Word cloud courtesy of hastac.org.

Last November, the New York Times declared 2012 the Year of the MOOC. Now, halfway through 2013, the MOOC momentum appears to be slowing – or, at least, shifting in a new direction. Some higher education observers go further, claiming the MOOC “revolution” is over.

For the uninitiated, MOOCs are massive open online courses generally offered free of charge by professors at elite universities to tens of thousands of people at a time. They are also a source of much breathless hyperbole about being a “game changer” or “creative disruptor” or “tsunami” that will sweep away traditional university campuses.

The chief purveyors of MOOCs are Coursera, edX and Udacity. The University of Toronto and the University of British Columbia are offering several MOOCs through Coursera, while the University of Alberta is launching a MOOC this fall with Udacity.

MOOCs are a grand idea – the democratization of higher education! – but they have attracted as many skeptics as promoters. Among the criticisms levelled at MOOCs: completion rates are abysmally low, the online format is often not very innovative pedagogically, and they aren’t offered for credit. The biggest knock against them is that there is, as yet, no appreciable business plan for how they’re supposed to make money.

This has not stopped the starry-eyed MOOC promoters such as New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman or author (and recently installed University of Trent chancellor) Don Tapscott. However, the ground appears to be shifting below their feet. Several higher education analysts point to a recent announcement by Coursera as the beginning of the end for MOOCs as we know them.

Until now, most MOOCs have been specialized one-off courses offered by professors at top universities and have attracted people who were taking the course simply out of personal interest. But, at the end of May, Coursera announced that it is “exploring MOOC-based learning … on campus.” More specifically, according to the New York Times, Coursera is forming partnerships with 10 large state university systems and flagship public universities to create courses – including introductory and required classes – that students can take for credit, either fully online or with classroom sessions. Presumably, they will pay for these courses.

(Udacity also seems to be changing gears. A University of Alberta blog claims Udacity has “decided to shift its business model” to focus on developing “a full online undergraduate and graduate degree in computer science” instead of offering “a wide variety of courses in many disciplines.”)

The Coursera announcement prompted one U.K. blogger to claim, “You Can Stop Worrying About MOOCs Now,” adding, “we all knew the MOOC bubble would burst sometime, but I’m saying it’s happened this week – it just doesn’t know it yet.” Similarly, Canadian higher education analyst Alex Usher proclaimed in his blog that Coursera has “jumped the shark” (a popular trope meaning it’s headed downhill) and that this signals the end of the revolution.

What these two bloggers, and many others, point out is that the move by Coursera makes it more of a competitor to courseware providers than a revolutionary disruptor of higher education. Others say this puts Coursera on course to become more like an academic publisher.

An Inside Higher Ed article spells it out: “some universities will try Coursera to see how well they can use its software to offer traditional for-credit online classes to dozens of registered students at once. If universities like the platform, long-time industry players like Desire2Learn and Blackboard could find themselves with new competition. Others will turn Coursera into a new kind of textbook by pairing online material from elsewhere with their own university’s instructors.”

What’s more, the “on campus MOOCs” proposed by Coursera sound suspiciously like the blended learning models that many educators have been advocating for some time. That’s not a bad thing, it’s just far from the revolutionary – or apocalyptic, depending on your point of view – MOOC rhetoric of last year.

I highly doubt these recent developments mean the end of MOOCs, but they certainly seem to indicate that the MOOC concept is undergoing a transition. Keith Devlin, a mathematician at Stanford University who has given two MOOCs, calls this the “first generation of MOOC platforms” and says they represent “a significant phase shift, not only in terms of the aggregate functionality but also the social and cultural context in which today’s MOOCs are being offered.”

Dr. Devlin also says MOOCs should be more properly considered a learning resource rather than a course. Through MOOCs, universities could share course material among themselves or license other universities’ content.

Roseann O’Reilly Runte, president of Carleton University, seems to suggest something along these lines in a recent opinion piece: “Classes can combine Internet connections, Skyped conversation, video-teleconference and satellite hookups with videos and segments of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) produced around the world” (my emphasis).

