From the CBC News:
Four universities in Calgary, Newfoundland and Labrador, and Ontario are offering scholarships to children of parents killed in active Canadian military missions to help them attain undergraduate degrees.
The University of Calgary, Memorial University of Newfoundland, the University of Ottawa and the University of Windsor have created a Project Hero scholarship to honour fallen soldiers.
Yesterday I received a message from Dr. Kathleen Flanagan, Coordinator of the Canadian Council on Learning Adult Learning Knowledge Centre, regarding the impending termination of the Centre's operations. An excerpt from that message:
I regret to inform you that the Adult Learning Knowledge Centre, an initiative of the Canadian Council on Learning, will terminate its operations on July 6, 2009. On April 6, the Canadian Council on Learning announced that, due to financial constraints, funding for its five knowledge centres will end on July 6. Full details of the announcement can be found at the following link.Essentially, the mandate of the Canadian Council on Learning has been extended by a year with no further funding from the federal government. As a result, the CCL has cut its staff by 20% and eliminated a number of its programs. In July, funding will end for the CCL’s five knowledge centres. These are centres for research on Aboriginal Learning, Adult Learning, Early Childhood Learning, Health and Learning, and Work and Learning. Evidently, the federal government sees no interest in continuing to provide public funding for the research and knowledge exchange activities of these centres.
During its four-year history, the Adult Learning Knowledge Centre, with the support of the Canadian Council on Learning and its fellow knowledge centres, has worked tirelessly to foster a dynamic, informed, and coordinated pan-Canadian culture of adult lifelong learning. With the help of stakeholders across Canada, AdLKC has helped to build a better understanding of the value of adult learning to our economic, social, and cultural well-being as individuals, communities, and as a nation.
Kevin Reed is a man on a mission to get free university tuition for the children of Canada's fallen soldiers, an initiative he's dubbed Project Hero.
The Toronto-based businessman, who recently took on the role of honourary lieutenant-colonel of an army reserve unit in southwestern Ontario, is approaching schools one by one with the idea and so far he has a 100 per cent success rate.
"My perfect world, by this fall, is to have most, if not all, the Canadian universities on side for this," said Reed.
Reed was inspired to start Project Hero after talking to retired general Rick Hillier, the former chief of defence staff who stepped aside last year and became chancellor of his alma mater Memorial University in Newfoundland and Labrador. Hillier's plan of getting free tuition for the children of fallen soldiers is well on its way at Memorial, and Reed asked if he could run with the idea and bring it to his own alma mater, the University of Ottawa.
Allan Rock, president and vice-chancellor of the University of Ottawa, said the school was immediately attracted to the concept. It didn't take long for the school to approve the idea, and on Tuesday the university is formally announcing its free tuition offer.
From the CBC News:
Former provincial and federal NDP leader Alexa McDonough is the new interim president of Mount Saint Vincent University in Halifax.McDonough's one-year term begins in August. During this time, the school will search for a permanent replacement for Kathryn Laurin, who resigned as president to take a position at a university in British Columbia.
From the St. John's Telegram:
Jeers: to having to say goodbye. Former Memorial University acting president Eddy Campbell officially leaves MUN tomorrow and will soon be running the University of New Brunswick, marking yet another chapter in the shabby tale of the provincial government's tampering in the presidential search process. If Joan Burke hadn't decided it was essential that she replace the university's hiring process, all this would be over and done by now. Maybe we should change MUN's name to Ad-hoc University or maybe Flux U: after all, it now has its second acting president, an acting vice-president academic, and an acting vice-president of research. MUN's website lists a vacancy at the dean of business administration's office as well. Any more acting, and the whole place would be a theatre school. Oh, well - sounds like autopilot for a while yet.
Training for trades. This article profiles Train for Trades, an innovative employment and training program for youth developed by the St. John's-based Choices for Youth.
Apprenticeship drop-off. While overall participation in apprenticeship is on the rise in England, the number of young apprentices (aged 16-24) has dropped.
Our headlines are hoaxed. A student newspaper at the University of Hawaii ran a 27-item correction page last week indicating that 21 people quoted in the paper this past year and a half were fictitious. The enterprising young reporter accused of fabricating sources says his work was "adulterated during the copy (editing) process".
YouTube ban lifted in China Iran Utah. Ending a ban that lasted almost three years, Brigham Young University, a Mormon Church-owned institution in Provo, Utah, has stopped blocking access to YouTube on campus.
