Before the emergence of Internet-based technologies, the classroom was still a room. It featured a teacher at the front delivering learning content to a group of students. Much of today’s teaching and learning is stillconducted within the four walls of the classroom. However, the ubiquity of the Internet, mobile devices, wireless networks and other technologies has torn down the walls of the classroom, enabling a variety of unconventional, location-independent learning environments. By allowing students fl exible learning options, schools can provide more individualized instruction. If implemented properly, online and hybrid learning engage students of all ages, ensure equal access to underserved areas, provide learning opportunities for students with family and job responsibilities, and give older learners a second chance at a college degree. This Special Report will focus on the evolution of learning settings from traditional, instructor-led classrooms to completely virtual, student-centric classes and schools. We will describe and illustrate myriad K-12, college and university learning environments, give examples of how evolving classroom models impact students and teachers, and highlight the technologies that make it possible.
Today’s students use technology to make decisions, manage information and engage socially. They require new ways of learning, communicating, thinking, finding information and problem-solving. To continue to keep students engaged in learning in an environment of ever changing technology, the classroom — be it a familiar on-campus environment or a student’s home or even acoffee shop — must evolve.
Over the past decade, the Ontario postsecondary sector has experienced pressure from a number of societal forces (Clark, Moran, Skolnik & Trick, 2009). The demand for increased access to postsecondary education (PSE), which is moving higher education from an elite model to one of near universal participation, has resulted in undergraduate enrolment increases
of close to 50 per cent over the past decade1. These increases are taking place in an environment where demands in other areas are also being made on institutions and faculty.Demands for increased accountability, demonstrated quality assurance and increased research and development responsibilities have placed higher burdens on institutions and faculty, which are intensified by tight budgets and limited resources. Institutions have responded to these pressures in part, by increasing average class sizes. In 2009, about two thirds of Ontario universities reported that 30 per cent or more of first year courses had more than 100 students.
The average number of FTE students per full time faculty has increased from 17 in 1987 to 25 in 2007 (Clark, Moran, Skolnik & Trick, 2009, page 99). The consequences of this and other adjustments on educational quality are unknown. Undoubtedly, these pressures will continue and intensify in coming years given projections of demand for PSE in Ontario, particularly for undergraduate degrees. As a result, there is a need for the higher education sector in Ontario to identify the challenges and opportunities that are unique to large class teaching environments, as well as strategies to approach these issues, in
order to maintain the quality of student learning in the face of rising class sizes.
A major problem in identifying trends with large classes is in defining what constitutes a large class. This will differ according to the discipline, the level and nature of the class (such as introductory or upper year, lecture, tutorial or laboratory), and the perceptions of lecturers and individual students. For the purposes of this study, a large class is defined as one in which a change in traditional teaching methods is deemed appropriate or necessary, so it may include an introductory class of 700 students or an upper year seminar with fifty.
The education of students with Special Needs (SN) has been well researched at the school level (K-12) and a growing number of studies have been conducted at the postsecondary education (PSE) level. However, there is little research on transitions of SN students between the two systems. Inclusive policies at both the school and postsecondary level are designed to encourage students with SN to continue with their education. However, relatively few do so. Some students with SN fail to complete their schooling and drop. Others graduate from high school but decide against enrolling in a college or university program. While some of these students may prefer direct entry to the labour market others have postsecondary aspirations for which they are not adequately prepared or supported. The social goal of inclusive education is to accommodate the aspirations of all students, including those designated as SN. The existing research on college and university access suggests that students with SN who aspire to PSE face significant barriers. How effectively they meet these challenges requires a better understanding of the basis for their post-high school pathway choices. Socio-demographic factors like gender, ethnicity, and socio-economic status have long been recognized as influencing access to PSE, whether or not the individual is a student with special needs. Whatever their background, high school students who aspire to PSE must meet the academic entrance requirements of the institution (college or university) and, at the same time, develop the self-confidence and dispositions to study that are needed to succeed in a
postsecondary program. Acquiring the necessary capabilities can be especially challenging forat-risk students – those with low levels of achievement and those with special needs. Many, nevertheless, display the resilience needed to plan for, invest in, and realize their PSE aspirations. Schools play a key role in developing these resilient qualities in adolescents. Inclusive policies that emphasize students’ “strengths” rather than “deficits” have led to greater integration into mainstream classrooms. Learning in integrated settings is assumed to enhance opportunities for school engagement that complement and contribute to key student beliefs and behaviours – specifically, their sense of personal competence, dependability, and capacity for self-regulation.