However things eventually turn out, these sorts of conversations are certainly a welcome relief from the commentary of venture capitalists and others about how MOOCs will upend universities and obviate the need for most university professors, or how MOOC “efficiencies” could allow governments to slash postsecondary education funding.

A final point is that the MOOC mania has had the benefit of highlighting the potential of online and distance learning which, after all, have been important but fairly minor components of postsecondary education for decades. Many of the universities that have signed on to provide MOOCs have promised to include a research component to see what works and what doesn’t, which is a fine development.

The Bill and Malinda Gates Foundation recently announced it is funding a MOOC Research Hub. “The peer-reviewed research on MOOCs has been minimal,” notes the foundation. “The MOOC Research Initiative (MRI) will begin to address this research gap by evaluating MOOCs and how they impact teaching, learning, and education in general.” Let the fun begin.

Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield unpacks a Canadian experiment called Microflow aboard the International Space Station. Photo credit: Canadian Space Agency.

The recent public outreach efforts of International Space Station Commander and Canadian Chris Hadfield – his explanatory videos, photos and remarkable cover of David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” shot from outer space, not to mention his nearly one million Twitter followers – was a triumph for science communication, says science writer Kyle Hill, writing for Scientific American. Who could argue with that?

This was great to see since science communication in Canada – or, at least, the media coverage of science – has never been particularly strong. Yes, there are some obvious exceptions, such as CBC Radio’s long-running Quirks and Quarks with Bob McDonald and the even longer-running TV show the Nature of Things with David Suzuki, also on our public broadcaster (the two shows, respectively, are currently in their 35th and 53rd seasons – a triumph that should be celebrated).

But, in the daily media, things are not so rosy. The days when Canadian newspapers had full-time science writers on staff are mostly gone, and science stories seem to rarely make it into television newscasts. Canada doesn’t even have a national science magazine.

There are efforts made to improve the quality of science writing through the likes of the Science Media Centre of Canada and the Canadian Science Writers Association, but these are mainly shoestring operations.

As is often the case, the situation is somewhat different in Quebec. It has a general science magazine, Québec Science, which celebrated its 50th anniversary last year, as well as an excellent science magazine for kids, Les Débrouillards. The annual Acfas Congress, organized by the Association francophone pour le savoir, is also a big media event and attracted some 6,000 attendees in May. Acfas also publishes an online magazine, Découvrir.

I’m not sure what to attribute this paucity of science reporting to in English Canada. It certainly cannot be due to a weak culture of science in this country. Canada has always held its own in scientific research internationally, a fact underlined by the likes of the Council of Canadian Academies in its 2012 report and most recently by the Science, Technology and Innovation Council (which noted, for example, that with a share of only 0.5 percent of global population, Canada accounted for 4.4 percent of the world’s natural sciences and engineering publications).

I do know, having covered science stories for much of my career, that I find it difficult to write about science in an engaging way. That’s because scientific discovery is rarely a single eureka event, a happening, but is rather a slow process of tiny advances that can appear arcane to the general public.

As well, when science is covered by the media, often the trivial triumphs over the important. Or, as one writer recently lamented in the Guardian, too much science journalism falls under the category of “infotainment.” The article garnered much reaction on Twitter, both pro and con.

As I’ve written before, I think what makes for a good science story – or any good story, for that matter – is human drama. Science, after all, is a human pursuit. I want to know about the personalities involved and what drives them in their quest (others may disagree, arguing that this limits the scope of science reporting).

A good example from our own pages of University Affairs was the story “A scientific whodunit” by Michael Smith, published in February 2005; it won the Sanofi Pasteur Medal for Excellence in Health Research Journalism that year. A more recent example is “The story of the origins of AIDS” by Mark Cardwell, which was recently nominated for best profile of a person for the Kenneth R. Wilson Awards in business publishing. (We’ll find out next week whether it won.)

