OUSA

Yesterday I had the opportunity to attend a meeting hosted by the Ontario Women’s Directorate (http://www.citizenship.gov.on.ca/owd/english/) on developing a plan in response to sexual violence on campuses in the province of Ontario. The meeting was a preliminary step in the information gathering process towards developing a comprehensive and diverse sexual violence action plan on the part of the Ontario government. It brought together experts in the field, community organizations, and stakeholder representatives to that end, including some of our partners — notably, the COU, OCUFA, and the MTCU. The meeting began with remarks from Hon. Laurel Broten, Minister Responsible for Women’s Issues and Minister of Children and Youth Services, in which she spoke about the importance of this project and laid out the consultative steps that will be taken in the coming months. We then proceeded into discussion, guided by general questions concerning what kinds of education strategies are most effective, what promising practices currently exist, and what would be the best approach to a comprehensive plan given Ontario’s fiscal situation. The discussion was long and detailed, with many different suggestions from all sides of the room on the best way to move forward with a public action plan. I will do my best to summarize some of the major points we touched on.

The first thing I should stress is the group’s insistence on how real and systemic of a problem this issue really is. Typical administrative estimates of sexual assault incidence tend to be under 10 individual cases per year, but these are based solely on numbers reported to campus security departments. Some of the faculty in the room had performed research that showed as many as 8% of women attending post-secondary education in a given year experience sexual harassment or assault. The group identified this discrepancy as a significant challenge moving forward, and urged that all future educational efforts include thorough research in order to identify the full breadth of the problem.

One recurring theme was that any public education initiative would need to meaningfully address the role men play in sexual violence on campuses in Ontario. Research shows that an overwhelming percentage of reported cases are perpetrated by against women by men that they know, and the group felt that it was important to teach men how they can speak to each other about the kinds attitudes that enable sexual harassment and assault against women. It was specifically brought up that most men have not heard the word ‘feminist’ before they get to post-secondary education, and if they have it is largely in a negative context. Possible methods of education included bystander training, in which men can learn about how they can react in group situations when sexist or violent utterances occur, and ally training, in which men can learn to pro-actively seek ways to speak out against violence against women.

In terms of implementation of these programs, the group stressed the necessity of a permanent staff member on each campus dedicated to these issues, who could take pressure off already overburdened human rights/equity offices. While we acknowledged that financial resources are hard to come by at this time, the group felt that without this position, a sustained sexual violence action plan would be nigh impossible. This staff member would work in conjunction with community groups to develop campus networks dedicated to education and awareness-raising around issues of sexual violence on campus. Once these networks are set up, a province-wide strategy would be much easier to implement centrally.

Another popular measure around the table was the development of a sexual violence education and awareness toolkit which would be ready-made for local adaptation. This package would be made available online and easily accessible. It would include information on how to run educational campaigns, research on campus violence, and provide lists of community resources for administrative use.

Finally, it was stressed that any approach would need to incorporate principles of anti-racism and anti-oppression. Without these kinds of understandings, any plan would lack the systemic perspective necessary to enact real, lasting change.

The Ontario Women’s Directorate will continue to hold these meetings throughout the summer, looking to ultimately enact something concrete this fall. This work is vital for creating an inclusive and safe space for women on our campuses, and am happy that OUSA will continue as a partner in this process.

Chris Rudnicki
Vice-President (University Affairs)
Alma Mater Society of Queen’s University

Hello Everyone,

My name is Kieran Slobodin and I’m the Academic Affairs Commissioner (2010-2011) for the Alma Mater Society, Queen’s University.  I came to Queen’s in 2008 from Whitehorse, Yukon, where I was born and raised and have thus far enjoyed two wonderful years at university.  I am currently entering my third year of studies with a major in Economics and a planned International Studies Certificate in the works.  I would like to talk about my involvement with the Alma Mater Society here at Queen’s as well some of the issues facing my Commission this year.

I’ve been involved with I have been involved with this commission since October 2008 when I was hired to be an Academic Affairs Intern.  Since then I’ve been a Deputy Commissioner and now, Commissioner.  I’m also heavily involved in our Orientation Week as a Gael and Orientation Coordinator (different divisions of orientation leadership).  Up until this year I was employed with our safety service, Walk Home, and continue to indulge myself in the outdoors through Queen’s Outdoors Club one of our 200 plus clubs.