As the Canada Student Loans Program heads toward the end of its 45th year in existence, the Educational Policy Institute's Alex Usher reflects on the program's new Repayment Assistance Plan (RAP):
[The] RAP is basically a more sophisticated version of the old Interest Relief (IR) Program which was created in 1984 and much expanded in 1997 and 1998 and which also incorporates the never-very-successful Debt-Reduction-in-Repayment (DRR) Plan of 1998. Below a fixed level of income, graduates pay no principle or interest; above it, they pay the amount owed on a regular amortization schedule, subject to the stipulation that a student never has to make payments exceeding more than 20% of their gross income and in many cases have to pay far less.
Overall, RAP is a pretty good idea. It’s not, however, a new one despite what the press releases might tell you. In fact, if you go back to the 1998 Budget – the one that expanded IR and created DRR in the first place – you’ll see that the Government of Canada committed itself then to the idea of “graduated debt repayment”, which in practice is indistinguishable from the RAP. Why did it take so long to arrive? Well, at the time, with the banks involved in the repayment system it was deemed too complex to implement – and later people simply forgot about it. But resurrected it has been, and it’s another important step in the maturation and long-term improvement of student assistance in Canada.
The main benefit of RAP is that it combines the accelerated repayment features of an amortization loan system with a protection of low-income borrowers in repayment afforded by the best income-contingent loan systems. In fact, now that it’s law, we can be honest about it – RAP is an income-contingent loan system plain and simple.
In his Sunday Toronto Star column Haroon Siddiqui writes an instructive epilogue about the recent conference at York University entitled: Israel/Palestine: Mapping Models of Statehood and Paths to Peace.
Despite that Canada's federal government attempted to derail the conference by directly intervening in the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council peer-reviewed decision to fund it, the organizers at York University thankfully stood by the decision to hold a civil dialogue and debate regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. From Siddiqui's column:
About 200 people from Canada, the U.S., Israel and Europe came [to the conference]. A quarter were Jewish. The dialogue was civil, [Queen's University professor Sharryn] Aiken reported from the meeting, which was closed to the media.
She said that many delegates, "first and foremost, the Israelis," were outraged at the attempts to ban the meeting. Among them: Meron Benvenisti, deputy mayor of Jerusalem under Teddy Kollek (1971-78), now a columnist for Haaretz, the liberal Israeli paper.
He opposes the one-state solution. He also opposes the notion of not talking about it. Of the Canadian critics of the conference, he told me: "If they want to be more patriotic than me, I have no use for them ... I am not going to take any lessons about Israel from people living here ... It's hypocritical of them to use my national flag to stop dialogue."
Memorial University of Newfoundland has been without a president since Dec. 31, 2007. Yesterday, it was announced that Dr. Chris Loomis, a respected academic in his own right, would assume the position of acting-president next month. Dr. Loomis is our second acting-president in as many years. In March, Memorial's out-going acting-president, Dr. Eddy Campbell, was confirmed as the next president and vice-chancellor of the University of New Brunswick. This a win for New Brunswick and a sorry loss for Newfoundland and Labrador.
In the university environment faculty and administration are frequently at loggerheads with each other, however, when details of the presidential hiring controversy at Memorial emerged last year our faculty members stood solidly behind Memorial's administrators in defense of the university's right to autonomy. Within the university and in the broader community, the uncritical stance taken on this important matter by the undergraduate student union at Memorial was perhaps one of the most problematic aspects of the whole affair.
When it became apparent last July that the Conservative government had egregiously interfered in the hiring process for a new president, with the education minister admitting that she personally interviewed and rejected two candidates (including popular acting-president Eddy Campbell), the St. John's Telegram naturally contacted the undergraduate student union seeking comment.
When the press asked the president of the undergraduates if he though it was odd for the minister of education to be interviewing and vetoing candidates for the university presidency, he responded by saying that "I think it's unusual, but I think it's also unusual that I go to an institution where my tuition fees are the lowest in the country". Worse, he went on to actually endorse government's interference in the university's affairs, saying that "government has been quite clear that they do want the university to go in a certain direction and I don't think that that's necessarily negative". Amazing, no?
It was also unusual that, while the Canadian Association of University Teachers was front and center defending Memorial’s autonomy and academic freedom, the Federation of Students was deafeningly silent.
It hard to understand why this position was taken by the leaders of our students, but a common refrain around university water coolers contends that our undergraduate leaders have been over-satiated by the Williams government's policies on tuition and student debt. While I don't dispute that these policies are for the most part progressive, these past few years it has been almost as though someone has hit the mute button on our undergraduates, and the broader provincial student movement in general.