On a related note, the Guardian recently assembled five top writers and asked them what makes for good science writing. It’s a bit difficult to sum up their views succinctly, but the article is nevertheless worth a read.

What do you think? Am I being too harsh concerning the state of science communication in Canada? And if not, what can be done to change that?

The latest report from Canada’s Science, Technology and Innovation Council.

Buried in the flurry of other news emanating from Ottawa on Tuesday was a damning report by Canada’s Science, Technology and Innovation Council, or STIC. The council concludes in its “State of the Nation” 2012 report that Canada “continues to tread water as a mid-level performer in science, technology and innovation” and says the country needs to “aim higher.” Maclean’s columnist Paul Wells described the report as “devastating” and an indicator of “long-term government failure.”

STIC’s mandate is to provide the federal government with “evidence-based science and technology advice” and to chart Canada’s performance in S&T and innovation relative to the rest of the world. The council has 17 members, including several university presidents and industry leaders, and is chaired by Howard Alper, who holds the title of Distinguished University Professor at the University of Ottawa.

This new report, the third public report from STIC, notes that Canada has “much to celebrate with respect to the high quality of our talent and our strength in generating new knowledge.” However, the country “continues to lag in private sector investment in innovation and transferring knowledge into the marketplace, as well as deploying our STI talent to best advantage in the labour force.” That latter point, roughly translated, means our science and tech graduates aren’t being hired for good jobs that make the best use of their education and training.

The council’s report breaks things down into three categories: talent, knowledge and business innovation. On the talent side, the report notes that, from 2006 to 2010, Canada saw an impressive 32 percent increase in the number of science degrees granted and a 7.3 increase in engineering degrees granted. However, Canada still lags in doctoral degrees granted in these areas, ranking 15th among OECD countries on this measure.

But, most importantly, Canada’s performance in employing these grads is disappointing. Using a measure which looks at the percentage of the labour force in the services sector occupied by science and technology workers, the council found that Canada is in the middle of OECD countries at about 39 percent. In the manufacturing labour force, Canada’s share was 11.5 percent, among the lowest in the OECD.

On the knowledge side, the report says the substantial investments in research in the higher education sector have reaped “significant rewards” – with a share of only 0.5 percent of global population, Canada accounted for 4.4 percent of the world’s natural sciences and engineering publications in 2010. However, Canada’s investment in higher-education R&D, or HERD, has declined as a percentage of gross domestic product. As a result, Canada’s rank among 41 economies has dropped from third in 2006 to ninth in 2011.

On the business innovation front, Canada also underperforms on the measure of business expenditure in R&D, or BERD. Although preliminary data suggests that BERD in Canada increased very slightly in 2011 and 2012, BERD intensity (BERD as a percentage of GDP) “has been in almost continuous decline for the past decade,” says the report. At 0.89 percent in 2011, Canada’s rank among comparator countries on BERD-to-GDP fell to 25th of 41 economies.

Looking more generally at gross domestic expenditures on R&D, or GERD, a similar pattern is noted. Canada’s GERD as a percentage of GDP peaked in 2001, when it reached 2.1 percent. Since 2001, however, despite the growth in R&D funding in Canada, GERD intensity has been declining, to the point where it reached a low of 1.7 percent in 2011. Canada’s declining GERD intensity has pushed its rank down from 16th position in 2006 to 23rd in 2011 (among 41 economies).

In many ways, this report simply confirms what we’ve been hearing for some time: that universities are more than holding up their end in terms of basic research and the production of highly skilled personnel, but university graduates are finding it difficult to get good jobs because the private sector is not investing sufficiently in innovation.

The federal government has been trying to address the issue by targeting more funds to applied – rather than fundamental – research and changing the mandate of the National Research Council, and yet things don’t seem to be improving. Meanwhile, on another front, the government finds itself battling the impression that it is waging a war on science, which surely isn’t helping matters. Recent cuts at Agriculture Canada, for instance, will reportedly affect the jobs of over 100 scientists – those highly qualified personnel that Canada needs so badly. The government is also receiving criticism for cutting back on basic research, another threat to innovation.

