has emerged as a new concept to capture educational big data. Learning analytics is about better understanding of the learning and teaching process and interpreting student data to improve their success and learning experiences. This paper provides an overview to learning analytics in higher education and more specifically, in e-learning. It also explores some of the issues around learning analytics.
"The current economic crisis is a structural one. Emerging industries require that young people possess new knowledge and entrepreneurial skills. Furthermore, tax and regulatory systems often inhibit business formation by young people. Systemic change is needed to help the new generation of young entrepreneurs to succeed in the innovative economy of the 21st century.”
For children in First Nations, Inuit and Métis communities across Canada, there is much to be positive about. Their communities are young: nearly a third of the total Indigenous population in Canada is under the age of 14, compared to 16.5% for the non-Indigenous population. Also, a characteristic of many Indigenous cultures is the centrality of children, which may be reflected in the active involvement of the community, and in support for families and parents. Youthfulness and a culture of respect for children are reasons for optimism and inspiration, but the effects of colonialism and the legacy of residential schools cannot be overlooked. These contribute to social and economic problems in many communities, impeding the ability of children to reach their potential as tomorrow’s leaders and decision makers. Statistics on virtually every measure of well-being such as family income, education, crowding and homelessness, poor water quality, and health outcomes
– reveal the serious disadvantages Indigenous children face compared to non-Indigenous children in Canada.
Technology moves at lightning speed, Facebook’s algorithm has new rules daily and marketing strategies are ever evolving as the audiences we all seek to reach become increasingly fragmented. And yet, some of us find ourselves
in workplaces where the prevailing sentiment is don’t rock the boat—if it worked in the past, let’s not make any
major changes.
If the culture at your college is all about not fixing what’s not broken, you may have a challenge ahead of you as you
try to suggest and implement some needed change. Turn that challenge into an opportunity with these tips for
shaking things up in a change-averse environment:
THE POSTSECONDARY REVIEW led by Bob Rae has presented a bracing diagnosis of a system he accurately describes as strong, but in serious jeopardy. OCUFA agrees that Ontario’s community colleges and universities are “on the edge of the choice between steady decline and great improvement” and that making the choice for improvement “will require more resources as well as a will to change.”
In other areas, Mr. Rae’s framing of the questions suggests a direction OCUFA would find troubling. The Discussion Paper’s section on “Accessibility” does not consider at all the financial barriers to participating in higher education. Instead, tuition and student aid are a major focus of the “Funding” section, pointing to an apparent belief that reformed student assistance accompanied by higher tuition fees could be a significant source of increased resources for community colleges and universities. In this submission, OCUFA calls attention to evidence from other jurisdictions that student aid innovations, in
particular the “go now-pay later” example currently being exported from Australia to the United Kingdom, will not deliver the hoped-for salvation. Instead, we set out the case for significantly increased public funding for higher education.We have organized our submission along the five main themes set out in the Discussion Paper: accessibility, quality, system design, funding and accountability.
Le projet Comprendre le concept de force en sciences est né de l’initiative des ministères de l’Éducation de l’Ontario et du Québec dans le cadre d’une entente de collaboration signée par les deux Premiers Ministres de ces provinces concernant le secteur de l’éducation ainsi que d’autres secteurs d’activité.
C’est une étude comparative, de nature collaborative et de type exploratoire, qui s’est déroulée de mai 2007 à mai 2008. Elle pourrait être suivie d’une étude plus approfondie et de plus d’envergure selon l’intérêt des résultats présentés ci-dessous de même que la disponibilité des ressources disponibles.
Americans are obsessed with narcissistic leaders, or at least they have an ambivalence between the ones they like and the ones they promote. A case in point is Real Estate baron and presidential candidate Donald Trump. Not that he is alone. At various times, similar attention and popularity have been heaped by the public and especially by the media for leaders such as Steve Jobs, Lee Iacocca and Larry Ellison.
There was a time not too long ago when the person with the most technical knowledge got promoted fastest. But hat’s often no longer the case.
Once someone gets promoted, technical skills become less necessary, and interpersonal ones become more critical in their place. You’ve probably already heard that emotional intelligence is a top factor in companies’ hiring decisions, but it plays a major role in how employers choose to promote their team members, too. This isn’t exactly news; in a 2011 Career Builder survey of more than 2,600 hiring managers and HR professionals, 71% said they valued emotional intelligence over IQ in general, and 75% said they’re typically more likely to promote an employee with high emotional intelligence and a comparatively lower IQ than one where that ratio is
flipped.