It has long been recognized that innovative policies and programs can help to ameliorate unequal opportunities to accessing post-secondary education. With the demographic reality of an aging population and the secondary school population in decline, Canada must devote attention to increasing the educational attainment levels of disadvantaged and under-represented groups in order to meet growing social and economic challenges. This paper highlights some of the contemporary challenges facing post-secondary education in Canada and focuses on the need for a system that is more democratic, open, and accessible. The paper draws upon current research about the challenges faced by groups of Canadians who experience difficulty accessing higher learning opportunities. It explores a number of possibilities for increasing educational participation and attainment for those who have traditionally been excluded from the system.Reference: Kirby, D. (2009). Widening access: Making the transition from mass to universal post-secondary education in Canada. Journal of Applied Research on Learning, 2(Special Issue, Article 3), 1-17.
Statistics Canada has released data on registered apprenticeship training in Canada for 2007:
There were 358,555 people registered in apprenticeship training programs in 2007, up 9.3% from 2006 and more than double the level in 1997.
The fastest growth occurred in metal fabricating trades, where registrations increased 11.5% from 2006, and in the electrical and electronics field, where they rose 10.2%.
These two fields, along with the building construction and motor vehicle and heavy equipment trades groups, accounted for 80% of total registrations in 2007.
Women represented about 1 in every 10 apprentices. Of the 38,070 women registered in apprenticeship programs in 2007, about 55% were in the food and services trades. In contrast, just over 1% were registered in the industrial and mechanical trades group.
Nationally, 24,495 people completed their apprenticeship training in 2007, up 17.5% from 2006, the fastest rate of growth during the last 10 years. About 2,780, or 11%, were women.
The high demand for post-secondary credentials combined with the burgeoning ubiquity of the Internet appears to have created an excellent environment for growth in diploma mills and purveyors of fake degrees. I'm sure you've seen the emails trumpeting "Get your degree in just 2-3 weeks! Master, PHD, anything you want in just 2-3 weeks!"
The Washington-based Council for Higher Education Accreditation (CHEA) and the United National Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) have recently partnered in an effort to crack down on diploma mills. Well, sort of. CHEA and UNESCO have issued a joint set of guidelines on effective practices for fighting the international growth of degree mills and bogus providers of higher education.
From The Guardian:
The government is to set up a fund to give students at risk of dropping out a chance to complete their degree online through the Open University.
The prime minister tonight announced the £12m plan to help some of the 35,000 students who drop out every year.
It is a major expansion of the role of the Open University (OU), which this week celebrates its 40th birthday. The university, which has no campus, began life offering late-night lectures on TV in the 1960s, but is now almost entirely web-based. It will partner other universities to design courses students can complete at home.
The Higher Education Statistics Agency reported last month that 7.4% of younger undergraduates left during their first year at university in 2007, up from 7.1% the year before. The Higher Education Funding Council for England said it hoped that up to 15% of the 35,000 who drop out each year could be encouraged to complete their degrees if they could do so at home rather than at university.
From Tehran Broadcast:
According to the Kalameh website, this evening, June 24th, Mir Hossein Mousavi held a meeting with the university professors who are members of [the Islamic Association of University Teachers of Iran]. After the meeting, 70 attendees were arrested.
From the PEI Guardian:
The Maritime Provinces Higher Education Commission's report University Participation: A Maritime Perspective, found that universities in the region attract high numbers of students from within and outside the Maritimes, and a high proportion of Maritime youth (age 18-24) attend university here or elsewhere in Canada.The full report may be downloaded here in .pdf format.
Measuring the proportion of the population that enrols in university is an important method for governments, universities, and the public to get a sense of whether qualified students have access to a university education. It is also a marker of future economic prosperity, given its link to future educational achievements.
Over the past 25 years, overall participation in Maritime universities has more than doubled to 34 per cent, eight points greater than the national average. Overall participation rates by province were: Nova Scotia, 39 per cent; Prince Edward Island, 25 per cent; and New Brunswick, 28 per cent.
Ontario’s Workforce Shortage Coalition, a coalition forged in better economic times, conducted a series of consultations with business, labour, education, and government stakeholders last year. The findings of those consultations have now been released in a report titled Workforce Requirements: Recession and Recovery.
The coalition report recommends that Ontario set targets for 2020 that include:
New research from the Canada Millennium Scholarship Foundation:
Post-secondary graduates holding a college diploma or university degree are more likely to be employed and they earn more than people who have not continued their studies past high school, confirms new research published today by the Canada Millennium Scholarship Foundation.
The report, entitled The Value of a Degree: Education, Employment and Earnings in Canada, shows that even though the number of post-secondary graduates has grown in recent years, the benefits of a degree, in terms of stable employment and higher earnings, have not diminished.
Key findings of the report include:
- Canadians without a high school diploma are two and a half times more likely to be unemployed than are those with a bachelor’s degree.