What’s your question?

It’s an intriguing invitation: the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research has issued its first-ever call for proposals for new research ideas that address “a complex question of importance to humanity.” My immediate response was to think of something snide, like “Why the Kardashians?” but CIFAR deserves a more serious reply.

For those who don’t know it, CIFAR is one of those rare private, not-for-profit research institutes in Canada not directly affiliated with a university. As I’ve written before, what they manage to accomplish on their $16 million annual budget is astounding. That money funds 12 wide-ranging interdisciplinary programs, among them: Cosmology and Gravity; Child and Brain Development; Earth System Evolution; Institutions, Organizations and Growth; Nanoelectronics; and Social Interactions, Society and Well-being.

Today, nearly 400 researchers in 17 countries participate in CIFAR’s multidisciplinary, global research networks. Since the institute’s inception in 1982, 14 Nobel Laureates have been associated with it. CIFAR’s president is Alan Bernstein, who is well-known in the research community as the founding president of the Canadian Institutes of Health Research from 2000 to 2007.

CIFAR holds a number of outreach activities each year. In 2010 and 2011, that included a series of public events called the Next Big Question, where CIFAR researchers were asked to make the case for why their topic of exploration represented the Next Big Question facing our world. Here is just a sampling of what they debated:

• What does the future hold for our planet?
• What makes a society resilient?
• Where can quantum computing carry us?
• Can we sustain the information revolution?
• What is the fate of the Universe?
• How can political institutions best promote peace and prosperity?

Well, now it’s your turn. What is your “complex question of importance to society?” For serious responses to CIFAR, you’ll need to hurry: letters of intent are due June 7. In the meantime, let us know what burning question you’d love to have investigated. Serious, and not so serious, replies welcomed.

As I’ve noted before, there has been quite a lot of talk recently about the imminent change or “disruption” facing universities (mainly from MOOCs) and the metaphors used to describe it: A tsunami! An avalanche!

Dr. Piper saw things from a different angle. She acknowledged the need for change, but knew it would be slow in coming. Universities, she said, “relish the past. They’re built on the history of centuries. They pride themselves on not changing” (emphasis hers – it may have been accompanied with some fist thumping on the podium as well). “Scholars are taught by scholars who were taught by scholars. Teaching methods and cultural values have been handed down from generation to generation to generation.”

Of course, universities do evolve. Over the past 40 years or so, Canada’s universities have gone through tremendous change as they’ve responded to the ever-increasing demands placed on them by governments, society and the economy. In the process, modern universities have become incredibly complex and, as a result, change can seem imperceptible. An insightful blogger commented that the apocalyptic metaphors were likely well off the mark and “that what is really going on is better viewed as a rather slower ‘tectonic’ movement.”

But it’s this slowness of change, I think, that can occasionally drive governments to distraction. Newly appointed ministers of education, in their haste to do something, occasionally throw out only-half-thought-out policy prescriptions, to which universities respond in a very deliberate way that Alex Usher perceptively calls “embrace and contain.”

To be fair, governments usually have mandates that last no more than four years, or less if they’re in a minority situation, and can’t always focus on longer-term change when they are facing an impatient electorate. I think that the push by the Ontario government to have universities prepare strategic mandate agreements, and for Alberta’s universities to sign “mandate letters” with their provincial government, are in part a response by these governments to try to force change more quickly.

In Ontario, the provincial government asked the Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario recently to reviews these mandates. The expert panel concluded that “bottom-up processes like that used with this [strategic mandate agreement] exercise will not produce the system changes we believe are necessary. The government will need to demonstrate discipline, consistency and commitment to direct changes over the several years it will take to implement them.”