The Academic Affairs Commission is in an excellent place to start the 2010-2011 year.  The result of the efforts of many past commissioners, the commission is offering a key service to students this year in the form of an online Syllabus Bank and USAT publication site, to be released sometime in the fall.  Additionally, this year is a very important time at our university as our new principal, Daniel Woolf, has begun an immense undertaking to draft a new Academic Plan and driving plan for our university.  This is a critical time for students to weigh in on their academics at Queen’s and the commission will play a big role in facilitating that dialogue.  Finally, for those of you planning to attend an OUSA General Assembly this year, if you come in the winter Queen’s will be your gracious host and we welcome you to come to campus.

Over the next year with OUSA I am hoping to be involved in researching and drafting our revised Financial Aid policy and, like my fellow Steering Committee member, Saad Aslam, I am very interested in the provincial government’s plans for the proposed Ontario Online Institute.  I have very high hopes that this initiative will not only increase access and affordability to students by making university courses available online, but I am hoping this will lead to less restrictive inter-university credit transfer policies.

The upcoming year has a lot of exciting opportunities before it, both at home and across Ontario and I am proud to be a member of such an excellent team representing students across Ontario.  I encourage you to visit the OUSA website often as it offers excellent updates on post-secondary education and if you have any questions for me individually you can contact me at aac@ams.queensu.ca or, if you’re ever at Queen’s, stop by our offices in the JDUC.

Cha Gheill!

Kieran Slobodin
Academic Affairs Commissioner
Queen’s University

TORONTO, June 29 /CNW/ – After reviewing the latest research on targeted student success interventions in Ontario universities, students are excited by the positive results and encourage the provincial government to champion broad implementation of these programs across the Province.

For the past three years, the Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario (HEQCO) has sponsored research into intervention programs designed to promote access, retention and quality in post-secondary education. Results of these interventions, released today, demonstrate the significant impact targeted programs can have on student success.

For instance, at Carleton University, a Peer-Assisted Study Session (PASS) was implemented in courses with high failure rates. Controlling for admission average, participants showed significant improvements in academic success, understanding of course concepts, and self-confidence. Academic success improved with the number of hours of participation, up to an overall improvement of 1.75 grade points.

“This research has confirmed once more that targeted initiatives to support struggling students can significantly improve student success,” said Meaghan Coker, President of the Ontario Undergraduate Student Alliance (OUSA). “It’s now up to the government and institutions to come together and take real action on these findings.”

OUSA’s recent survey of over 10,000 Ontario undergraduate students showed over half were not satisfied with academic advising, career counseling, and services for students with disabilities. Direct government funding for student support services and early warning systems is needed if Ontario is to see widespread improvements in student persistence and success.

OUSA represents the interests of over 140,000 professional and undergraduate, full- and part-time university students at seven Ontario institutions.

TORONTO, June 29 /CNW/ – After reviewing the latest research on targeted student success interventions in Ontario universities, students are excited by the positive results and encourage the provincial government to champion broad implementation of these programs across the Province.

For the past three years, the Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario (HEQCO) has sponsored research into intervention programs designed to promote access, retention and quality in post-secondary education. Results of these interventions, released today, demonstrate the significant impact targeted programs can have on student success.

For instance, at Carleton University, a Peer-Assisted Study Session (PASS) was implemented in courses with high failure rates. Controlling for admission average, participants showed significant improvements in academic success, understanding of course concepts, and self-confidence. Academic success improved with the number of hours of participation, up to an overall improvement of 1.75 grade points.

“This research has confirmed once more that targeted initiatives to support struggling students can significantly improve student success,” said Meaghan Coker, President of the Ontario Undergraduate Student Alliance (OUSA). “It’s now up to the government and institutions to come together and take real action on these findings.”

OUSA’s recent survey of over 10,000 Ontario undergraduate students showed over half were not satisfied with academic advising, career counseling, and services for students with disabilities. Direct government funding for student support services and early warning systems is needed if Ontario is to see widespread improvements in student persistence and success.

Holla OUSA,

Allow me to introduce myself, my name is Joe Finkle and I am the Vice President (Education) of the McMaster Students Union and the Vice President (Administration) of OUSA. I just finished my fourth year of Honours History and was elected at the beginning of April for a one year term.