Abstract
The community college is one of many providers of postsecondary and adult education in Canada. In making decisions about how the community college should allocate its efforts among various possible programs and activities, it is important to understand its relationship to other providers of postsecondary and adult education. This article describes and analyzes the relationship between Canada's community colleges and other providers of postsecondary and adult education in Canada. It attempts to identify the comparative strengths and weaknesses of community colleges relative to other providers with respect to particular types of activity, and from that analysis it offers suggestions regarding the emphases that colleges might place on certain of their activities.
Résumé
Le collège communautaire est un des nombreux fournisseurs d’enseignement supérieur et d’éducation aux adultes au Canada. En prenant des décisions concernant la manière dont les collèges communautaires devraient allouer leurs efforts parmi différents programmes et activités, il est important de comprendre leurs relations avec d’autres fournisseurs d’enseignement supérieur et d’éducation aux adultes. Cet article décrit et analyse la relation entre les collèges communautaires du Canada et les autres fournisseurs d’enseignement supérieur et d’éducation aux adultes au Canada. Il tente d’identifier les forces et faiblesses des collèges communautaires comparativement à d’autres fournisseurs relativement à certains types d’activités, et à partir de cette analyse, il offre des suggestions concernant l’importance que les collèges peuvent accorder à certaines de leurs activités.
When teachers think the best, most important way to improve their teaching is by developing their content knowledge, they end up with sophisticated levels of knowledge, but they have only simplistic instructional methods to convey that material. To imagine that content matters more than process is to imagine that the car is more important than the road. Both are essential. What we teach and how we teach it are inextricably linked and very much dependent on one another.
This special report features 11 articles pulled from the pages of The Teaching Professor to help you discover new ways to build connections between what you teach and how you teach it. The report offers tips on how to engage students, give feedback, create a climate for learning, and more. It also provides fresh perspectives on how faculty should approach their development as teachers.
It’s been said that few things can enhance student learning more than an instructor’s commitment to ongoing professional development. Here’s a sample of the articles you will find in Effective Strategies for Improving College Teaching and Learning:
• Faculty Self-Disclosures in the College Classroom
• A Tree Falling in the Forest: Helping Students ‘Hear’ and Use Your Comments
• Understanding What You See Happening in Class
• Can Training Make You a Better Teacher?
• Striving for Academic Excellence
Although there is no single best teaching method, approach, or style, this special report will give you a variety of strategies to try. Those that work effectively with your students
you should make your own.
ABSTRACT
Student parents are a significant minority population on Canadian post-secondary campuses. As research exploring this population has been extremely limited to date, this study provides the first national profile of Canadian student parents. We explore student parent enrolment patterns over time and examine current demographic characteristics. The data for this study were drawn from two datasets collected by Statistics Canada: the Labour Force Survey 1976–2005 and the Survey of Labour and Income Dynamics 2004 cross-sectional data file. Student parents accounted for between 11% and 16% of all post-secondary enrolment between 1976 and 2005. Further analyses explore participation patterns based on type of institution college/university), study status (full-/part-time study), age, gender, and marital status. Future research directions and implications for policies and institutional practice are discussed.
