The rise of online and hybrid courses at the higher education level increases the need for distance
learning infrastructures to nourish online faculty preparedness and student online learning success. One part of the distance learning infrastructure is incorporating the use of educated and trained instructional designers to assist faculty in developing robust and quality online courses. Developing online courses with an instructional designer is a very laborious process, but the results can outweigh the struggles that facultyexplain what is involved in an established six-step course development model for developing, reviewing, and delivering a quality online course.
This document contains the appendices to CAAT baccalaureates: What has been their impact on students and colleges?
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada’s “Missing Children and Unmarked Burials Project” is a systematic effort to record and analyze the deaths at the schools, and the presence and condition of student cemeteries, within the regulatory context in which the schools were intended to operate. The proj-ect’s research supports the following conclusions:
• The Commission has identified 3,200 deaths on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s Register of Confirmed Deaths of Named Residential School Students and the Register of Confirmed Deaths of Unnamed Residential School Students.
• For just under one-third of these deaths (32%), the government and the schools did not record the name of the student who died.
• For just under one-quarter of these deaths (23%), the government and the schools did not record the gender of the student who died.
• For just under one-half of these deaths (49%), the government and the schools did not record the cause of death.
• Aboriginal children in residential schools died at a far higher rate than school-aged children in the general population.
• For most of the history of the schools, the practice was not to send the bodies of students who died at schools to their home communities.
• For the most part, the cemeteries that the Commission documented are aban-doned, disused, and vulnerable to accidental disturbance.
• The federal government never established an adequate set of standards and reg-ulations to guarantee the health and safety of residential school students.
• The federal government never adequately enforced the minimal standards and regulations that it did establish.
• The failure to establish and enforce adequate regulations was largely a function of the government’s determination to keep residential school costs to a minimum.
This article examines the career and college advice that high school counselors and vocational teachers give to the “forgotten half,” students who are unlikely to seek a 4-year college degree. Using interview data from 12 Midwestern high schools, we found that most counselors tend to encourage all students to attend college, regardless of the students’ interests or plans. Vocational teachers, on the other hand, showed evidence of a more nuanced view of the need for college. We found that vocational teachers in our sample fit in to four broad categories in terms of their advice and opinions about college: the college-for-all advocates, who push college regardless of circumstances; the diplomats, who try subtly to tell students that their plans are unrealistic; the straightforward, who try to make sure that students have realistic information; and the hands-off, who disavow any role in helping students make future plans. After an examination of these approaches, we conclude with a discus-sion of the implications of the various approaches for guiding students’ choices.
Evelyn Christner has a job — actually, four jobs — with low pay, negligible sick time, no vacation or health insurance, no retirement plan, no guarantee of work and zero long-term job security. Christner doesn't serve french fries or run the cash register at a convenience store; she teaches anthropology and sociology to college students.
Part-time adjuncts like her, who freelance without the benefits of tenure or even regular employment, make up the majority of college instructors in the U.S. Tight budgets are pushing colleges and universities to rely increasingly on adjuncts (sometimes called associate or contingent faculty members), but their lives often are a far cry from the ivory-tower image of traditional academe.
This paper explores the potential of cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT), to provide new insights into community service-learning (CSL) in higher education. While CSL literature acknowledges the influences of John Dewey and Paolo Freire, discussion of the potential contribution of cultural-historical activity theory, rooted in the work of Russian psychologist
Lev Vygotsky, is noticeably absent. This paper addresses this gap by examining four assumptions
associated with activity theory: the rejection of a theory/practice divide, the development of
knowledge as a social collaborative activity, the focus on contradictions in and across activity
systems, and the interventionist approach
aimed at transformation.
This purpose of this article is to introduce others to a successful, innovative, self-funding model of entrepreneurship education through a collaborative effort among seven universities and colleges in Northeast Ohio. Ashland University, Baldwin-Wallace College, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland State University, John Carroll University, Kent State University, and The University of Akron created a new 501(c) (3) non-profit corporation called the Entrepreneurship Education Consortium (EEC) http://www.eecneohio.com/acorn.php?page=home to stimulate
entrepreneurial activity within the region.
This report presents the findings of a one-year study of the creation and implementation of a new Français course at the University of Ottawa, offered as a pilot project in 2012-2013. The course was created at the request of francophone first-year students from regions of Canada where the French language is in a minority context. These students reported experiencing difficulty in bridging the gap between the literacy skills they acquired in secondary school and the academic literacy skills
required of them to succeed in the mandatory foundational French courses (FRA courses) and other courses taught in French (Lamoureux et al., 2013).
With the rise in online and hybrid courses at the post-secondary level, many institutions are offering various online learning readiness assessments to students who are considering these instructional formats. Following a discussion of the characteristics often attributed to successful online learners, as well as a review of a sample of the publicly available online readiness surveys, an application of one representative tool is described. Specifically, the Distance Education Aptitude and Readiness Scale was administered in both hybrid and face-to-face sections of beginning post-secondary French across a two-year span. Differences in scores between groups, as well as the relationship between scores and grades are examined.
