Currently, there is great interest across Ontario in the expansion of pathway programs between colleges and universities. Through strategic partnerships, two Ontario-based postsecondary institutions (a college and a university) have developed innovative and effective pathway programs that facilitate the transition of students between institutions for the completion of degrees, diplomas, and certificates. These programs support the training of highly qualified, market-ready graduates. This paper reports on a mixed-methods study of the successes and challenges of a particular Ontario college and university
pathway program, with a focus on the Bachelor of Commerce Pathway program. Preliminary results indicate that pathway students were more academically successful than their traditional university student counterparts but did experience a number of challenges in transitioning from college into university. Principal challenges included inefficient communication between
program administrators, academic advisors, and students; lack of orientation activities for pathway students; lack of college student preparedness in communication and critical thinking skills; and difficulties experienced by college
students integrating into the social–cultural life of the university.
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).
This story is featured in our 2016 Canadian Universities Guidebook, available on newsstands now. Pick up a copy of the guidebook for full profiles of 80 universities, insider reports written by current students on where to eat, study, and party, and the latest data including the grades needed to get into the school of your dreams and our definitive university rankings.
Information, it’s often said, is power. Yet when high school students are faced with one of the most important decisions of their lives—whether to attend college or university, and which course of study to take, in a sense they’re flying blind. “They’re going on anecdotal information,” says
Ross Finnie, a professor in the graduate school of public and international affairs at the University of Ottawa. That’s because there’s very little good data on how students perform in the labour market once they graduate, making it harder to “shop around” for a diploma or degree that will lead to a great job at the end. With a new initiative, Finnie hopes to change that.
Key stakeholders all across higher education -- including boards, policy makers, administrators at all levels, faculty of all types, disciplinary societies, and unions -- increasingly have one. It's time to make it a reality, argues Adrianna Kezar.
This note demonstrates how life tables can be adapted from demography to studies of teachers’ careers. We provide an example using data from the Schools and Staffing Survey to compare teachers across rural, urban, and suburban locales. Using life tables, we estimate both retention rates and how long we expect teachers to remain at their school depending on their level of experience and find no difference across locales. This methodology could be applied to predict future school staffing needs.
If any part of the university should understand leadership, it would be the business school. Not only do the faculty research leadership, they also impart this knowledge to undergraduate and graduate students, as well as participants from across the globe in a variety of executive education programmes.
Scrutiny: students’ attention to performance measures ‘plays to the UK’s strengths’
Chinese students have an increasingly “open attitude” when applying to university, with many now focusing on institutions’ teaching quality and student satisfaction scores, according to the director of the British Council in China.
Carma Elliot said that there had “traditionally been a strong preference among Chinese students for ‘elite’institutions, but there was now a more open attitude to the widest range of options available”.
This document describes the development of analytic rubrics for competency assessment project. The purpose of this report is to describe the process of developing a set of general analytic rubrics to assess competencies in design, communication and teamwork, and a set of outcomes and indicators to assess problem analysis and investigation.
The work to develop the rubrics was structured into three main phases. In the first or planning phase, a review of the literature was carried out to create a comprehensive list of learning outcomes in the five competency areas under investigation. A list of more specific, measureable learning outcomes, called indicators, was also compiled. The resulting comprehensive list of learning outcomes and indicators was distilled by removing redundancy between the systems, filling content gaps, and grouping indicators into common learning outcome categories.
Teacher empowerment requires investing in teachers' right to participate in the determination of school goals and policies and the right to exercise professional judgment about the content of the curriculum and means of instruction. Implications of this conception and the kind of school leadership it requires are discussed. (Source:ERIC)
Two central questions should arise for anyone who attends to the rhetoric of empowerment that is being used in current discussions of improvement of teaching as a profession: (1) What is teacher empowerment? and (2) Toward what ends are teachers to be empowered? Discussions of teacher empowerment have proceeded as if all of those who use the term were in agreement, when even a cursory review of what has been written on the subject reveals that this is clearly not the case. In the literal sense, to ize or license. It is also to impart or bestow power to an end or for a purpose. An obsolete definition ng back into the history of the word, is to gain power or assume power over.1
ize or license. It is al ng back into the history of the word, is to gain power or assume power over.