RÉSUMÉ
Les étudiants qui sont aussi parents représentent une population minoritaire d’importance sur les campus postsecondaires canadiens. Puisque la recherche portant sur cette population demeure extrêmement limitée à ce jour, l’étude qui suit constitue le premier profil national d’étudiants canadiens qui sont aussi parents. On y explore les modèles d’inscription de ces étudiants au fil du temps et on y examine les caractéristiques démographiques actuelles. Les données de cette étude ont été prises de deux sources recueillies par Statistique Canada : la « Labour Force Survey 1976-2005 » et la « Enquête sur la dynamique du travail et du revenu, 2004 [Canada]: Fichier d’enquête transversale principale ». Les étudiants qui sont aussi parents représentent entre 11 % et 16 % de toutes les inscriptions postsecondaires entre 1976 et 2005. D’autres
CJHE / RCES Volume 41, No. 3, 2011
analyses explorent les modèles de participation fondés sur le type d’institution (collège ou université), le statut de l’étudiant (temps plein ou temps partiel), l’âge, le sexe et le statut familial. On y discute également de la direction des recherches futures, ainsi que des implications pour la rédaction de politiques et pour la pratique en milieu institutionnel.
The BYOD Concept
The days of students carrying heavy, book-laden backpacks to school are numbered. Increasingly, students at all
levels expect to access learning materials electronically. And students expect their school to support access to the Internet from anywhere, not just from a classroom computer with a wired connection.
The push for mobile learning options isn’t just coming from students. Teachers also have high opinions of the educational value of these new tools. A PBS/Grunwald survey in 2010 reported that teachers view laptops, tablets and e-readers as having the highest educational potential of all portable technologies. The movement to mobile and digital learning reflects the exploding popularity of mobile devices among consumers and the parallel growth in wireless network services to support them. Instead of using shared or enterprise-owned computers at work, school or libraries, people now want to use their personally owned mobile devices everywhere, a trend called bring your own device (BYOD). In fact, personal computing devices are fast becoming not just a luxury in both primary and secondary education, but a necessity. The growth of more virtual, personalized learning experiences throughout the educational spectrum is engaging students like never before.
The 2010 ”Speak Up” education survey conducted by Project Tomorrow found that more than one quarter of middle school students and 35 percent of high school students use online textbooks or other online curricula as a part of their regular schoolwork. The survey also found that nearly two-thirds of parents of school-aged children see digital curriculum as a key component of the ”ideal” classroom for their student, making access to computing devices a key part of today’s educational experience.²
This trend is creating tremendous new demand levels for wireless networks. For example, one market research firm reports growth of 40 percent in enterprise wireless local area networks (WLANs) in Q2 2011, attributable in part to the BYOD trend and the tremendous popularity of the Apple iPad.³ Gartner Research supports this notion as well, concluding that without adequate preparation, iPads alone will increase enterprise WiFi demands by 300 percent.⁴
Support for this trend is also found in Center for Digital Education (CDE) interviews with K-12 district IT staff. A notable 27 percent of school IT decision-makers interviewed expressed an intent to pursue a BYOD policy.
While the percentage of higher education students with their own devices is significantly higher than at the elementary level, CDE’s Digital Community Colleges Survey reveals that they grapple with many similar technology challenges. A full 92 percent of community colleges report expanded distance learning offerings for online, hybrid and Web-assisted courses, providing ample support for their No. 1 identified technology priority: mobility. The growing popularity of mobile devices isn’t the only factor straining the capacity of educational networks today. Video, interactive learning games and other media-rich content are being
watched, created and shared by students and teachers to foster learning of both skills and subject matter. These media not only gobble up bandwidth — they may also require priority over other network traffic in order to deliver acceptable performance for in-class use. From a technical perspective, the challenge for educational institutions is supporting BYOD for students and staff with secure wireless and remote access network capabilities. Yet the movement to mobile learning isn’t just about supporting new technologies. It’s also about shifting to new ways of teaching and learning.
Top performance in today’s sales environment requires a highly collaborative approach. Reps who have either grown up using tools like email, social networking platforms, and mobile devices (“digital natives”) or who are heavily engaged with such tools are in a much better position to become top performers and win more deals, faster. Accordingly, a collaborative team environment enabled by “social learning” capabilities represents revenue opportunities for forward-thinking sales leaders who want to train, manage, mentor, and coach winning teams.