And how to do this? “Funding,” said the panel, “is the major lever available to government to motivate and steer change.” This is very similar to what HEQCO president Harvey Weingarten said to me when I visited in Toronto earlier this year. What’s important, he said, is that the government decide what type of system it wants, and then – most importantly – put incentives in place to get that desired result. With the right incentives, change will happen, he asserted. I think I remember a similar concept from the film Jerry Maguire: show me the money!

I graduated from journalism school more than 25 years ago in what in hindsight can only be considered as the glory days for the industry. The economy was picking up. Newspapers were expanding. New ones were being launched. And no one had heard of the internet. Many of us, if not immediately, soon found jobs with dependable incomes and nice benefits. Over the years I have watched friends and colleagues lose those jobs or walk away from them as technological forces have reshaped the industry, wiping out advertising dollars and gutting newsrooms.

Turns out those who toil away in academia have it almost as rough. Earlier this week a panel discussion billed as “The War on Knowledge?” and held in advance of June’s Worldviews 2013 conference on global trends in media and higher education resulted in a lively debate. The gist of it was whether higher education is under attack and what role, if any, the media plays in that.  “Internationalization, politics, and worldwide economic trends are forcing universities and colleges to ask themselves tough questions,” a news release promoting the event read. “Criticisms are commonplace in the media, while new communication technologies threaten traditional institutions. So what lies ahead?”

Tony Burman, former editor-in-chief of CBC News and head of Al Jazeera English and now the Velma Rogers Graham Research Chair in news media and technology and journalism instructor at Ryerson University, set the stage with the keynote address. Mr. Burman, who started his career as an education reporter in the 1970s at the now-defunct Montreal Star, argued that higher ed and the media are both “under siege” today. Public distrust of the media is at an all time high while cutbacks have forced the closure of foreign bureaus and hollowed out newsrooms, leaving consumers of news all the worse off. Those that are left, mind you. As Mr. Burman noted, more than 30 percent of Americans have abandoned traditional media outlets. The upshot: this has limited the amount of media coverage of higher education. But the media, however flawed, should be seen by academia as part of the solution, he suggested.

The subsequent panel discussion resulted in an interesting reversal of roles. Janice Gross Stein, director of the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto, where the event was held, dismissed the notion that simplistic reporting is hurting academia. “Let’s lay off reporters,” she said. The media are valuable contributors to the public debate, she added, and responsibility for getting academics’ stories disseminated lies with taxpayer-funded professors.

Scott Jaschik, editor of Inside Higher Ed and former editor of The Chronicle of Higher Education, took a less favourable view of his colleagues. He noted that in the U.S., mainstream press coverage of higher ed issues has been “abysmal.” He pointed to media coverage of Florida Governor Rick Scott’s questioning the value of anthropology degrees and the 2012 ouster of University of Virginia president Teresa Sullivan for not climbing on the MOOCs bandwagon quickly enough as examples of the media’s failure to ask critical questions when reporting on such events. “Is the press scrutinizing these claims,” he asked. “I don’t think they are.”

University Affairs blogger and York University PhD candidate Melonie Fullick, who also participated in the debate, noted that here at home the closure of federal libraries and archives, the continuing cutbacks at Statistics Canada, and the government’s unabashed attempts to muzzle its scientists have contributed to the attacks on academia.

The event was all cheerfully moderated by novelist, playwright and Toronto Star columnist, Rick Salutin, who in a lighthearted moment came to the defence of Twitter for its democratizing values. He said he likes the way that 140 characters can quickly rob someone of authority, like the observer at a recent event who tweeted: “Check out Salutin’s shoe-sock combo.” An apocryphal story perhaps, but Mr. Salutin delighted the crowd with it.

The event set the stage well for the full blown conference taking place in Toronto June 19 to 21 which will feature some of the same cast  and others including: Sir John Daniel, former assistant director-general of Unesco, Phil Altbach, director of the Center for International Education at Boston College and former U of T President David Naylor. A complete list of speakers and sessions can be seen here.

