In Canada, the term “visible minority” is used to define one of four designated groups under the Employment Equity Act. The purpose of the act is to achieve workplace equality and to correct employment disadvantages affecting women, Aboriginal peoples, people with disabilities, and visible minorities. Within this context, visible minorities are defined as “persons, other than Aboriginal peoples, who are non-Caucasian in race or non-white in colour.”
Student ratings of teaching have been used, studied, and debated for almost a century. This article examines student ratings of teaching from a statistical perspective. The common practice of relying on averages of student teaching evaluation scores as the primary measure of teaching effectiveness for promotion and tenure decisions should be abandoned for substantive
and statistical reasons: There is strong evidence that student responses to questions of “effectiveness” do not measure teaching effectiveness. Response rates and response variability matter. And comparing averages of categorical responses, even if the categories are represented by numbers, makes little sense. Student ratings of teaching are valuable when they ask the right questions, report response rates and score distributions, and are balanced by a variety of other sources and methods
to evaluate teaching.
Are books a condition of our labour? Do we need libraries with stacks and physical collections? Recent discussions within libraries across the country have highlighted faculty anxiety and displeasure with the fate of university libraries, as cuts are made to purchasing and operating budgets, collections culled, and the very nature of acquisitions transformed by changes in the
methods of conducting and disseminating our research. Are libraries not an intrinsic part of our working conditions? How can we teach a student about the history of slavery, for example, if they do not have access to a wide range of interpretive sources that reflect changes in the writing of history over time? How can we encourage students to seek out many different kinds of evidence and to ask new and innovative questions, if libraries do not offer a variety of materials from a variety of different time periods? How can we encourage students to be venturesome and curious if they can no longer browse shelves? Those of us at smaller institutions long ago gave up the idea of having a ‘research’ library, but we do need very basic book collections, as well as collections of government documents and other sources that have not been digitized and, in fact, may never be. Without these, our teaching will be impoverished and our students’ learning will too.
Post-secondary education is a cornerstone of Ontario’s continued prosperity. The Ontario government realizes this and confirmed its commitment to expanding post-secondary education in the 2010, 2011 and 2012 provincial budgets. The government announced funding allocations in all three budgets to support enrolment growth in the post-secondary sector. The 2011 budget committed the province to creating 60,000 more spaces in colleges and universities.
Media and policy commentary have focused lately on Canadian employers’ apparent inability to find employees with the desired labour market skills. To explore this issue further, HEQCO reviewed and summarized the current discourse surrounding a “skills gap” in The Great Skills Divide: A Review of the Literature and conducted an analysis of Canadian job advertisements geared toward recent postsecondary graduates in Bridging the Divide, Part I: What Canadian Job Ads Said. In the latter publication, 316 job advertisements for entry-level positions requiring postsecondary education were examined to ascertain the education credentials, work experience and essential skills employers were seeking. To follow-up on Bridging the Divide, Part I, the current report analyzes survey responses from 103 employers that posted job advertisements included in the preceding study. In particular, employers were asked if they had filled the advertised position or, if not, the reasons for being unable to find someone to hire. Those employers that had filled the position were also asked about the successful candidates’ qualifications and performance on the job so far.
By the 1930's the federal government had come to the internal conclusion that iling to meet its goals. In 1936, R. A. Hoey,
ted as Indian Affairs’ an assessment of the residential schools. He noted that in 1935–36, spending on residen- tial
schools was $1,511,153.76. This amounted to 77.8% of the entire Indian Affairs edu- cation budget of $1,943,645. Enrolment was increasing at a rate of 250 pupils a year. To provide these students with residential school schooling would require an additional expenditure of $40,000 a year—a figure that did not include the cost of building new schools or paying interest on the capital outlay. However, day school education for an additional 250 students would cost only $7,000 a year. Not surprisingly, he opposed any further expansion of the residential school system, observing, “To continue to build educational institutions, particularly residential schools, while the money at our disposal is insufficient to keep the schools already erected in a proper state of repair, is, to me, very unsound and a practice difficult to justify.”
The pressure is on Canadian universities for a scandal-free year after a string of high-profile sexual assault cases and orientation week faux pas over the past academic year spotlighted what some say is a pervasive campus rape culture.
"Things don't change overnight. It's a slow progress," said Bianca Tétrault, officially McGill University's new "liaison officer (harm reduction)" and informally the person tasked with combating sexual assault on campus. "But that doesn't mean we should be deterred from it or that we should stop."
Over the past decade or so, the bachelor’s degree has undergone major changes in much of the world. The most important set of changes was brought on by the adoption, across Europe, of the Bologna Process. This led not only to the introduction of bachelor’s degrees in countries where no such qualification had previously existed, but also to a pan-continental harmonization (more or less) of the length of the degree, at three years. More recently, a number of universities in the United States – where a four-year degree has been sacrosanct for decades – have started experimenting with shorter degrees. At the same time that systems have been altering the length of degrees, there has also been a trend for systems in Europe and elsewhere – including Ontario and other parts of Canada – to open up degree provision to non-university Higher Education Institutions (HEIs). This has broken the centuries-long monopoly of universities over the provision of granting degrees. These two major experiments in changing times and changing places are the subject of this report, which was undertaken by Higher Education Strategy Associates for the Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario (HEQCO).