Online Student Engagement Tools and Strategies
Most online students, even those who are successful, will tell you it takes an extra dose of motivation to stay on top of their assignments compared to the traditional classroom. In fact, the anytime/anywhere convenience of online learning sometimes makes it too convenient … to procrastinate, forget about, and become otherwise disengaged. No wonder online courses have an attrition rate that’s 10 – 20 percent higher than their face-to-face counterparts.
For faculty teaching in the online classroom, this reality underscores the importance of having activities that build student engagement and help create a sense of community among their geographically dispersed students.
Online Student Engagement Tools and Strategies features 11 articles pulled from the pages of Online Classroom and provides practical advice from online instructors who recognize the value of engagement and its role in student retention and success.
Here are just a few of the articles you will find in this report:
• Engaging Students with Synchronous Methods in Online Courses
• Indicators of Engagement in the Online Classroom
• Teaching Online With Errol: A Tried and True Mini-Guide to Engaging Online Students
• Engage Online Learners with Technology: A Free Tool Kit
• Promoting Student Participation and Involvement in Online Instruction: Suggestions from the Front
In short, this special report explains how adjustments in tone, technology, teaching presence and organization can bring positive changes to student learning.
One of the many lessons learned from the early years of distance education is the fact that you cannot simply pluck an instructor out of the classroom, plug him into an online course, and expect him to be effective in this new and challenging medium. Some learned this lesson the hard way, while others took a proactive approach to faculty training. All of us continue to refine our approach and discover our own best practices. Today, it’s possible to learn much from the mistakes and successes of those who blazed the trail before us. Faculty development for distance educators is a critical component of all successful distance education programs. Well thought-out faculty development weaves together needed training, available resources, and ongoing support, and carries with it the same expectations for quality teaching that institutions of higher education have for their face-toface classes. This special report, Faculty Development in Distance Education: Issues, Trends and Tips, features 12 articles pulled from the pages of Distance Education Report, including:
• Faculty Development: Best Practices from World Campus
• Developing Faculty Competency in Online Pedagogy
• A Learner-Centered, Emotionally Engaging Approach to Online Learning
• How to Get the Best Out of Online Adjuncts
• Workload, Promotion, and Tenure Implications of Teaching Online
• Four Steps to Just-in-Time Faculty Training
This report is loaded with practical strategies that can help you build a comprehensive faculty development program, helping ensure that instructors stay current in both online pedagogy and practical technical know-how. No matter what the particular character of your program is, I think you’ll find many ideas you can use in here.
Abstract
Increasingly, students are seeking transfer from college to university educational programs. This challenges universities to assess the effectiveness of transfer policies and also challenges colleges to prepare students for continued education. This paper reviews the various transfer procedures used by Canadian universities, barriers experienced by students seeking
transfer, and strategies for improving the transfer process. The authors propose the use of learning outcomes, which identify student knowledge and skills following an educational experience, to develop block transfer strategies that ease student transfer between educational programs.
Résumé
Les étudiants cherchent de plus en plus à transférer leurs projets d’études collégiales vers un programme universitaire. Les universités doivent donc relever le défi d’évaluer l’efficacité de leurs politiques de transfert, tandis que les collèges doivent réfléchir sur la façon de mieux préparer leurs étudiants aux programmes de formation continue. Le présent article passe en revue les diverses procédures utilisées par les universités canadiennes, les obstacles que doivent surmonter les étudiants cherchant à effectuer un transfert et les stratégies d’amélioration du processus de transfert. Les auteurs proposent l’utilisation de résultats d’apprentissage, qui identifient les connaissances et les compétences acquises par les étudiants d’un
programme donné, afin d’élaborer des stratégies générales qui faciliteront le transfert d’étudiants entre programmes éducatifs.
Executive Summary
The significance of literacy for postsecondary success has been demonstrated in numerous
research reports showing that attrition and underachievement are strongly linked to low levels of language proficiency (Jennings and Hunn, 2002; Perin, 2004). It has also been shown that Canadian adults with lower literacy levels have significantly lower employment rates and incomes, higher rates of unemployment, and are less likely to be engaged in their community than Canadian adults with higher literacy levels (Statistics Canada, 2005). On a national scale, literacy is a key factor in economic growth, productivity and innovation (Coulombe, Tremblay and Marchand, 2004).
