Altnough competency-based education may seem relative new to postsecondary education, the concept has been widely discussed throughout American education since 1990s.
This Signature Report focuses on the six-year outcomes for students who began postsecondary education in fall 2009. These students were part of the surge of increased enrollments that accompanied the Great Recession, arriving on campus at a time when institutions were already dealing with reduced public budget support (Barr & Turner, 2013; Mangan, 2009). One result was that institutions were forced to increase tuition just as students and their families found themselves with diminished financial resources, leading to questions about growing levels of student debt and whether this might affect rates of degree completion (Long, 2013).
Leadership models of the last century have been products of top-down, bureaucratic paradigms. These models are eminently effective for an economy premised on physical production but are not well-suited for a more knowledge-oriented economy. Complexity science suggests a different paradigm for leadership—one that frames leadership as a complex interactive dynamic from which adaptive outcomes (e.g., learning, innovation, and adaptability) emerge. This article draws from complexity science to develop an overarching framework for the study of Complexity Leadership Theory, a leadership paradigm that focuses on enabling the learning, creative, and adaptive capacity of complex adaptive systems (CAS) within a context of knowledge-producing organizations. This conceptual framework includes three entangled leadership roles (i.e., adaptive leadership, administrative leadership, and enabling leadership) that reflect a dynamic relationship between the bureaucratic, administrative functions of the organization and the emergent, informal dynamics of complex adaptive systems (CAS).
Keywords: leadership, complexity theory, complex adaptive systems (CAS), Knowledge Era, creativity, adaptive organizations, bureaucracy
So much of what determines the overall success or failure of a course takes place well in advance of the first day of class. It’s the thoughtful contemplation of your vision for the course— from what you want your students to learn, to selecting the instructional activities, assign-ments, and materials that will fuel that learning, to determining how you will measure learning outcomes.
To meet the challenges currently facing it—chief among them, to remain viable in an era when traditional sources of funding such as state funding and tuition are decreasing or reaching their market limits—higher education depends on its leaders’ capacities to deal with current challenges, envision change, and make that change happen. In March 2012, the TIAA-CREF Institute hosted a summit on leadership and governance to explore what it will take to steer higher education through this new landscape.
This paper explores how community service-learning (CSL) participants negotiate competing institutional logics in Canadian higher education. Drawing theoretically from new institutionalism and work on institutional logics, we consider how CSL has developed in Canadian universities and how participants discuss CSL in relation to other dominant institutional logics in higher education. Our analysis suggests participants’ responses to competing community, professional, and market logics vary depending on their positions within the field. We see actors’ use of hybrid logics to validate communityengaged learning as the strategy most likely to effect change in the field.
Nature of Leadership
Effective leadership is a key factor in the life and success of an organization
Leadership transforms potential into reality.
Leadership is the ultimate act which brings to success all of the potent potential that is in an organization and
its people.
Leaders propose new paradigms when old ones lose their effectiveness.
This report on international undergraduate students is part of a series commissioned by the UK Higher Education International Unit to systematically examine the UK’s market position with respect to international student recruitment and the international student experience. It complements two companion reports that look at the UK’s competitive advantage concerning international taught postgraduate students and international postgraduate research students.
Developing leaders is an especially daunting task for higher education institutions. Like individuals working in professional service firms, academicsx are often ambivalent about assuming leadership roles. Their professional idenity and sense of satisfaction from work are derived pricipally from their professional expertise and accomplishments. They are not recruited for their leadership potential, but rather are selected andrewarded for their research, course development, and/or teaching.
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.
Diversifying the professoriate has long been a priority on many campuses, and such goals have only grown more urgent in light of recent national and local discussions about race. Yet college and university faculties have become just slightly more diverse in the last 20 years, according to a new study from the TIAA Institute. Most importantly, as faculty jobs have become more stratified with the growth of non-tenure-track positions over the same period, most gains for underrepresented minority groups have been in the most precarious positions. That is, not on the tenure track.
The development of outcomes-based educational (OBE) practices represents one important way in which a learning outcomes approach to teaching and learning can be applied in the postsecondary sector. This study adopts a multiple case study design and profiles seven OBE initiatives being implemented in Ontario’s colleges and universities to better understand the scope of outcomes-based educational practices in the province’s postsecondary sector. ‘OBE initiatives’ are defined as purposeful
actions undertaken by postsecondary providers directed at defining, teaching toward and assessing learning outcomes in their
educational practice (modified from Jones, Voorhees & Paulson, 2002).