- In 2005, a bachelor’s degree holder earned $18,000 more per year than a high school graduate. The holder of a university graduate degree earned $29,000 more than a high school graduate.
- Over the course of 40 years, a college graduate will earn $394,000 more than a high school graduate, while a bachelor’s degree holder will earn a premium of $745,800 over the course of 40 years.
Globe and Mail reporters Bill Curry and Elizabeth Church write about Ottawa's new student grants in today's paper. The following two sections are especially interesting:
Under the new program, each year about 245,000 college and university students would qualify for grants that do not have to be repaid.Since the federal government will be spreading an equal amount of money amongst a larger group of students, it makes sense to wonder who will get less financial aid under the new regime.
That would be an increase of more than 100,000 students when compared to the previous program, but the individual awards of up to $2,000 for eight months of study will be lower.
. . .
Two of Canada's main student groups - the Canadian Federation of Students and the Canadian Alliance of Student Associations - said the new programs come at a good time given that recent high school graduates face grim job prospects unless they sign up for higher education.
But Alex Usher, a consultant with Toronto-based Educational Policy Institute, said the revised program does not include additional money for students and is an attempt to distribute existing funds differently.
The unanswered question, he said, is whether this change will encouraging more students to enroll in college or university. "I suspect that it will not have the effect on access that they think it will, but spreading money around more is likely to be politically popular," he said.
From Canoe.ca news:
Student groups gave the federal government a robust “A” Monday for its overhauled system of post-secondary loans and grants, which takes effect in September.
“There’s a huge challenge for students and their families right now,” said Arati Sharma, national director of the Canadian Alliance of Student Associations. Because of the tough economy, “students are looking more toward loans and grants.”
The program, a 2008 budget promise whose details were fleshed out by Human Resources Minister Diane Finley, follows on from the Millennium Scholarship Foundation set up by the former Liberal government, which winds up this year.
The government says the new Canada Student Grant program and Repayment Assistance Program will direct grants to 100,000 more students than the program they replace. In addition, students in danger of missing loan payments will have an opportunity to renegotiate how they pay their debt.
From The Canadian Press:
As young people prepare to don caps and gowns this month and take the stage to grab their diplomas, Canadians confess a certain skepticism about the value of an education in this country.
Nearly half of the Canadians polled in a recent Harris-Decima survey said they feel Canada's educational system does not adequately prepare young people for work in the modern economy.
Albertans are most pessimistic about the system -- 52 per cent say they find it inadequate.
From an opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal:
For generations, the United States has led the world in higher education. But today the U.S. has fallen to ninth in the proportion of young adults (age 25-34) who attain college degrees among the countries belonging to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. In Japan, Korea and Canada, more than 50% of young adults hold college degrees. Only 41% do in the United States. The question is: Should we do more?
Our nation's economic future depends on it. Our educational advantage made us the world's leader in discovery, invention and innovation. Our labor force has been able to perform better and receive higher wages because of its intellectual capital. But as that capital lags behind that of its competitors, our country's prominence is at risk.
The bottom line is that education affects economics. The more educated a work force is the more value it adds to society. We can chart this by looking at the way income levels vary with educational degrees. Since 1980, the gap between the earnings of those with bachelor's degrees and those with just high-school diplomas has widened. The ratio between the median earnings of men with the former and men with the latter grew to 1.99 in 2007 from 1.43 in 1980.
In today's harsh economy, there is a strong correlation between education and employment. In May 2009, those with bachelor's degrees have an unemployment rate of 4.8%; associate's degree, 7.7%; high-school degree, 10.0%; and less than high-school degree, 15.5%.
From The Associated Press:
Medical device maker Medtronic paid about $850,000 over nearly 10 years to a former Army surgeon accused of forging signatures and falsifying data for a study touting the benefits of one of the company's implants.
Medtronic, the world's largest device firm, previously declined to release details of its financial arrangements with Dr. Timothy Kuklo, who authored a paper on Medtronic's Infuse implant that later had to be retracted from publication.
The Army found that Kuklo, now a university professor, forged the signatures of four colleagues and made up data overstating the benefits of Medtronic's implant on leg injuries of soldiers at Walter Reed Medical Center.
The ever-insightful Brian Jones, columnist for the St. John's Telegram, writes on Memorial University of Newfoundland's presidential search, the university's latest splashy advertising campaign, and what actually makes a university 'great':
The MUN presidential search committee this week asked for public input. Here's a suggestion: hire someone who will put the students ahead of everything else.
The MUN administration was in full-fledged boasting mode this week after a report revealed that its research income has grown at a faster rate than at any other Canadian university. The bragging included big ads in The Globe and Mail and The National Post, to let competitors and potential donors know just how far on top MUN is.