Contract academic faculty make an enormous contribution to postsecondary institutions: in teaching, in research, and in administrative service. And yet they inhabit an uncertain, and sometimes perilous, space within the Canadian university system. For the most part, they lack job security. Their salaries are usually low. Many receive few, or no, health benefits. Most have no access to a pension plan. Full-time contract faculty teach more students, and over longer hours, than do their tenured and tenure-track colleagues: this can create challenges in staying current with changes in their disciplines and staying competitive in the narrowing job market. Many contract academic faculty report lack of access to meaningful decision-making within their Departments. Many perceive themselves to be unprotected by the basic protocols of academic freedom. The Association of Canadian College and University Teachers of English (ACCUTE) seeks the support of our association members, our fellow scholarly associations, and Canadian English Departments in establishing more equitable, humane and respectful working conditions for Canada’s contract faculty professionals.
Listening: An Introduction
There seems to be a growing realization of the importance of solid listening and communication skills. After all, lack of attention and respectful listening can be costly ‐ leading to mistakes, poor service, misaligned goals, wasted time and lack of teamwork.
Background/Context: Very little empirical research has been conducted on the issue of educator sexual misconduct (ESM) in secondary settings. The few reports available typically treat a larger social issue, such as sexual harassment or child abuse; therefore, data on ESM specifically must be extrapolated. When such data are obtained, the focus has been on rates of incidence rather than the nature of the problem. Feminist scholars have theorized embodiment in education and debated whether and to what extent an eroticized pedagogy is desirable, but scant attention has been paid to how and why erotic pedagogy can go awry.
Audio, visual, textual—most people are willing and eager to identify themselves as a certain type of learner. And it follows pretty quickly that they learn better and faster when teachers approach a lesson in their “style.” Based on that logic, many school districts have poured money into training and materials to help teachers tailor their lessons to the various learning styles of their students. But haste makes waste, write Harold Pashler of the University of California, San Diego; Mark McDaniel of Washing-ton University, St. Louis; Doug Rohrer of the University of South Florida; and Robert A. Bjork of the University of California, Los Ange-les. There just isn’t sufficient evidence to support customizing education in this way.
Graduates themselves are often unsure of where to look for opportunities outside academe.
This report presents the results of research into the use of collaborative, multiple-choice format question-writing activities as a supplement to standard peer instruction (PI) methods in a large introductory physics course.
This study examines 143 graduate assignments across 12 faculties or schools in a Canadian university in order to identify types of writing tasks. Based on the descriptions provided by the instructors, we identified nine types of assignments,
with scholarly essay being the most common, followed by summary and response, literature review, project, review, case analysis, proposal, exam, and creative writing. Many assignments are instructor-controlled and have specific content requirements. Some are also process-oriented, providing students with teacher or peer feedback on outlines or initial drafts, suggestions for topic choices, and examples of good writing. With an overview of the types of writing tasks across campus, the study has implications for English for Academic Purposes (EAP) or graduate writing program designers,
material developers, educators working within and across disciplines, and researchers interested in the types of university writing assignments in Canada.
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 series of reports explores new forms of teaching, learning and assessment for an interactive world, to guide teachers and policy makers in productive innovation. This fourth report proposes ten innovations that are already in currency and are having an increasing effect on education. To produce it, a group of academics at the Institute of Educational Technology in The Open University collaborated with researchers from the Center for Technology in Learning at SRI International. We proposed a long list
of new educational terms, theories, and practices. We then pared these down to ten that have the potential to provoke major shifts in educational practice, particularly in post-school education. Lastly, we drew on published and unpublished writings
to compile the ten sketches of new pedagogies that might transform education. These are summarised below in an approximate order of immediacy and timescale to widespread implementation.
A PhD is a prerequisite for an academic career, but fewer than 20 per cent of Canada’s PhDs are employed as full-time university professors. The majority of PhDs are employed in a wide range of rewarding careers outside academia. This report examines the employment opportunities and outcomes of PhD holders. It characterizes the challenges some PhD graduates face when transitioning to careers beyond academia, as well as the state of demand for PhDs among Canada’s employers. The valuable contributions PhDs make in a wide range of careers are highlighted. The report examines the status of professional skills development for PhD students and presents innovative examples of professional development initiatives in Canada and peer countries.
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.
According to Beghetto, there are three major perspectives for including creativity in the classroom. The first is the “radical change” view that requires entirely rethinking the goals of the K–12 curriculum and the ways in which teachers teach. The second approach, the “additive change,” incorporates “extra” or “new” creativity activities to the current curriculum. Finally,
the third perspective, which the author argues for and illustrates in this book, is the “slight change” one. More specifically, the goal of the book is to show that teachers do not have to make radical changes in their present academic responsibilities to incorporate creativity in their classrooms; instead, “teachers [can] develop an understanding of the role of creativity in the
classroom, common challenges that get in the way of including creativity in one’s classroom, and practical insights for addressing those challenges in the context of one’s everyday teaching” (p. xii).