The University community has an interest in improving the happiness and well-being of graduate students for a straightforward reason: to enable graduate students to do their best work. Balanced, happy people are more productive, more creative, more collaborative, better at pursuing long-term goals, more likely to find employment, and more physically and psychologically resilient, among other things. Positive emotion is associated with curiosity, interest and synthetic thinking. In contrast, depression is associated with loss of interest, helplessness, difficulty concentrating and remembering details, and worse. For more on this, see Part VI, “The Objective Benefits of Subjective Well-Being,” from the World Happiness Report.
As sites of work-force development, community colleges must be responsive to the demands of the rapidly changing job market. Now, many community-college systems are turning to job-market data that are more up to date and more precise than ever before.
This paper replicates the work of Giles and Drewes from the 1990s.They showed a catch-up effect whereby graduates of liberal arts undergraduate programs, although at an early-career disadvantage compared with graduates of applied programs, had higher incomes by mid-career. Working with the Panel 5 Survey of Labour and Income Dynamics (2005–2010), the catch-
up no longer exists.
Wish I had a dollar for every speech intoned by corporate leaders and politicians alike about the human capital needs of the so-called “learning society” or the “knowledge economy”. Cradle to grave learning is the key to a healthier, safer, more just and prosperous future for all of us. That’s what we’re told. And it’s all true. But public policy lags well behind the Alice in Wonderland rhetoric. “Jam yesterday, jam tomorrow but never jam today,” said Alice. Even in Ontario, with a Premier so committed to education, achieving a seamless continuum of effective learning implied by the learning society vision, remains elusive.
Whether the separation is voluntary or not, losing a tenure-line or otherwise full-time faculty member is always a costly to an institution. The departing professor will take any external research grants with him or her, not to mention the sunk costs of hiring and training. Then there are additional costs that are harder to quantify, such as those to morale, mentorship, service and leadership in a department.
Responsible leadership is rare. It is not that most leaders are irresponsible, but responsibility in leadership is frequently defined so that an important connotation of responsible leadership is ignored. This article equates responsible leadership with virtuousness. Using this connotation implies that responsible leadership is based on three assumptions—eudaemonism, inherent value, and amplification. Secondarily, this connotation produces two important outcomes—a fixed point for coping with change, and benefits for constituencies who may never be affected otherwise. The meaning and advantages of responsible leadership as virtuous leadership are discussed.
Friendships can blossom naturally between scholars and students, but are they always problematic? Nina Kelly
navigates the boundaries.
Madeline Levine has been a practicing psychologist for twenty-five years, but it was only recently that she began to observe a new breed of unhappy teenager.
When a bright, personable fifteen-year-old girl, from a loving and financially comfortable family, came into her office with the word empty carved into her left forearm, Levine was startled. This girl and her message seemed to embody a disturbing pattern Levine had been observing. Her teenage patients were bright, socially skilled, and loved by their affluent parents. But behind a veneer of achievement and charm, many of these teens suffered severe emotional problems. What was going on?
Research on role congruity theory and descriptive and prescriptive stereotypes has established that when men and women violate gender stereotypes by crossing spheres, with women pursuing career success and men contributing to domestic labor, they face back- lash and economic penalties. Less is known, however, about the types of individuals who are most likely to engage in these forms of discrimination and the types of situations in which this is most likely to occur. We propose that psychological research will benefit from supplementing existing research approaches with an individual differences model of sup- port for separate spheres for men and women. This model allows psychologists to examine individual differences in support for separate spheres as they interact with situational and contextual forces. The separate spheres ideology (SSI) has existed as a cultural idea for many years but has not been operationalized or modeled in social psychology. The Sepa- rate Spheres Model presents the SSI as a new psychological construct characterized by individual differences and a motivated system-justifying function, operationalizes the ideology with a new scale measure, and models the ideology as a predictor of some important gendered outcomes in society. As a first step toward developing the Separate Spheres Model, we develop a new measure of individuals’ endorsement of the SSI and demonstrate its reliability, convergent validity, and incremental predictive validity. We provide support for the novel hypotheses that the SSI predicts attitudes regarding workplace flexibility accom- modations, income distribution within families between male and female partners, distribu- tion of labor between work and family spheres,
and discriminatory workplace behaviors.Finally, we provide experimental support for the hypothesis that the SSI is a motivated, system-justifying ideology.
Within the span of 20 years, tuition as a source of operating revenue grew from 18 percent in 1988 to 37 percent in 2008.1 The most recent financial reports show tuition alone made up 45 percent of universities’ operating budgets in 2014—51 percent
when fees are included— compared to the provincial government’s 43 percent contribution. 2 As tuition continues to increase the affordability, accessibility, and accountability of a university education is put at risk. Our Tuition policy sets out students’ priorities for addressing their short and long term concerns with regards to the tuition framework and tuition payment processes.