Educated Solutions

The rapid advancements in technology and digital learning accelerated by the pandemic have driven innovation, change, and transformation within the post-secondary sector. Conversations have spanned a range of topics, including teaching and learning, privacy, and ethical use. This year's Educated Solutions offers critical discussions and fresh insights into the growing partnership between technology and modern education to emphasize the pressing need for meaningful conversations, strategic insights and intentional action that can pave the way for a more inclusive and equitable future for all students.

The events over the past couple of years, both pandemic and non-pandemic related, have sparked conversation about how post-secondary can reimagine its policies and practices to cultivate a more accessible, affordable, accountable, high quality education system. This year’s Educated Solutions offers suggestions for how the sector can shape its strategic vision to better adapt to the changing in-study and post-graduation climates, to ensure students have a rewarding and fruitful post-secondary experience.

Over the past 18 months, conversations about equity in post-secondary education have become more prominent. This year’s Educated Solutions offers suggestions for how the sector should strengthen their equity initiatives to support students from marginalized backgrounds, with articles focusing on the barriers faced by various student populations in access, employment outcomes, research, and educational resources.

In March 2020, COVID-19 dramatically shifted the landscape of post-secondary education. This year’s Educated Solutions offers strategies for how the sector should move forward, with articles focusing on improving the quality of online learning, supporting student mental health, providing accommodations for students with disabilities, and fostering collaboration between students, instructors, institutions, government, and communities.

This year’s edition looks at the importance of student-led advocacy and the challenges it faces moving forward. OUSA’s hope is that the ideas and solutions put forward here will help address shared concerns and lead to a more accessible, affordable, accountable, and high-quality post-secondary education system in Ontario.

This issue is called Tuition and Funding. With the current tuition framework set to expire in 2019, we thought it would be fitting to bring together sector experts and student voices to present their ideas and concerns about tuition and post-secondary funding in Ontario. It is OUSA’s hope that we can use these ideas and proposed solutions to address shared concerns and help create a more accessible, affordable, and high-quality post-secondary system in Ontario.

This issue is called Student Employment and is aimed at exploring both the strengths and challenges the post-secondary education sector encounters as Ontario’s students prepare to enter the workforce. To do so, we have brought together a diverse set of perspectives from across the post-secondary education sector to share their thoughts, expertise and experience on the topic.

This issue is aiming at challenging and contemplating the systemic direction of higher education in Ontario. It fathers ideas, opinions, and concerns from students and leaders in the post-secondary sector on what this vision might look like, and what collectively we must do to realize it.

Affordability is an important and prominent facet of the ongoing debate on the future of post-secondary education. Obviously tuition costs are an area of concern for both students and their parents. For governments and universities, quality of education and ensuring financial sustainability is heavily linked to the tuition debate. Beyond simply tuition itself, students view ancillary fees, student financial assistance and textbook costs as important facets of “affordability.” This issue of Educated Solutions looks at some of these issues from a variety of perspectives.