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Higher Education in Ontario
Ontarians are busy debating where the province’s three new post-secondary campuses should be, with mayors from Barrie to Niagara Falls holding out their caps. But ahead of that decision, Glen Murray, Ontario’s new Minister of Training, Colleges and Universities, says there are all kinds of ideas he wants to explore first. Those who lust after future campuses should take note.
Here are 10 things I learned about the future of higher education in Ontario from Glen Murray.
1. Murray’s biggest concern “is how we’re utilizing the existing capacity we have right now.” He thinks more campuses should be using their physical resources year-round, by offering three-semesters, perhaps.
2. He’s exploring three-year degrees. Three, after all, is the standard in Europe and is increasingly common in Australia. The fourth year could be rolled into the Master’s, he says.
3. Murray knows that students’ “tolerance” for 500-person lectures delivered on physical campuses is waning. He thinks future courses will include more online delivery. “I think you’re seeing the build out now, in the next few years, of information technology and online learning at the kind of scale you saw with the expansion of the colleges in the 70s and 80s,” he says.
4. Murray thinks the government can help us use our time more wisely, perhaps by offering courses on commuter trains and coaches. “Working, looking after your family, often your extended family… it’s very hard to find time to upgrade your skills,” he explains.
5. Murray thinks new campuses should be catalysts for downtown revitalization. When he was mayor of Winnipeg, Red River College wanted to build on the periphery, but he insisted it be built in the Exchange District. “That triggered a renewal of that part of Winnipeg where the vacancy rate dropped from over 50 per cent to around 10 per cent and provoked a renewal of the City of Winnipeg’s tax base,” he says, and “it spawned a whole bunch of new enterprises, triggered a digital effects industry, and repopulated a whole bunch of heritage buildings.”
6. Murray sees a lot of struggling places aching for development in Ontario too. He notes that successful revitalizations of downtowns are already underway by Brock University in St. Catharines and by Wilfrid Laurier University in Brantford, Ont. He sees potential for such revitalization in cities like Hamilton, Ont. where downtown is “50 per cent parking lots.”
7. But he thinks rural Ontario can’t be overlooked. “The problems of Dryden, Cornwall, Lindsay, Sudbury or Goderich are not that different from the problems of large urban centres where mainstreets have declined and are bereft of businesses and activities,” he says. “We want to make sure we’re restoring small-town Ontario and using our public institutions to help rebuild main-streets of small communities.” While he says it’s premature to guess where the new campuses may be, that statement makes it seem less likely that all will be built in fast-growing suburban Toronto.
8. Murray says Ontario will bound into the future on the backs of the Gazelles, small knowledge-based companies that derive value out of high-tech design and intellectual property. “[Gazelles] are often perfect in the small retail buildings that make up the small streets of downtowns and they need connections to some sort of university or research facility,” he says.
9. Murray won’t commit to making the new campuses teaching-focused, as was proposed in the recent book Academic Reform. In teaching universities, class sizes could theoretically be halved or tuition could be reduced—or both—because professors spend 80 per cent of their time teaching, rather than 40 per cent of their time teaching and 40 per cent on research as they do today.
10. Policy on the new campuses is coming in a month or so. In the meantime: “if universities are coming at me saying, look, right now we have X number of buildings and this kind of campus, we think we can use these assets to better serve our communities, but our new campus idea would add net new value by doing this, this and this,” says Murray, “that’s the type of thing I’m looking for.”
This article was written by Josh Dehaas for Macleans on campus.
Get Involved: The Educator Volunteer Network
A new initiative by the Canadian International Learning Foundation has set out to overcome what Canadians say is the single biggest barrier to becoming a volunteer: lack of time.
“Change the world in five hours a week” is the mantra of the Educator Volunteer Network, which matches up skilled Canadians with schools in developing and at-risk regions around the world, letting them donate their time without ever leaving their desks.
EducatorVolunteer.Net is the brainchild of Ryan Aldred, president of the CanILF, a registered charity devoted to improving educational opportunities for children in destitute and war-torn regions. Through the agency’s work in Afghanistan, Aldred said, he saw that online volunteers could make a massive difference to schools.
So far more than 50 volunteers have signed up to provide one-on-one online assistance with new technologies, research requests, curriculum enhancement, development of resources, writing content for websites and putting together budgets and business plans.
“Going overseas to volunteer isn’t always possible,” said Melanie Wilson, a volunteer working on her PhD in Montreal, in a press release. “Now I’m in touch directly with a school in Uganda… It has been a fun, interesting and empowering experience that has nicely fit into my already busy schedule.”
In addition to two schools in Uganda, there are six other partner schools in Afghanistan, Tanzania, Nepal and Liberia.
The beauty of helping online, Aldred points out, is that because the network offers mainly expertise, there’s little risk that resources might be misused. Volunteers know the exact value of their contributions, and the schools provide oversight and feedback to determine their needs and evaluate the assistance they’re getting.
While charitable organizations are increasingly using the Internet and social media to solicit donations, Aldred said, the network is the first to harness it in this specific way, and he sees huge opportunity.
Right now, Aldred said, the network is seeking volunteers with business knowledge, “to help with developing business plans and help [schools] build up the credibility they need to work with international organizations.”
To volunteer or to donate, visit educatorvolunteer.net
To read the entire Vancouver Sun article, click here.