Oh, yes, there was one more thing. During the debate, Dr. Stein let drop this interesting tidbit: she’s heard that a major Ontario university, which she emphasized is not U of T, is considering going private. Hmm. Any guesses?

Where have I heard that before?

According to a survey last fall, 89 percent of U.S. adults and 96 percent of senior administrators at colleges and universities said higher education is in crisis, and nearly 4 in 10 in both groups considered the crisis to be “severe.” More fodder for the crisis literature in higher education.

In Canada, I’d say there isn’t quite the same sense of foreboding doom, but we do certainly have our own home-grown examples of the crisis literature. This comes to mind because of a stray comment I heard recently from Glen Jones that it has been ever thus. Dr. Jones, professor of higher education at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto, said one of the first papers he ever had published, nearly a quarter century ago, was an editorial on the crisis literature in Canadian higher education. It had the  somewhat cheeky title, “Imminent disaster revisited, again.”

The nature of the crisis, perhaps not surprisingly, changes over time. In 1956, the National Conference of Canadian Universities (precursor to the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada) claimed the higher education system was in crisis because of a grave lack of capacity – something we don’t hear much of now. Over the years there has also been, Dr. Jones noted, a “moral crisis,” a “crisis of confidence,” a “crisis of management,” a “crisis of mediocrity,” and the ever-popular “funding crisis.” (Remember, this paper was written nearly a quarter-century ago – what other crises could we add since then? The “skills gap” comes to mind as the latest trope.)

One of the most serious shortcomings Dr. Jones identified in most of this crisis literature was a failure to provide convincing evidence that disaster was imminent. “The crisis argument,” he wrote, “often is built on anecdotal reflection, unexplained causal relationships, or case studies supposedly demonstrating what the author assumes to be a sector-wide problem.” While the failure to provide convincing evidence in support of an argument does not necessarily imply that the conclusion is incorrect, it does bring the argument into question.

The second problem he identified was that the crisis literature is not “progressive,” by which he meant that contributions to the literature are not built upon or based on other contributions to the literature, and there is rarely any follow-up or critical analysis of the validity of these predictions. There is also rarely any explicit criteria for what constitutes a crisis. This leads to the misleading sense that the system is in a constant state of crisis. Or worse, this can lead to the “crying wolf” phenomenon. What if this time it really is a crisis? How will we know?

A college diploma or university degree?

Prior to the unveiling of the federal budget last Thursday, there was lots of talk about a “skills mismatch” in Canada which had some within the university community concerned. That’s because at least some of the reporting contained blithe assertions like, “there are too many kids getting BAs and not enough welders,” or hoary clichés about “all those bartenders and baristas with expensive university degrees.”

In the end, the skills provisions in the 2013 budget likely will have little practical impact, positive or negative, on universities. The budget’s signature new Canada Jobs Grant program to help train or retrain Canadians for “labour market demands” is meant to be of short duration and is aimed at community colleges, career colleges and trade union training centres. There is some doubt about whether such a program will have the desired effect or is needed, but that’s a different matter.

In the run-up to the budget, Alex Usher of Higher Education Strategy Associates had a couple of excellent posts on his “One Thought to Start Your Day” blog questioning some of the assertions around the “skills shortages” debate (see the posts here and here – they’re well worth a read). “Much of the talk about skills shortages in Canada is data-free, and factually challenged,” he asserts.

The Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada quickly jumped into the fray to address some of that lack of data with a document entitled “Canada’s skills gap: 11 quick facts.” Among the facts it cites: According to a recent CIBC report, most jobs in high demand in Canada require a university degree; and between July 2008 and July 2012, 700,000 net new jobs were created for university graduates, compared to 320,000 net new jobs for college and trades graduates.

Earlier, in a speech (PDF) to the Empire Club of Canada on March 7, University of Toronto’s outgoing president, David Naylor, also addressed the issue of whether universities “ought to produce more job-ready, skills-focused graduates.” He added facetiously, “Stop all this liberal arts guff and this social science silliness. What Canada needs to compete and win in the world economy are more folks with college diplomas, and universities that focus on preparing people for careers – for the real world.”

