When Emzhei Chen moved into residence at the University of Waterloo about 10 years ago, she found the experience nerve-wracking. Her parents supported her, but her dad was a machinist who had never gone to university and her mom hadn’t finished high school, so they were as unfamiliar with universities as she was. She saw a reference to “first generation” on the application form (a term that meant your parents hadn’t attended a postsecondary education institution or had done so abroad), but she doesn’t remember checking the box. “It didn’t seem to be a pressing characteristic,” she says. “I didn’t think it was important.”
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.
According to a new survey of more than 4,000 undergraduates at 10 community colleges across the nation, half of all community college students are struggling with food and/or housing insecurity. Fully 20 percent are hungry and 13 percent are homeless. These numbers are startling and indicate the need for a multi-pronged, comprehensive set of institutional, state, and local policies to alleviate the barriers presented by poverty, so as to improve educational success.
This follow-up report, Faster, Cheaper, Smarter: Improving Efficiency at Ontario Universities, focuses on innovation through partnership. Universities continue to control costs through collaboration, shared services, and administrative efficiencies, while improving services for students and staff. The Ontario government’s Productivity and Innovation Fund (PIF) – a $45 million investment in Ontario’s postsecondary sector – was a major catalyst for collaboration that has achieved amazing results. We thank the government for this significant investment.
From pro-rape chants at St. Mary's University in Halifax to misogynistic Facebook posts by some dentistry students at Dalhousie University, sexual assault has become a contentious topic on Canadian campuses.
Over the course of six months, CBC News contacted 87 university and major colleges across Canada to request the number of sexual assaults reported on each campus to the institution between 2009 and 2013.
Here's that data, searchable by school.
Canada’s universities develop globally aware graduates with the internationally competitive skills suited to the jobs of today and tomorrow, while fostering globally connected research and scholarship. Results from a new survey by Universities Canada highlight how universities across the country are highly engaged in and committed to internationalization – and where there is room for improvement.
Learning Study is a collaborative, action-research approach to improve the effectiveness of student learning by enhancing the professional competence of teachers. This is achieved through the collaborative construction of the pedagogical content knowledge enabling them better to teach specific objects of learning. Through inquiry and authentic learning by the teachers, it takes account of students’ prior knowledge in the lesson planning and so creates an authentic learning environment for the students. This paper explains how the Learning Study approach relates to the set of approaches known as “Lesson Study” and how it incorporates the principles for high quality learning proposed by the OECD project on Innovative Learning Environments (ILE) in its design and implementation. It examines how Learning Study helps to integrate the factors comprising innovative learning environments. It analyses the critical conditions that support its development and practice in schools and in professional learning networks and education systems in general.
This paper uses the acronym “LGBTQ+” to refer to anyone who identifies as Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, Questioning, Intersex, Two-Spirit, Asexual, Pansexual, and other identities and sexualities that are not cisgender or heterosexual.
The terms “trans” and “transgender” are used interchangeably. The plus sign indicates the intention to recognize a diverse and fluid range of gender identities, gender expressions, and sexual orientations. Throughout the paper, the term “Queer” may be
used interchangeably with “LGBTQ+.”
Though the term MOGAI (Marginalized Orientations, Genders, and Intersex) has been offered as an alternative to LGBTQ+, this paper opts for the latter term because it, currently, is more widely recognizable. As language and nomenclature continue to
evolve, this terminology choice may be revisited.
As a minority group on university campuses, the unique needs of mature students can be easily
overlooked. It is important that the term “mature students” does not disguise the heterogeneity of this group: “…it
is erroneous to speak of ‘the adult learner’ as if there is a generic adult that can represent all adults.”1 However,
amongst this varied group of students, there are common concerns that they share. This policy sets out students’
priorities in increasing the visibility of mature students on campus as well as optimizing their educational
experience.
Mature students need more recognition of the different hurdles they face in achieving success. These can
include situational barriers like a lack of time, lack of money, health issues, or dependant care,2 as well as
attitudinal or dispositional barriers, including the fear of failure or alienation. Lastly, they also face systemic
barriers such as restrictive course offerings and availability of instructors or support services outside of regular
business hours.3
The focus of this paper is on the importance of early educational engagement in the retention of postsecondary students. Tinto (1975, 1987) argues that greater academic and social integration in college leads to higher rates of retention. Empirical tests of the claim have been mixed and a frequent criticism of such studies is that the variables used to construct the academic
and social integration measures are not consistent across studies, making it difficult to replicate the results of individual studies. Questions on the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE), however, offer a way around the difficulty of generalization. NSSE, administered nationally to freshmen and seniors by the Center for Postsecondary Research and Planning at Indiana University, is designed to measure student engagement. Since many of the questions about engagement are concerned with various aspects of students’ integration, by using the questions on NSSE to measure social and academic integration we hope to provide an easy and replicable way to examine the effect of integration on student retention.