But a university can't build a reputation through marketing techniques or ad campaigns, even one costing $200,000. A university's reputation doesn't even come from its research or its fabulous faculty.
In an article some years ago, a Harvard man said his alma mater is routinely and widely cited as the best university in the world because its students are so successful after graduation.
Plenty of universities have first-rate students, stellar staff and original, important research. But it's what the students accomplish after graduation that makes a university's reputation.
First Nations University of Canada, which has seen its share of controversy these past few years, has another headache to deal with:
The federal government is holding back payment of more than $2 million to the First Nations University of Canada — saying it wants to see changes at the institution before it hands over the money.
According to documents from the Indian and Northern Affairs Department obtained by CBC News, the Regina-based school is supposed to receive $7.3 million over the fiscal year that began April 1.
However, the department says it will hold back one-third of that — $2.4 million — if it doesn't receive a series of reports and "action plans" on how the post-secondary institution will reform itself.
This piece from New Scientist is worth a read:
At New Scientist we love a good hoax, especially one that both amuses and makes a serious point about the communication of science. So kudos to Philip Davis, a graduate student in library and information science at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, who revealed yesterday on The Scholarly Kitchen blog that he got a nonsensical computer-generated paper accepted for publication in a peer-reviewed journal.
This is me at the front gates of the University of Warsaw during my visit there yesterday. The university, one of the oldest in Poland, was established in 1816. Composer and virtuoso pianist Chopin was a student here.
Below the evening sun meets the Kazimierz Palace, the oldest building on the University of Warsaw campus. The original palace building was constructed here in 1637, but it was destroyed and re-built several times. Like 90 percent of the other buildings in the city of Warsaw, the Kazimierz Palace was destroyed during World War II and subsequently re-built in its original style.
From the Hay River Hub:
Northern Canada may be seeing the workings of a northern university in the years to come.
Three colleges are currently working to find a way to create an arctic university, using the existing campuses as a foundation.
Yukon College, Nunavut Arctic College, and NWT's Aurora College will be working to join together under federal funding to offer more university programs.
Although Aurora College already offers two degree programs, college president Maurice Evans says a founded university will offer other benefits [such as the capacity to conduct specialized research].
A new article in Statistics Canada's Education Matters notes that Canada ranks the highest when compared to other major OECD countries in terms of the percentage of college and university graduates who have low employment earnings. In 2006, 18% of university graduates aged 25-64 and 23% of college graduates in the same age group earned less than half the national median income.
Using data from the Survey of Labour and Income Dynamics, the authors' analysis reveals a number of graduate characteristics that are associated with lower earnings, including working on less than a full-time full-year basis, being self-employed, gender, age, immigrant status, and field of study.
The authors conclude that "being in a situation of low earnings is largely a function of the nature of an individual’s participation in the labour market. While it is the case that university graduates were significantly less likely to be in a low-earnings situation than college graduates, the two other key factors were working on less than a full-time full-year basis and being self-employed."
From The Chronicle of Higher Education:
The cost of attending California’s community colleges will probably rise by 30 percent in the fall, after a legislative budget committee voted on Tuesday to approve a fee increase to help the state meet its gigantic budget deficit.
Community-college leaders had argued against raising the fees at all, but the amount of the proposed increase, from $20 to $26 per course credit, was far less than they had feared. The system’s tuition is the lowest in the country by a wide margin, and the state Legislative Analyst’s Office last week recommended tripling the fee in order to generate additional revenue and to take better advantage of federal student-aid programs.
The government of Newfoundland and Labrador has released a new edition of CareerSearch, a compilation of program-level information covering a variety of labour market outcomes and experiences of post-secondary graduates. Some of the key findings highlighted by the Department of Education include the following:
Today I visited the Collegium Maius (Great College) at Jagiellonian University in Kraków. The 15th century Collegium Maius is the oldest university building in Poland, while Jagiellonian University itself is the second oldest university in Central Europe. Polish polymath Nicolaus Copernicus, developer of the revolutionary heliocentric theory, studied here at the former Kraków Academy.
This is the view of the Collegium Maius from the street.
Inside the courtyard of the Collegium Maius.
Lech Wałęsa is a pretty popular fellow in Poland as you might imagine. He was the Patron of the EDEN 2009 Annual Conference which I attended this past week.
This afternoon I visited the Gdansk shipyards where Wałęsa and the Solidarność movement began the work that eventually led to the end of Soviet influence here and free elections. Incidently, this year is the 20th anniversary of those elections, and there is much celebrating taking place as a result.