Graduating over 71,000 students per year (MTCU, 2011), colleges play a central role in preparing Ontario adults with varying literacy levels for the labour force. A recent review of literacy-related practices at Ontario’s colleges demonstrated that there is currently a wide range and diversity of activities and models being used to address the language needs of students (Fisher and Hoth 2010). Without the appropriate supports, literacy and language challenges are barriers that prevent students from achieving success in their chosen program of study and subsequent career. All post-secondary institutions struggle with finding workable models to support these students, yet there has been little rigorous research evaluating the effectiveness of various remediation approaches (Levin and Calcagno 2008).
In fall of 2008, George Brown College piloted an innovative remedial approach in the Practical Nursing program that targets reading, writing, speaking and listening skills while integratingcontent from select core courses, termed the Communications Adjunct Model (CAM). The goal of this research project was to assess the impact of CAM on adult learners with diverse remedial
English language needs in order to provide important lessons for post-secondary institutions. To assess the program’s effectiveness, the academic performance of students placed in CAM was examined in relation to two comparison groups. The first comparison group consisted of students in the same cohort as the CAM group (2008/2009) who were not placed in CAM. The second comparison group included students from two academic years prior to the introduction of CAM (2005/2006 and 2006/2007) who fell below the entrance score cut-offs for selection into the adjunct program.
The analysis undertaken suggests that CAM did not have a strong effect on overall grade performance (GPA). While two out of the four evaluations of the effectiveness of the program showed that CAM had a positive effect on students’ GPA, the results were weak and did not prove to be reliable across comparison groups. It is important to remember, however, that the analysis assessed the impact of CAM solely on GPA performance. CAM has a number of additional objectives, such as general language skill development, that would require additional data collection and analysis to better determine the effectiveness of the program. Nonetheless, there are many important learnings that can be gleaned from the project based on George Brown
College’s experience of developing and administering CAM.
David Cooperrider, the originator of a relatively new approach to organizational or institutional change called Appreciative Inquiry, tells the story of a conversation he had with the father of modern management, Peter Drucker, before his recent death. He asked Drucker, then 93, to distill the essence of what he knew about leadership. Drucker told Cooperrider, “The task of leadership is to create an alignment of strengths, making our weaknesses irrelevant.” Appreciative Inquiry (AI) is a way of helping organizations discover their strengths so they can create an alignment of those strengths, making their weaknesses and problems irrelevant. Since the mid-1980s, thousands of organizations in more than 100 countries – corporations, businesses, nonprofits, churches, educational and governmental organizations – have used this strengths-based approach to
organizational or institutional change and development.
Academic dishonesty is a persistent problem in institutions of higher education, with numerous short- and long-term implications. This study examines undergraduate students’ self-reported engagement in acts of academic dishonesty using data from a sample of 321 participants attending a public university in a western Canadian city during the fall of 2007. Various factors were assessed for their influence on students’ extent of academic dishonesty. More than one-half of respondents engaged in at least one of three types of dishonest behaviours surveyed during their tenure in university. Faculty of enrolment, strategies for learning, perceptions of peers’ cheating and their requests for help, and perceptions and evaluations of academic dishonesty made unique contributions to the prediction of academic dishonesty. High self-efficacy acted as a protective factor that interacted with instrumental motives to study to reduce students’ propensity to engage in dishonest academic behaviours. Implications of these findings for institutional interventions are briefly discussed.