OECD’s Centre for Educational Research and Innovation (CERI) has worked on Open Educational Resources (OER) in the past, which led to the publication Giving Knowledge for Free – the Emergence of Open Educational Resources (2007). This working paper thus builds on exploratory and forward-looking research in CERI and invites countries to consider the policy implications of the expansion of OER, its benefits and associated challenges.
A small OER expert group was established to discuss the subject, link it to other relevant developments in the field, and develop a draft questionnaire for member countries in order to collect information regarding the policy context related to OER. The expert group met in June 2011 and for a second time in September 2011. The questionnaire was sent to the 34 OECD member countries in August 2011. It outlined a short informative note about the benefits and challenges of OER. The responses to the questionnaire are analysed in this document.
Between 1991 and 2011, the share of young people with a university degree increased significantly, as did the share of young workers employed in professional occupations. Nevertheless, many young university degree holders could still be considered ‘overqualified’—working in occupations requiring lower levels of education. In this article, changes in the overqualification among young graduates are examined over the period from 1991 to 2011.
Paid Parental Leave LESSONS FROM OECD COUNTRIES AND SELECTED U.S. STATES
The United States is at a crossroads in its policies towards the family and gender equality. Currently America provides basic support for children, fathers, and mothers in the form of unpaid parental leave, child-related tax breaks, and limited public childcare. Alternatively, the United States’ OECD peers empower families through paid parental leave and comprehensive investments in infants and children.
Lesson planning is important for three reasons:
Thoughtful planning creates more purposeful instruction. Lesson planning is what links the curriculum to the particulars of instruction (Clark & Dunn, 1991). Thoughtful planning also helps you understand the content of the lesson, creates a logical sequence of instructional events (Freiberg & Driscoll, 1992), and links activities to instructional objectives.
During the 2014-15 academic year, 9.4 percent of all students attended more than one institution, a figure that has remained constant for the last three years. In each year shown, the mobility rate was highest for students who began the academic year at a two-year public institution. The postsecondary student one-year mobility rate is the percentage of students, across all levels of study, who enrolled in more than one institution within a single academic year (including summer and concurrent enrollments). It
provides a current indicator of the likely double-counting of institution-based annual enrollment reporting.
It’s no secret that high youth unemployment and record high debt levels mean youth in Canada are facing a difficult future. While the economy continues on a slow recovery, students and youth are being left behind through decreased program funding, ineffective employment plans, and a lack of federal strategies.
Over the last five years, high youth unemployment has been a constant challenge in the Canadian labour market. Attainment of a post-secondary education has become a prerequisite for participation in Canada’s workforce. It’s time for Canada to prioritise youth employment. We have looked abroad to find solutions, and Germany’s Dual Vocational Training System is a plan that values the work of youth and has long-term rewards for the economy and society. Publicly funded, and with no tuition fees, Germany serves as a model for us in Canada on how to build a thriving economy that values workers.
Canada needs more university, college and trades graduates. In order to compete in the new global knowledge economy, we have to equip all Canadians to achieve their potential and contribute to a prosperous Canada.
Recommendations for Documentation Standards and Guidelines for Post-Secondary Students with Mental Health Disabilities
A project funded by the Ontario Ministry of Training, Colleges and Universities' Mental Health Innovation Fund
With the ever-increasing availability of online education opportunities, understanding the factors that influence online student satisfaction and success is vital to enable administrators to engage and retain this important stakeholder group. The purpose of this ex-post-facto, nonexperimental quantitative study was to investigate the impact of faculty professional development, faculty degree status, and faculty longevity upon online student satisfaction and success. A large, archived dataset from an online public
state university was analyzed. Repeated measures Hierarchical Linear Modeling (HLM) analysis was used to explore changes in student satisfaction over time. Results showed that both training and degree were not significant predictors of student satisfaction. On the contrary, faculty longevity was found to be a predictor of student satisfaction. Recommendations for future research include incorporating qualitative analysis and expanding the study to diverse institutional types to determine whether findings are consistent.
At the heart of Concordia University’s mission and tradition is respect for every member of its community. The university is committed to equality, dignity, and the building and maintaining of a healthy, safe and respectful environment.
Behaviours commonly associated with rape culture, such as victim blaming, normalizing sexual objectification and violence, are absolutely unacceptable in the Concordia community. As such, sexual violence violates our institutional values, in particular the rights of individuals in our university community to be treated with dignity and respect.
Concordia has taken many important steps to creating a safe environment. It was the first university in Canada to create the position of sexual harassment advisor in 1987 and one of the first to adopt a policy on sexual harassment in the early 1990s. It was also among the first Canadian universities to create an Ombuds Office in the 1970s. In 2013, the university launched the Sexual Assault Resource Centre (SARC) to inform the campus community about consent and prevention, and to provide
survivor support.