A look at some UCASS data from 1970 to 2016.
Last year, Statistics Canada released University and College Academic Staff System survey data for the first time in five years. (The survey had been scrapped in 2012 and revived in 2016.) This data on full-time faculty at 112 universities and colleges offers an important snapshot of Canada’s professoriate (read more about the latest results here).
The UCASS survey goes back to 1937, but 1970 is the earliest date for a continuous time series.U niversity Affairs took a closer look at this data, starting from 1970, and the resulting six charts tell a partial history of Canada’s full-time faculty over nearly five decades (no data was available from 2011 to 2015 while UCASS was on hiatus).
Francophone students represent a unique population within Ontario, and understanding their educational experience is an important factor for developing policies and programs that contribute to their development, both as individual learners and with respect to the linguistic, cultural and economic vitality of the broader francophone community. Over the past few decades, postsecondary education (PSE) has increasingly become a focal point for all Canadians, with research linking length of schooling and levels of education to engagement in the workplace, career stability, occupational status, wealth, stronger social ties, and better psychological and physical health (Pallas, 2000). More recently, federal and provincial governments have linked the strength of the Canadian economy to the expansion of postsecondary enrolment (Industry Canada, 2001; Rae, 2005).
Bloom's Taxonomy was created in 1956 under the leadership of educational psychologist Dr Benjamin Bloom in order to promote higher forms of thinking in education, such as analyzing and evaluating concepts, processes, procedures, and principles, rather than just remembering facts (rote learning). It is most often used when designing educational, training, and learning processes.
Abstract Since the 1990s, enrolment in postgraduate programs has increased significantly in Canada. In more recent years, this has led to concerns regarding overproduction and the labour market outcomes of those with postgraduate education. Women have played an important role in this growth, but questions remain as to whether women’s progress into the highest levels of education has helped ameliorate their wage disadvantage relative to men. Using the 2011 National Household Survey, this study finds large wage premiums for completing master’s and doctoral degrees for both men and women, especially in younger cohorts; however, there are important differences by field of study. The gender wage gap is smaller for women with master’s degrees than for those with bachelor or doctoral degrees. Occupational differences account for more of the gender wage gap than field of study, suggesting that after degree completion, university-educated women sort into occupations that are lower paid than their male counterparts’.
Résumé Depuis les années 90, les inscriptions aux programmes de deuxième et de troisième cycles universitaires ont augmenté de façon importante au Canada. Récemment, des inquiétudes ont été exprimées quant à la surproduction de diplômés et à ses conséquences sur le marché du travail. Bien que les femmes aient occupé un rôle important dans l’augmentation de ces inscriptions, il est encore impossible de savoir si l’avancement de celles-ci vers les niveaux académiques les plus élevés a contribué à l’amélioration de leurs conditions salariales, par rapport à celles des hommes. À l’aide de l’Enquête nationale auprès des ménages 2011, la présente étude conclut que les salaires des femmes, tout comme ceux des hommes, sont bonifiés après l’obtention d’une maîtrise ou d’un doctorat, surtout chez les cohortes plus jeunes. Par contre, d’importantes variations existent en fonction du domaine d’étude. Pour les femmes possédant une maîtrise, l’écart salarial entre sexes est moindre que pour les femmes possédant un baccalauréat ou un doctorat. L’écart salarial est davantage dû aux variantes sur le plan professionnel que celles des domaines d’étude, postulant donc qu’après avoir obtenu un diplôme universitaire, les femmes se lancent vers des professions moins rémunérées que ne le sont celles de leurs homologues masculins.