RÉSUMÉ
Le comportement académique malhonnête persiste dans les institutions d’enseignement supérieur, et ses implications à court et à long terme sont nombreuses. La présente étude examine l’adoption d’un comportement académique malhonnête par des étudiants de premier cycle, grâce aux données d’un échantillon de 321 participants qui fréquentaient une université publique dans une ville de l’ouest canadien à l’automne 2007. Différents facteurs ont été évalués en fonction de leur influence sur l’étendue du comportement académique malhonnête des étudiants. Plus de la moitié des étudiants échantillonnés ont adopté au moins l’un des trois types de comportements malhonnêtes au cours de leur passage à l’université. La faculté à s’inscrire, les stratégies d’apprentissage, la perception quant au comportement tricheur des pairs et quant à leurs demandes d’aide, et les perceptions et évaluations de la malhonnêteté académique constituent des indices uniques pour ce qui est de prédire le comportement académique malhonnête. Un degré élevé d’auto-efficacité, de même que certains motifs essentiels, avaient un effet protecteur dans la réduction de la propension des étudiants à s’engager dans des comportements académiques malhonnêtes. L’article aborde brièvement les conséquences de ces résultats au cours d’interventions en institution d’enseignement.
Social Media Usage Trends Among Higher Education Faculty
The numbers surrounding social media are simply mind boggling.
750 million. The number of active Facebook users, which means if Facebook was a country it would be the third-largest in the world.
90. Pieces of content created each month by the average Facebook user.
175 million. The Twitter accounts opened during Twitter's history.
140 million. The average number of Tweets people sent per day in February 2011.
460,000. Average number of new Twitter accounts created each day during February 2011.
120 million. LinkedIn members as of August 4, 2011.
More than two per second. The average rate at which professionals are signing up to join LinkedIn as of June 30, 2011.
All of these stats, which come from the respective companies’ own websites, serve as proof points to what we already knew: social media is growing at breakneck speed. Yet the story of social media is still being written as organizations and individuals alike continue to evaluate the benefits and drawbacks of social media in the workplace. When that workplace is a college or university, there’s a cacophony of opinions in terms of the most effective uses, if any.
For the past two years, Faculty Focus conducted a survey on Twitter usage in higher education, this year we expanded the survey to include Facebook and LinkedIn, while changing a number of the questions as well. Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn are considered "the big three" in social media, and we thank those who recommended we take a
broader look at the landscape.
All three platforms have their strengths and weaknesses, and are better used for some things than others. But how are the three being used in higher education today? It’s our hope that these survey results provide at least some of the answers while lending new data to the discussion.
In the traditional college classroom today, faculty and students arrive with a certain set of expectations, shaped largely by past experiences. And although students may need the occasional (or perhaps frequent) reminder of what’s required of them, there’s usually something very familiar about the experience for both faculty and students alike. In the online classroom, an entirely new set of variables enters the equation. It’s a little like trying to drive in a foreign country. You know how to drive, just like you know how to teach,but it sure is hard to get the hang of driving on the left side of the road, you’re not quite sure how far a kilometer is, and darn it if those road signs aren’t all in Japanese. This special report explains the “rules of the road” for online teaching and learning and features a series of columns that first appeared in the Distance Education Report’s “Between
the Clicks,” a popular column by Dr. Lawrence C. Ragan, Director of Instructional Design and Development for Penn State’s World Campus.
The articles contained in the report will help you establish online instructor best practices and expectations, and include the following principles of effective online teaching:
• Show Up and Teach
• Practice Proactive Course Management Strategies
• Establish Patterns of Course Activities
• Plan for the Unplanned
• Response Requested and Expected
• Think Before You Write
• Help Maintain Forward Progress
• Safe and Secure
• Quality Counts
• (Double) Click a Mile on My Connection
These principles, developed at Penn State’s World Campus, outline the core behaviours of the successful online instructor, and help to define parameters around the investment of time on part of the instructor. In his articles, Ragan identifies potential barriers and limitations to online learning, and specific strategies to assist instructors in achieving the performance expectations.
There are a number of studies that classify governing boards into different types. Some classifications are based on management form. Some are based on the form in which authority is exercised. Some are based on the form of institution that the board serves. Most of these classifications include "working boards" but few offer a clear definition of them. Even those that do attempt to define this type of board acknowledge that little is known about how they actually function. This study examines a small public not-for-profit institution with a "working board" to determine how that type of board functions, where it succeeds and where it fails, and how it is different from other types of boards.