Personally, I am extremely excited to be working with OUSA. My university involvement began when a friend of mine forced me to come to a meeting of the McMaster OUSA Street Team, and it has been all uphill since then. Over the past few years I have been exposed to the amazing work OUSA has undertaken and I am proud to say that I am a member of this organization. I have seen how education changes lives for the better and I want to continue improve the condition and experiences of students through OUSA.

My key issue lay in quality of education, which OUSA has been a leader in. I want to ensure the quality of learning and teaching in Ontario, and OUSA is simply the best way to do so.

Best,

Joe Finkle
Vice President (Education), McMaster Students Union
Vice President (Administration), OUSA

It’s Day 3, the final day of the STLHE conference in Toronto, but interesting breakout sessions have driven great turnout for an early Saturday morning in an otherwise deserted city. I’ve been looking forward to this particular breakout session for a while, though I was somewhat surprised by the conclusions that emerged.

Presented by Elizabeth Wooster and Tony Chambers of OISE, the session’s title pretty much says it all. OISE is in the midst of a longitudinal study on the effects of small classes on first year undergrads and the preliminary results are interesting.

But first, a review of the literature on small classes yielded mixed results. It seems that we can’t say definitively that small classes in any discipline actually generate more learning, critical thinking, or other competencies. Intuitively, those who have experienced small classes can say yes, it was a positive experience. But we don’t yet have the data to back up this conclusion and there are almost no longitudinal studies in this area.

Graduate students, with some professorial support and significant involvement from the Registrar’s Office, are leading the OISE study. Students were divided into a treatment and control group and the treatment group was given a small class experience in either a one- or two-term course. Pre and post surveys were used to gather qualitative data. Unfortunately, nothing quantitative is yet available. The Registrar’s Office will be providing marks data soon and NSSE scores will also be looked at, so the quantitative results are coming.

From the survey results, a few things stood out. Most striking was that results between the treatment and control groups were more or less identical across the board. In the pre survey, all students rated strong research credentials as the most important quality in a professor; coming out, the most important characteristic changed to the ability to maintain students’ attention and hold their interest, but again, it didn’t matter if you were in the treatment or control group.

When Dr. Chambers was asked whether we should focus new investments in lowering class sizes, his answer was striking. Based on the data, he suggested we should spend money on improving the quality of teaching in courses that currently exists before lowering class sizes. After looking at further data, a new response may emerge, but this is what the data tells us right now.

We have collectively made the assumption that you get greater student-faculty interaction and a better overall education in a small class. Certainly, small classes provide the potential, perhaps even the probability, that students will receive a better experience. But on a macro scale, we just don’t know how to measure if this potential is fulfilled.

One thing at least is certain: small classes alone do not ensure quality.

This post concludes OUSA’s blogging form the STLHE conference. Hope you enjoyed reading.

Alexi White
Executive Director

The University of Alberta’s Faculty of Science has implemented an innovative first year program, and I had the pleasure of hearing about and viewing their results in one of the STLHE’s breakout session. The students in the faculty have the option of enrolling in SCI 100 as a replacement for all of the science courses typically taught by subject in first year (i.e., no chemistry, biology, physics, or earth sciences classes). Instead this group of 40 students are taught by a set of nine instructors about all aspects of science in an interdisciplinary way. Over the course of the year, the students perform over 70 labs and receive dozens of one-hour lecture sessions on a mix of core scientific concepts and real-world examples ranging from non-renewable energy sources to radioactivity to water management. Field trips, scavenger hunts, and collaborative learning techniques are common. The focus throughout the first year is on instilling the scientific method, discovery research techniques, and the formation of a basis on which to build their next three years of more content-based learning.

Considering this began relatively recently, the evaluation of the impact of this program is still underway. But the results thus far look impressive as the students are getting better grades, are giving better course evaluations, and seem genuinely more engaged. The employment of well-studied active teaching techniques has no doubt had an enormous effect on these students.

While I doubt that many institutions have (or could) replicated this highly-resource-intensive program across entire faculties, discussions with people from all across the country indicate that many universities are attempting to move towards a model where first year students are exposed to a high-impact experience. A 100-level course that overviews the discipline and future careers and teaches broad thinking and communication skills are being implemented in many programs, as are first-year seminars and commitments to ensure that every first-year student has at least one course with a low student-to-faculty ratio. One particularly good example from Ontario came from the president of the University of Guelph who shared with us about the problem-based seminar that students are exposed to in their first year.