Whenever I am fortunate to have an opportunity to travel abroad, I like to get the skinny on the post-secondary system in country I'm in. So, I was pleased to see that there's an informative piece on Polish higher education in the current (summer 2009) issue of International Higher Education. Snipped from the article:
As with most of the eastern European region, private higher education rapidly developed in Poland after the collapse of communism in 1989. Indeed, Poland quickly grew to have the largest private share in the region, some 34 percent of total enrollments. By 2007/08 the enrollment spread across some 324 private institutions, in comparison to 131 public institutions.
An overview of the private sector is possible through the categories invoked in the global private higher education literature: religious, elite/semielite, and demand absorbing/nonelite.
Only few Polish private higher education institutions are run religiously by the Roman Catholic Church and individual churches. The Catholic University of Lublin, established in 1918, is the only institution listed as private that existed under the communist regime.
Elite private higher education is quite rare outside the United States, as seen in the Times Higher Education/QS ranking and Shanghai Jiao Tong global rankings. Although no Polish university archives these rankings, a few Polish public universities qualify as elite, such as Jagiellonian University and Warsaw University.
In contrast, even the best private universities lie below these leaders. As in most countries, in Poland the large majority of private institutions are markedly nonelite. They absorb much of the demand for higher education that could not be accommodated by the public sector, from the communist era, even as that sector has since grown. Private demand absorbers are common, especially in the developing world.
From Inside Higher Ed:
Sixty-four percent of American faculty members at four-year colleges believe that their institutions have a "strong emphasis" on a "top down management style," according to an international survey of professors being released today at the annual meeting of the American Association of University Professors. Only 31 percent said that they believed there was a strong emphasis on collegiality in decision making, and only 30 percent believe that there is a strong emphasis on good communication between management of higher education and academics.
British professors in the survey had an even gloomier view on those measures of shared governance. Professors in China saw a bit more collegiality (35 percent) and less of a top down management style (57 percent).
. . .
Generally, academics in industrialized democratic nations don't appear to believe that higher education is getting better. Asked whether conditions in higher education are "very much" or "much" improved over the course of their careers, 38 percent of Americans said Yes -- while the figures were 16 percent for Britain, 22 percent for Canada and 13 percent for Japan. In contrast, academics are much more likely to feel that they are seeing major improvements in China (61 percent), Malaysia (55 percent) and Mexico (47 percent).
The view strolling along Dlugi Targ which is essentially the main drag in Gdansk.
From The Ottawa Citizen:
The University of Ottawa has introduced what it calls an “honesty, integrity and transparency” reporting tool and what professors call a “snitch line.”
In a e-mail to staff, acting vice-president of governance Nathalie Des Rosiers said the university has approved a policy on fraud and safe disclosure and “it is the duty of each employee to immediately report any incidents of wrong-doing related to University activities.”
To that end, the university has introduced a trademarked system called ClearView Connects “a tool that allows employees to report quickly, anonymously and in complete confidence any incidents of theft, misappropriation of funds, falsification of documents, vandalism, unethical behaviour, etc.”
Whistleblowers can provide information online or to a live operator on a hotline operated by ClearView. Reports are forwarded to Des Rosiers’ office.
In the neo-liberal 1990s, which seem all too distant for this aging former student activist, it became fashionable for student unions across the country (though mostly in Alberta, southern Ontario, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick) to abandon the broader Canadian student movement for the center-right hobby horses of their left-wing loathing leaders.
One recalls how the leaders of this rightward student movement derided the primary vehicle for student organizing at the time, the Canadian Federation of Students, for a perceived alignment with the New Democratic Party. There were other arguments for the fissure, of course, including myopically-conceived notions that college and university students had no interest in collectively voicing their concerns about broader societal issues such as the civil rights of women, minorities, and others; poverty and unemployment; sustainability and our environment; peace and conflict; and so on.
While witnessing the implosion of Conservative minister Lisa Raitt’s credibility, if not her political career, these past few days, I am reminded of just how far from the NDP benches some of the nineties neo-liberal student leaders have landed. In addition to New Brunswick’s Liberal minister of education, Kelly Lamrock, and Conservative caucus seatmate Stephen Fletcher, Raitt was herself a leader in the 90s efforts to divide up the student movement in Canada. Back in the day, Raitt was a vocal leader of a graduate student faction which split from the CFS National Graduate Caucus to form its own graduate student organization, the Canadian Graduate Council.
The movement that minister Raitt seems to have floundered into oblivion. At this rate, she may very well join it.
Snipped from a Canadian Association of University Teachers news release:
The organization representing more than 65,000 academic and general staff at 121 universities and colleges across Canada is calling for the resignation of Minister of State for Science and Technology Gary Goodyear following his unprecedented efforts to interfere with funding for a major academic conference.More here from The Globe and Mail.