Daniel Lang
Despite Canada having one of the world’s best-educated populations, numerous rationales have been presented to support the continued expansion and broadening of participation in post-secondary education (PSE). Not only do recent federal and provincial occupational projections suggest that future jobs will overwhelmingly require candidates with some form of PSE, the evidence on earnings premiums and private rates of return to PSE provide some indications that the labour market can still absorb large quantities of PSE graduates. Provinces have made higher PSE attainment a priority — for example, in the most recent Ontario budget, the government set as one of its goals to increase the PSE attainment rate from 62 per cent to
70 per cent (Ontario Ministry of Finance, 2010).
Yet, demographic trends suggest that maintaining, let alone increasing, the number of postsecondary graduates in coming years will prove challenging. Though there are currently supplyside constraints in some regions (principally urban Ontario), within 20 years, the pool of postsecondary- aged Canadians will be substantially shallower than it is today. To keep the supply of skilled workers at current levels, participation rates will have to keep climbing. As participation rates are already quite high among economically advantaged segments of the population, there is growing consensus that the best opportunity for growth in participation rates may be among groups that are currently under-represented in PSE, such as students from low-income families, students with no history of post-secondary education in their families and Aboriginal students. A strong case can be made as well that governments and PSE institutions should strive to close the gap in participation rates between under-represented groups and the rest of the population on the grounds that all Canadians should be provided with the same chances and opportunities to engage in PSE studies, independently of their socio-economic background. In short, increasing the participation rates of disadvantaged populations is an objective worth pursuing from both an efficiency and equity perspective.
Abstract: This article describes the consequences for workplace e-learning of viewing organisations as political systems. Organisations tend to stratify, and potential conflicts develop between “top-down†or designer-generation of workplace systems, and “bottom-up†or learner- and practice-based approaches. The differences in the objectives, procedures, tacit knowledge and conceptions of the value of workplace e-learning between these orientations have led to conflicts that have damaged real e-learning projects in the past. Some cases from the literature are analysed to support this point. However, other examples show how these tensions may also be turned into opportunities for communication, learning and collaborative design by including a measure of operational proximity and organisational citizenship behaviour in workplace e-learning design. It is suggested that through initiatives like these, designer-generation and learner-generation of context may act as complementary checks or balances, each helping compensate for the deficits of the other, thus improving workplace e-learning effectiveness.
Keywords: workplace e-learning; professional development; learner-generated contexts; communities of practice (CoPs); conflict; co-ordination
In its final report to Canadians, the Canadian Council on Learning (CCL) reveals that Canada is slipping down the
international learning curve. The needs in this area are stark. The potential rewards are enormous. But we are falling behind competitor countries and economies. We are on the wrong road and must make a dramatic change in the course we are taking.
The principal cause of this unacceptable and deeply troubling state of affairs is that our governments have failed to work together to develop the necessary policies and failed to exhibit the required collective political leadership.
The necessary approach is voluntary and co-operative, respectful of provincial and territorial responsibility, but involves the development of clear trans-Canadian policies and actions.
The starting point for the proposed directions is the establishment of a federal/provincial/territorial Council of Ministers on Learning. In addition, there must be: clear and measureable national goals for each stage of learning, as described in this report; permanent, independent monitors to compare Canadian learning results to our stated goals; standing advisory groups, including educators and civil society, to consult on requisite national objectives and the means to reach these goals. Through CCL, Canadians were offered an opportunity to set in place a vision, a mission, and a model for continuous learning which could unite Canadians in a common purpose. It was a much-needed national initiative. Although CCL will close in spring 2012, that need continues. Without a sustained trans-Canadian approach, many learners will not reach their objectives. The country requires a national learning framework in order for its regions, provinces and territories to succeed. Without a national framework, we will miss the east–west learning railroad that should connect Canadians of all regions, generations and languages. The vision of CCL was to link Canadians in sharing learning experiences and promoting the enhancement of learning as a core value of a distinctive Canadian society. Hence the transformative image of a trans-Canadian learning architecture which would entrench and maintain our economic stability and social cohesion. CCL closes; the vision endures. This final report summarizes the state of learning for each stage of the life cycle.