Abstract
Informal mid-term feedback processes create opportunities for students and academics to have a dialogue about their progress and to make any necessary or reasonable mid-stream corrections. This article reports on an action research project designed to see what impact mid-semester feedback might have on the classroom experience. The underlying motive for the study was to generate institution-specific “proof” which might encourage other academic staff to conduct informal mid-semester informal feedback exercises with their students.
End-of-semester data shows that both students and lecturers found the exercise to be a positive
experience. Students appreciated being able to voice their problems and opinions at a time when
mid-course corrections were possible. Lecturers felt there was an improvement in
the lines of communication, resulting in a friendlier teaching and learning environment.
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 ar- ticle 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.
In preparing students for employment in commerce, the student needs to be aware of many aspects not necessarily included in business programs. In recognizing students often have no or limited exposure to foreign envi- ronments, the authors developed an electronic exchange between students in Canada and Kazakhstan. In this exchange, students not only learned about foreign marketplaces but were able to integrate classroom teachings and text knowledge into their actions. This approach
resulted in enhanced learning for students through double-loop porcesses and development in their other courses.
The purpose of this descriptive quantitative study was to examine the quality elements of online learning in a regional doctoral
program. Utilizing the six quality dimensions of Hathaway’s (2009) theory of online learning quality as a framework, the study
investigated instructor-learner, learner-learner, learner-content, learner-interface, learner-instructional strategies, and social
presence in order to explore the frequency and importance of these elements. A likert-style survey administered through Qualtrics was used to report self-perceptions of the doctoral students and faculty members. Descriptive statistics for the survey and subscales indicated alignment with the review of literature. Course design, instructor’s facilitation, and student interaction were factors impacting learning outcomes (Eom, Wen, & Ashill, 2006). Faculty participation was also found to dramatically improve the performance and satisfaction of students (Arbaugh & Rau, 2007; Hrastinski, 2009). Resultantly, five conclusions emerged from
the study. First doctoral students and faculty valued the frequency of corporate interaction, clear prompt feedback, and multiple
opportunities to learn and demonstrate learning. Secondly, instructor to learner interaction has to be an intentional practice. Third, the inclusion of learning technologies is necessary for building relationships, making connections and giving credibility to the learning environment. The fourth conclusion revealed that students were more concerned with the quality of assignments than faculty; and finally, faculty responses to students’ discussions is an area for improvement in the online program.
This qualitative research project explored the experiences of women who jug- gle the demands of family or parenthood while engaging in academic careers at a faculty of education. The researcher-participants consisted of 11 women; 9 women provided a written narrative, and all women participated in the data analysis. The data consisted of the personal, reflective narratives of 9
women who participated in a faculty writing group. Analysis of narratives uncovered 5 themes common to the researchers and participants in this study: gender- specific experiences surrounding parenting, second-career academics, pres- sure surrounding academic work, human costs, and commitment to work and family. Implications of the findings are discussed with particular emphasis on how a faculty writing group framed by a relational model of interaction can be used to support
untenured faculty who experience difficulty balancing the demands of family and academia.
As Canadian universities seek to attract more international students, there is a need to recognize and respond to the diversity within this group and to question the binary categories of domestic students and international stu- dents. Relying primarily on 116 qualitative interviews with international undergraduates at the University of British Columbia, we utilize American students as a case study from which to explore the complex and blurred boundaries between these two categories. Americans resemble domestic stu- dents in some respects and international students in others, yet they are often less prepared to meet adaptational challenges because they have low expecta- tions of cultural and institutional differences. We compare the experiences of
Americans and international students from other countries, as well as other groups of students who fall between the cracks of the domestic and inter- national student classifications. We argue that, by targeting services on the basis of these broad administrative categories, categories that were created for financial purposes, the university reduces the take-up of the very services students need.
One of the commitments emerging from the Canadian Education Association’s What’s Standing in the Way of Change in Education? workshop in Calgary in October 2013 was to convene a series of Regional Workshops designed to expand
the conversation about change in Canada’s education systems. To this end, in the Spring of 2014, similar workshops were held in New Brunswick, Manitoba, Ontario and British Columbia with a final session held in Quebec in August, 2014.
What is on the five-year horizon for higher education institutions? Which trends and technologies will drive educational change? What are the challenges that we consider as solvable or difficult to overcome, and how can we strategize effective solutions? These questions and similar inquiries regarding technology adoption and educational change steered the collaborative research and discussions of a body of 56 experts to produce the NMC Horizon Report: 2015 Higher Education Edition, in partnership with the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI). The NMC Horizon Report series charts the five-year horizon for the impact of emerging technologies in learning communities across the globe. With more than 13 years of research and publications, it can be regarded as the world’s longest-running exploration of emerging technology trends and uptake in education.
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.
The following exercise will ask you 50 questions about your leadership style, and then give you an idea of your typical styles.
If you are still a student you might like to answer the questions as you would if you were a manager in an rganisation, rather than the way you would if, for example, you were president of a student society where the leadership style is more casual than that in most work environments.
Education has lost its soul. The idealism of the 70s was crushed upon the rocks of the back-to-the-basics movement of the 80s. In today’s hyper-testing environment, there is little room for real learning, creativity, innovation, passion, and curiosity. Today, education today is more about what we do to students than what students do. Adopting a humanistic approach to education is one way to find our way back.