Julia Christensen Hughes, the co-author of Taking Stock, talks frequently about the importance of “high-impact” experiences on student engagement, particularly in the first year. I look back at my first year experience at a research-intensive university, and I don’t think that a single one of my ten classes had fewer than 100 students and certainly all employed a lecture-only style of teaching. It is encouraging to hear that a few universities have moved to improve this situation, and I look forward to working with our institutional partners and government on how to broadly implement these practices so that all Ontario university students receive the benefit of an engaging and rich education.

Sam Andrey
Director of Research and Policy Analysis

Here we are on Day 2 of the annual STLHE conference, looking forward to a packed day of discussion on issues in teaching and learning. My first session of the day, presented by Tyler Evans-Tokaryk and Cleo Boyd of the University of Toronto Mississauga, focused on issues of plagiarism in today’s universities, both from a faculty and student perspective.

After introducing the topic and covering some of the important literature, the facilitators presented an intriguing survey of faculty opinions on plagiarism. In general, faculty agree that plagiarism is a big problem; however, there are fundamental differences across disciplines about how faculty understand plagiarism, its causes, and its effects. Humanities and social sciences faculty were significantly more concerned about the causal relationship between globalization and technology than were faculty in science and engineering.

The facilitators also presented the results of their student focus groups, which indicated that students have great trouble understanding the multitude of different definitions or approaches to plagiarism in different disciplines. There’s also a strong sense among students that professors are not acting as role models in this area.

To illustrate some of the misunderstandings, a story was told about a student who believed that by buying the textbook they owned the ideas in it and should be allowed to use them.

With the move from academic dishonesty to academic integrity, more and more institutions are removing consideration of intent from academic codes of conduct. Under this model, whether a student committed plagiarism by accident or on purpose, they are considered equally guilty. Intent is considered only in the punishment stage.

Based on their research, the breakout facilitators argued that this is unfair to students who do not have the necessary understanding of plagiarism to be judged in this way.

Discussion also touched on the perceived double standard in the way plagiarism is dealt with at the student level and at the faculty level. While intent is not considered in cases of student plagiarism, most faculty collective agreements require clear and cogent proof of dishonest intent in order to find a professor (who arguably should have a better understanding of plagiarism than a student) guilty of the offense.

Alexi White
Executive Director

When choosing my last breakout session of the day, I was attracted by this one’s focus not only on teaching and learning pedagogies but also on the barriers faced by students from underrepresented groups. Run by Meredith Lordan, a high school teacher and professor at UofT, the session was about the challenge of designing and implementing the HSBC Steps to University Program, a joint initiative between UofT, Pathways to Education, and the Toronto District School Board to give a taste of university to high school students in Regent Park.

After completing an interview process, students are selected to take a real, intensive first-year sociology course on weeknights, after a full day of school. The students are often tired and are juggling family responsibilities and jobs, yet with a retention rate of about 75%, they seem to be very committed.

Course instructors use a variety of interesting tools to engage the students and keep them motivated. For example, one class created a successful magazine aimed at other residence in Regent Park. Another tool is bringing back successful graduates to speak to the students about their experiences and the barriers they had to overcome.

When I asked her, Dr. Lordan said she thinks this model could easily be exported to other high-risk areas. She suggested the best way to gain widespread support for such a program is to create joint-partnerships with the school boards.

It’s long been OUSA’s position that the government should create an arm’s-length foundation to fund community early outreach initiatives across Ontario. Such a foundation could be the catalyst that brings institutions, school boards and communities together to implement similar programs and start closing those persistent participation gaps.

Alexi White
Executive Director

Just before lunch I had a fantastic conversation with an educational developer from Open Universities Australia (OUA). With the provincial government preparing to create implement an Ontario Online Institute, learning from the experiences of others is critical if we are to avoid duplicating their mistakes.

The OUA, like the Open University in the UK, takes online courses from “brick and mortar” universities and brings them together to create degree programs. Students interact directly with the OUA on everything from admissions to student support, but another institution grants the final degree. In pulling all these online courses together, credit transfer and cost-sharing become significant hurdles, but the OUA has worked through these issues over the last 15 years or so.

This is exactly the kind of model students want to see from the Ontario Online Institute, and OUSA will continue to work with the OUA and other partners in online education as we prepare a detailed blueprint for the Institute.

Alexi White
Executive Director