More education a better crime-fighter than tougher sentences: UBC study
Increasing funding to make sure more students graduate from high school would be a more effective way of reducing property crime than increasing sentences, according to a new University of B.C. study.
Improving high school graduation rates would boost income potential, consumer spending and taxes paid over the lifetime of the graduates, said UBC economics professor Giovanni Gallipoli, who co-authored the study, Education and Crime over the Life Cycle, with Giulio Fella, a professor at the University of London.
“Educational policies are extremely effective in reducing property crime,” Gallipoli said in an interview Tuesday. “It increases their earning potential and employability.”
Such a policy would also pay for itself, he pointed out.
“Our findings suggest that keeping kids in school, making them employable and improving their value in the labour market is nearly twice as cost-effective at reducing crime as simple incarceration,” he said. “People commit property crime for economic reasons, so providing more economic opportunities through education and employment can reduce the incentives for people to engage in criminal behaviour.”
The study comes at a time when the federal Conservative government has introduced a new tough-on-crime bill, which is expected to increase prison sentences and force the government to build more prisons.
Gallipoli suggested the money would be better spent tackling the roots causes of crime, such as the lack of education and employability.
“Canada has very expensive correctional facilities,” he said, noting the average annual cost of keeping a prisoner incarcerated in 2009 was $109,699 a year, the highest of any Western country.
The study focused on property crime, including burglary, robbery and fraud, and found that such crimes are more likely to be driven by economic considerations than violent crime.
According to the researchers, high school dropouts aged 16 to 23 are most likely to commit property crime.
Please click here to read the entire Vancouver Sun article.
Google Scholar Citations Open to All
Google has introduced a simple way for authors to compute their citation metrics and track them over time. To make use of this service Click here and follow the instructions to get started.
According to Google “Here’s how it works. You can quickly identify which articles are yours, by selecting one or more groups of articles that are computed statistically. Then, Google will collect citations to your articles, graph them over time, and compute your citation metrics – the widely used h-index; the i-10 index, which is simply the number of articles with at least ten citations; and, of course, the total number of citations to your articles. Each metric is computed over all citations and also over citations in articles published in the last five years.
Your citation metrics will update automatically as we find new citations to your articles on the web. You can also set up automated updates for the list of your articles, or you can choose to review the suggested updates. And you can, of course, manually update your profile by adding missing articles, fixing bibliographic errors, and merging duplicate entries.
As one would expect, you can search for profiles of colleagues, co-authors, or other researchers using their name, affiliation, or areas of interest, e.g., researchers at US universities or researchers interested in genomics. You can add links to your co-authors, if they already have a profile, or you can invite them to create one.
You can also make your profile public, e.g., Alex Verstak, Anurag Acharya. If you choose to make your profile public, it can appear in Google Scholar search results when someone searches for your name, e.g., [alex verstak]. This will make it easier for your colleagues worldwide to follow your work.
We would like to thank the participants in the limited release of Scholar Citations for their detailed feedback. They were generous with their time and patient with an early version. Their feedback greatly helped us improve the service. The key challenge was to make profile maintenance as hands-free as possible for those of you who prefer the convenience of automated updates, while providing as much flexibility as possible for those who prefer to curate their profile themselves.”
Here is hoping that Google Scholar Citations will help researchers everywhere view and track the worldwide influence of their own and their colleagues’ work.
Parents cry foul after Toronto school bans balls
A Toronto elementary school has banned most balls from its playground, citing the need to protect staff and students after a parent got hit in the head with a soccer ball. The new policy has infuriated parents and students, and exposes what child-health researchers say is a growing focus on child safety that is keeping kids from being physically active.
On Monday, Earl Beatty Junior and Senior Public School principal Alicia Fernandez sent home a note warning parents their students are no longer allowed to bring soccer balls, basketballs, baseballs, footballs and volleyballs to school. All balls that weren’t made of sponge, or nerf, material would be confiscated.The school, which has about 350 students in Kindergarten to Grade 8, along with a daycare, has a small, walled playground that gets crowded during recess and flying balls had become a constant problem, said ward trustee Sheila Cary-Meagher. Two weeks ago a mother picking up her child at the daycare went to hospital with a concussion after getting struck in the back of the head with a soccer ball.
“They have been trying very hard for a long time to get kids to stop throwing balls so hard and it wasn’t working, so (the principal) just had to ramp up the policy,” Cary-Meagher said. Anna Caputo, a spokeswoman for the school board, said the ban was actually a long-standing policy at the school that had stopped being enforced until someone got hurt. “Some parents will say it’s extreme and some may agree (the principal) had to quickly implement something that will address the situation at the school to avoid the further risk of injury to the students,” she said.
The Toronto school isn’t the only one to ban balls over concern for student safety. Last year, an Ottawa public school banned balls on the playground during winter. In June, a public school St. Catharines, Ont., banned balls after a girl got hit in the head while watching a schoolyard soccer game. Both bans were overturned after students at the schools started a petition.
“When it comes down to it, the kids are not allowed to do anything, so there’s 325 kids who are all just standing around for 15 minutes,” said Scott Taylor, whose 10-year-old son, Matthew, started the petition at the St. Catharines school. “Kids need to play; they need to have things to do.”
Click here to read the entire Vancouver Sun article, written by Tamsin McMahon.