CAUT has learned that Goodyear telephoned the president of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) to ask him to reconsider a peer-reviewed decision to fund an academic conference called "Israel/Palestine: Mapping models of statehood and prospects for peace" being held at York University later this month.
My visit to Montreal for the Adult Learning Knowledge Centre Symposium is unfortunately a short one. This afternoon I will embark on a 14-and-a-half-hour journey to Gdansk (via Munich and Warsaw) to attend the annual conference of the European Distance and E-Learning Network (EDEN).
EDEN "exists to share knowledge and improve understanding for professionals in distance and e-learning across the whole of Europe and beyond, and to promote policy and practice for this field of endeavour". In the spirit of that, later in the week my colleague Dr. Dennis Sharpe and I will be presenting on recent research we've conducted through Memorial University's Killick Centre for E-Learning Research.
The EDEN conference has an official conference blog which will report on highlights of the conference and provide an opportunity for on-line discussion of the events in Gdansk.
From the Winnipeg Free Press:
Brandon University is leaving five per cent of its professors' jobs vacant for the 2009-2010 school year to help find more than $1.2 million in cuts to balance its budget.The jobs aren't gone, but 11 of 220 faculty positions will be left vacant next year, said BU vice-president of finance Scott Lamont.
A subsidiary of Apollo Group Inc. has acquired the UK-based BPP Holdings plc, a top provider of education and training for professionals in the legal and finance industries, for about $540 million (USD). Apollo Group Inc. is the parent company of the University of Phoenix, the largest private university in the United States.
I am on route to Montreal today. Tomorrow morning I am presenting at the 2009 Annual Symposium of the Canadian Council on Learning's Adult Learning Knowledge Centre. This presentation, An Analysis of Non-Formal Adult Learner Programming at Canadian Post-Secondary Institutions, will be similar to the one I gave at the Canadian Society for the Study of Higher Education annual conference last month.
My visit to Montreal for the Adult Learning Knowledge Centre Symposium is unfortunately a short one.
This evening I will embark on a 14-and-a-half-hour journey to Gdansk (via Munich and Warsaw) to attend the annual conference of the European Distance and E-Learning Network (EDEN). Later in the week my colleague Dr. Dennis Sharpe and I will be presenting on recent research we've conducted through Memorial University's Killick Centre for E-Learning Research.
The EDEN conference has an official conference blog which will report on highlights of the conference and provide an opportunity for on-line discussion.
Female students are ahead of men in almost every measure of UK university achievement, according to a report from higher education researchers.
A Higher Education Policy Institute report shows that women are more likely to get places in the top universities and go on to get better grades.
Women also outnumber men in high status subjects, such as law and medicine.
Women have been entering university in greater numbers than men in recent years - with the participation rate for young women standing at 49%, compared with 38% of young men.
From The Times of India:
If you want a good university education in India, there are two choices: make sure you're born brilliant and study incredibly hard to gain entry to one of the country's few world-class engineering, science or medical schools. Alternatively, you can head abroad. The first is getting tougher - only 2.7% of those who sit the IIT entrance exams get in, compared to 10-15% heading for Harvard and Princeton. Little wonder that roughly 160,000 Indians go overseas each year, in pursuit of their dream education.Also from The Times of India, Indian students rally in Sydney against racial attacks:
Angry over the spate of racial assaults in Australia, hundreds of Indian students on Sunday took out a massive rally in Sydney to protest against the attacks targeting the community.
Some of the sharpest young minds from India have taken up residence at B.C. universities as part of an unusual program intended to woo international students and boost Canada's reputation as an education destination.
The 17 students, from the elite Indian Institutes of Technology, will spend three months working on mathematical sciences and economic research alongside select professors at the University of B.C., Simon Fraser University and the University of Victoria.
But it's not all work. There will also be whale watching off Vancouver Island, a Whistler visit, kayaking, hiking, possibly bungee jumping and -- with a bit of luck -- tickets to a Coldplay concert in June.
From Michael Barbour at Virtual High School Meanderings:
Tinkering with how K-12 education is designed and delivered, without addressing the root cause of many of the problems facing K-12 education (e.g., poverty, lack of nutrition, inaccessibility of day care and early childhood education opportunities, poor health due to lack of health insurance, etc.) will result in the same outcomes. It doesn’t matter if a hungry child is taught by a teaching lecturing or student-centric learning software. If the child isn’t learning because they are hungry then the child won’t learn either way.
From the UK Daily Mail:
The proportion of working class students going to university has dropped since tuition fees were brought in.