This is a time of change in higher education in Canada.
David Agnew, former Cabinet Secretary for the Government of Ontario, current President of Seneca College, and Chair of Colleges Ontario, drew attention to the changes occurring in Ontario in a speech to the Canadian Club in October 20151. Some of the changes occurring in Ontario and across Canada increase access to, and success in, higher education for many who would otherwise not have been able to go to college or university. Other changes are not so positive, as Agnew also
observed. Some colleges and universities are struggling to survive while others appear to be thriving. Understanding the current and future dynamics of the higher education system is important, especially for those leading the system or developing the policies which guide it.
Background:
In this paper we call for studying school leadership and its relationship to instruction and learning through approaches that highlight the role of configurations of multiple organizational supports. A configuration-focused approach to studying leadership and other essential supports provides a valuable addition to existing tools in school organizational analysis and is particularly useful in examining equifinality and causal asymmetry. Equifinality is the idea that more than one pathway can result in a desired outcome whereas causal asymmetry suggests that the set of conditions that lead to the presence of an outcome need not be the same as the conditions that lead to its absence.
It happened seemingly overnight, but suddenly the education community is all a-Twitter. Or is it? That’s what Faculty Focus set out to learn when it launched in July 2009 a survey on the role of Twitter in higher education. The survey asked college and university faculty about their familiarity and use of the micro-blogging service, if any, as well as whether they expect their Twitter use to increase or decrease in the future.
Gemmell grew up on a berry farm in Stirling, Ont., watching his father fx or create whatever equipment he needed with whatever materials he had. It was a childhood that stoked his own passion for industrial design. (He once built an insulated dog house for the family pet, complete with a Plexiglas room with a view.) But when his portfolio of “backyard inventions” wasn’t enough to earn him a spot in the industrial design program at Carleton University, Gemmell ended up on a 13-year trek through life and higher learning. He earned a bachelor’s degree in visual arts and psychology at Brock University, worked for a year as a web designer in Toronto, but “wasn’t really feeling it,” so he spent a year in Whistler, B.C. snowboarding, and teaching snowboarding, until he ran out of money.
The highly volatile monthly job creation figures and an unemployment rate that sometimes masks more than it reveals get all the attention. But the real tale of the Canadian labour market is written far away from the spotlights, closer to where the details reside. And there, the emerging picture is of a job market that is fundamentally changing. Canadian employment dances
increasingly to the tune of structural forces and less to reversible cyclical dynamics. And it’s not only about demographics. Job market mismatches, sticky long-term unemployment, diverging bargaining power, rising entry barriers and increased job tenure and job stability for those who clear the bar, all suggest that monetary policy aimed at the cyclical component of employment slack is aiming at a shrinking target.
Studying and working abroad transforms Canadian students into global citizens, helping them develop inter-cultural awareness, adaptability and problem-solving skills. It also gives them a hiring edge with today’s employers. Leaving one’s home province to study can also be a transformative experience, increasing students’ understanding of the diverse cultures, histories and values that make up our country.
Whether learning abroad or in another province, these experiences deepen students’ awareness of the diversity of Canadian and international communities, while strengthening bonds between campuses across Canada and worldwide.
Too few Canadian students, however, benefit from the mobility experiences that can prepare them to enter a globalized labour market. Improving the international and interprovincial mobility of university students is a crucial step in developing our next generation of leaders and sharpening Canada’s competitive edge.
During a speech on Thursday, President Trump revealed a striking ignorance of one of the pillars of his country’s educational system. In the course of promoting his infrastructure plan, he, a bit perplexingly, dismissed the country’s community colleges, suggesting he doesn’t know what purpose they serve. “We do not know what a ‘community college’ means,” he told the crowd in an Ohio training facility for construction apprentices, moments after expressing nostalgia for the vocational schools that flourished when he was growing up—schools that offered hands-on training in fields such as welding and cosmetology.