His response: Canada is already the world leader in college-level attainment, but ranks only 18th among OECD countries in university (baccalaureate-level) graduation rates. “If Canada’s competitiveness problems were going to be solved by colleges and polytechnics, or by universities that behave like them, we’d already be rolling in tax revenues,” he concluded.

James Knight, president of the Association of Canadian Community Colleges, was asked about the skills gap in a Q&A interview in the Globe and Mail. One of the questions posed was: “We’ve seen data earlier this month from Statistics Canada that a B.A. holder still earns 41 percent more than a high-school graduate while college graduates earn 22 percent less than B.As. I wonder about the wisdom of encouraging high-school students to think about college rather than focus on university?”

His response was that “StatsCan data is hokum.” He proceeded to cite his own study (n=1) of his son’s experience. “My son went to Carleton [University] and got a degree in economics that had no value in the job market whatsoever. After a year of wandering around, he went to George Brown College for Sports and Event Management and the moment he graduated he was picked up by the Ontario Cycling Association” and now works for the national cycling organization.

I am happy for his son, but anecdote is not evidence.

Mr. Knight also might have added a bit of detail about the college program he cites. I can’t find a program called “Sports and Event Management” at George Brown, so I’ll assume he was referring to the “Sports and Event Marketing” program, which George Brown does offer. This is what the college calls a “postgraduate” program, which is in fact marketed, in part, to undergraduate degree holders and requires a degree or college diploma for admittance. And, while I will accept Mr. Knight’s assertion that it was the postgraduate college certificate which landed his son his job, might it not have been the combination of the degree and the certificate?

U of T’s Dr. Naylor in his speech to the Empire Club seemed to anticipate this line of argument: “What we aren’t doing,” he said, “is celebrating the fact that tens of thousands of university students who have finished a baccalaureate go on to get a college diploma or certificate. That’s seen somehow as a mistake. … Why shouldn’t a young person get a liberal arts education, learn to think better, acquire some breadth of competencies and general knowledge, be challenged intellectually by professors and peers – and then go on to get specific vocational skills?”

My point is not to pick a fight with Mr. Knight – in fact, quite the opposite. I think if colleges and universities are pitted against each other, the whole postsecondary educational sector, and the country, loses.

I’ll give the last word to Graham Carr, from his presidential speech (PDF) to the annual general meeting of the Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences on March 23: “For me, the debate should never be of universities vs. colleges but of the PSE sector working together more effectively to provide real educational choices in all their complexity that foster a spirit of inquiry, imagination, discovery and collaboration.”

But, of course, it would be good to know empirically that there is a pedagogical benefit to a study-abroad program, a point addressed in an article in the latest edition of the Canadian Journal of University Continuing Education. The article, “Student Engagement and Study Abroad,” is by Liam Rourke and Heather Kanuka at the University of Alberta.

The two authors looked at a short-term study abroad program that consisted of a group of Canadian undergraduates spending six weeks in Mexico. The program included a 10-day bus tour, three half-credit courses and accommodations with local families. The two authors had the novel idea of using a modified version of the National Survey of Student Engagement, or NSSE, to investigate the extent to which the students engaged in their learning activities while abroad. The authors administered the NSSE twice – once at the conclusion of the students’ school year as a sort of baseline measure, and six weeks later at the end of their study-abroad program – and compared the results. (I’m oversimplifying, but you can check out the paper yourself for the full methodological detail).

Their results weren’t terribly encouraging. The authors report that there was “a pattern of results favouring the study-abroad experience” but the effect was modest: “Participants reported levels of engagement during their study-abroad experience that were similar to levels in class, on campus.” The results, they say, “are consistent with those of several others who find limited empirical support for short-term study abroad in higher education.”