IQ tests and achievement tests do not capture non-cognitive skills — personality traits, goals, character and motivations that are valued in the labour market, in school and elsewhere. For many outcomes, their predictive power rivals or exceeds that of cognitive skills. Skills are stable across situations with different incentives. Skills are not immutable over the life cycle. While they have a genetic basis they are also shaped by environments, including families, schools and peers. Skill development is a dynamic process. The early years are important in shaping all skills and in laying the foundations for successful investment and intervention in the later years. During the early years, both cognitive and non-cognitive skills are highly malleable. During the adolescent years, non-cognitive skills are more malleable than cognitive skills. The differential
plasticity of different skills by age has important implications for the design of effective policies.
The Ontario Undergraduate Student Alliance is pleased to be presenting our first issue of “Habitats,” a series of case studies researched and written by Ontario university students. Municipal affairs are an important part of the student experience, affecting everything from how students live during their time at school, to how they get to class, to how they interact with their broader community environment. Such topics are always of great interest to students, and OUSA’s members have been eager to explore them in-depth. However, their very nature as local issues can make them difficult to examine in a broader context.
Why We Need to Act
One in five women is sexually assaulted in college. Most often, it’s by someone she knows – and also most often, she does not report what happened. Many survivors are left feeling isolated, ashamed or to blame. Although it happens less often, men, too, are victims of these crimes.
The President created the Task Force to Protect Students From Sexual Assault to turn this tide. As the name of our new website – Not Alone.gov – indicates, we are here to tell sexual assault survivors that they are not alone. And we’re also here to help schools live up to their obligation to protect students from sexual violence.
Enrolments in graduate programs in Ontario and across Canada have grown substantially over the past 15 years. This growth has been supported and encouraged by strategic investments from provincial and federal governments. Although it has been argued that an increase in the number of Canadians with master’s- or PhD-level education is needed to support increased innovation and economic advancement, there is a growing view that many recent master’s and doctoral graduates are unemployed or underemployed. The current lack of evidence regarding the employment outcomes of master’s and doctoral graduates makes it difficult to evaluate the extent to which this might actually be the case. Several reports have highlighted the need for universities to document and report on the employment outcomes of master’s and doctoral graduates.
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.
One of the most maddening things about contemporary book publishing is the niche that a new book is supposed to occupy. This niche is not an abstraction: it corresponds to the actual place where a book will land in the bookstore. Consider, then, an analytical book about contemporary parents: is it a parenting book, which will then end up next to the how-to book on toilet training? Maybe. But if the book doesn’t offer advice, some would say it doesn’t belong there. Then does it belong on the “sociology” shelf, where no parent will find it?
Based on recent public opinion polling commissioned by the Ontario Undergraduate Student Alliance (OUSA), an
overwhelming majority of Ontarians (79 per cent) agreed that students and their families have to borrow too much money
to pay for their education. When asked to rank (on a scale of to 5) how important a university degree was to finding a good
job, 53 per cent of those surveyed selected 4 or 5, indicating that a degree was ‘important’ or ‘very important’. Only 11 per
cent of the respondents ranked a degree as ‘unimportant’ or ‘very unimportant’ to securing a good job. Finally, nearly half
of Ontarians indicated that they would be willing to pay more taxes to decrease student costs and increase student financial
assistance.
For college and university presidents, the process of apologizing after high-profile missteps can seem to take as long as a tortoise walking a mile.
As a result, the actions Wednesday of University of California, Irvine, Chancellor Howard Gillman stand out as noteworthy. Days after news broke that the university revoked admission offers from 499 students, Chancellor Howard Gillman issued a public statement offering a personal apology. The university would admit all accepted students except for those who dropped below its academic standards, he said.
The relative speed and decisiveness with which Gillman acted raise the question of why more university presidents don’t step in so swiftly. Higher education’s recent history is littered with instances of leaders who seemingly hesitated to offer forceful apologies. Instead of pleasing the public by uttering two little words and a promise to fix
things, such presidents have been seen as incompetent, stonewalling or hemming and hawing.