Students from working-class families are taking a smaller share of places at university after the introduction of £3,000-a-year tuition charges in 2006.
And nearly a quarter of all students are failing to finish the courses they start despite a £1billion crackdown on the university drop-out toll, university league tables showed yesterday.
Student leaders blamed tuition charges for the figures, and demanded a radical shake-up of university funding.
Inside Higher Ed story:
Most of us have had the experience of receiving e-mail with an attachment, trying to open the attachment, and finding a corrupted file that won't open. That concept is at the root of a new Web site advertising itself (perhaps serious only in part) as the new way for students to get extra time to finish their assignments.
Corrupted-Files.com offers a service . . . that sells students (for only $3.95, soon to go up to $5.95) intentionally corrupted files. Why buy a corrupted file? Here's what the site says: "Step 1: After purchasing a file, rename the file e.g. Mike_Final-Paper. Step 2: E-mail the file to your professor along with your 'here's my assignment' e-mail. Step 3: It will take your professor several hours if not days to notice your file is 'unfortunately' corrupted. Use the time this website just bought you wisely and finish that paper!!!"
The annual report of the Construction Sector Council says that Atlantic Canada needs 20,000 skilled trades' workers:
Atlantic Canada will need more than 4,600 new trades' people to meet demands for new construction. The age of Atlantic Canada's workforce is above the national average. As a result, an unprecedented 15,000 workers are needed to replace retiring baby boomers between now and 2017.
In late April, the Manchester Metropolitan Students’ Union was accused of spying on professors after it set up a hotline for student complaints about late or canceled lectures. The University and College Union, which represents UK academics, contends that student campaigns involving unsolicited and anonymous criticism are a form of bullying:
Student campaigners at the University of Central Lancashire have posted examples of bad feedback online. At the University of Bolton, students have left anonymous cards in staff pigeonholes, giving them marks out of ten for performance.
And at Manchester Metropolitan University, students are texting its students' union to inform it when classes are cancelled or lecturers are late.
The University and College Union is unhappy about the campaigns, and it has likened the scorecards at Bolton to "hate mail".
At its annual congress last week, the union passed a motion on the subject that said: "(UCU) notes the concern regarding evidence, particularly in the North West region, of unsolicited, inappropriate and often anonymous criticism by students of academic staff via text messages, social networking sites and pigeonhole postcards. Conference believes that this is a form of bullying (that) cannot be tolerated."
From The New York Times:
Harvard University will endow a visiting professorship in lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender studies, a position that, it believes, will be the first endowed, named chair in the subject at an American college.
The visiting professorship, which the university is planning to announce formally as part of commencement exercises on Thursday, was made possible by a gift of $1.5 million from the Harvard Gay and Lesbian Caucus.
With the gift, Harvard said it would regularly invite “eminent scholars studying issues related to sexuality or sexual minorities” to teach on campus for one semester, according to a draft of a university press release.
From The London Evening Standard:
Britain's best universities should be privatised to form an elite US-style Ivy League, a leading higher-education figure said today.
Sir Roy Anderson, head of Imperial College London, warned that Britain's world-leading reputation for higher education was under threat from funding cuts and a lack of government vision. He suggested elite academic institutions such as Imperial, Oxford, and Cambridge should be given the power to charge unlimited tuition fees and take on more overseas students.
In an exclusive interview with the Standard, Sir Roy called for a debate over the privatisation of the country's top five universities, which would also include the London School of Economics and University College London.
He suggested that the best universities should be allowed to “float free” from the Government's funding regime to charge unlimited fees, putting them on a par with US Ivy League institutions such as Princeton, Harvard and Yale.
As I noted last week, the Canadian Council on Learning’s analysis suggests that Canada’s most recent score on the Council's Composite Learning Index (CLI) has declined slightly in comparison to the previous year's score. In taking issue with the suggestion that there is a link between the recession (i.e., unemployment) and the lower CLI score, Educational Policy Institute (EPI) partisan Alex Usher makes the following incisive observation about the Index:
Ever since the CLI was launched, it has been screamingly obvious that there is an almost-one-to-one correlation between provincial CLI scores and provincial GDP per capita. The two traditional “have” provinces, Alberta and Ontario, have the highest CLI scores and have done since the start. Newfoundland, traditionally the poor man of confederation, has the lowest score and has since the start. Quebec and the maritimes do poorly; the western provinces tend to do better.
Fundamentally, everything the CLI measures– more spending on education and culture, more educated people, denser networks of cultural and educational amenities, putting kids in sports clubs - are correlates of the existence of an affluent middle-class. There is nothing more complicated to it than that.