The next part of their discussion seems pretty damning, so I’ll quote at length:

An examination of these reports suggests that the lack of an unmistakable difference may be a gulf between the potential of study abroad, which captivates proponents, and the actual effect that is observed and reported by researchers. The potential is students engaging in goal-directed behaviour – linguistic, cultural, disciplinary, personal, or professional goals – amid the complexity of their subject matter unfolding in real time. What actually happens, in those instances when the benefit of study abroad is equivocal, is students circumventing immersive, goal-directed activity. The students in our program … spent the bulk of their time travelling in a tight group, moving from the classrooms where they passed much of their days to the Internet cafés at night to work on assignments. Avoiding any real need to grapple with intercultural issues, they were in continual contact with their friends and family back home via Facebook, email, and text messaging.

University Affairs reported something similar regarding students doing short-term volunteering abroad. The article quotes Rebecca Tiessen, associate professor of international development studies at Royal Military College, who said: “Universities and colleges are somewhat blindly pushing short-term assignments in developing countries without truly understanding their efficacy as learning opportunities, the ethical implications, or their true impact.”

What surprised Dr. Tiessen, in particular, were students’ motivations for going abroad: “The desire to help others ranked really low,” she said. “It was probably one of the lowest ranked motivations compared to more personal development factors like skills-development, resumé-building, and adventure and travel.”

Now, it must be emphasized, that we’re talking here about short-term experiences abroad. The results may very well be quite different for a longer-term program of a semester or more, a point the U of Alberta authors make. I also wonder if there are benefits to these short-term experiences which just aren’t being adequately captured or which could be fortified through student self-reflection activities during and afterwards.

The authors conclude that for a study-abroad program to be most effective, students should be thoroughly immersed in the experience. “Unfortunately, few authors have identified methods to ensure student immersion. The program we studied … seemed designed to discourage immersion.”

The two announcements, together with a couple of other recent presidential appointments at the University of Victoria and Dalhousie University, mark a definite changing of the guard at Canada’s universities. As Globe and Mail reporter James Bradshaw noted back in November, the four departing university presidents (David Naylor at U of T, Heather Munroe-Blum at McGill, Tom Traves at Dalhousie and David Turpin at UVic) have a combined experience of 50 years in the corner office.

Interestingly, the article by Mr. Bradshaw also speculated on what type of leaders universities should be searching for nowadays, raising the question of whether hiring committees should look outside the academic ranks for new talent. He reports that U of T officials “toyed with breaking the mould and appointing a non-academic” as president, but “after listening to students and professors,” decided to choose the insider (Dr. Gertler, as mentioned, is U of T’s current dean of arts and science and joined the university in 1983). Likewise, Jamie Cassels, who becomes UVic’s president in July, comes from within; he is the university’s current vice-president, academic, and before that was UVic’s dean of law.

Suzanne Fortier is not quite a McGill insider, but is an alumna, having received her BSc and PhD at McGill. And although her most recent experience is as head of NSERC, she has a strong background in senior academic leadership in Canada, serving at Queen’s University as associate dean of graduate studies and research, VP research and then VP academic.

Maclean’s columnist Paul Wells picked up on some of this in a blog post. He writes:

In hiring close to home, both universities [U of T and McGill] can be taken to be demonstrating either quiet confidence in the maturity of Canadian academe, or a chastened realization that in a time of limited resources, even the biggest schools are wise to stick to their knitting. Both schools instituted global searches and wound up bypassing candidates from afar in favour of local produce.

The only outlier of the group – barely – is Richard Florizone, who becomes president of Dalhousie in July. Dr. Florizone is the current VP of finance and resources at the University of Saskatchewan, but has significant experience outside academia, for instance as director of strategic initiatives for Bombardier Aerospace. He also had been seconded for a one-year administrative leave while at USask to serve as a senior adviser to the International Finance Corporation in Washington, D.C.

Ross Paul, the former president of the University of Windsor and Laurentian University, wrote a book on the subject of university presidents in Canada in 2011, entitled Leadership Under Fire. Dr. Paul examined 47 recent presidential appointments in Canada – not including the four most recent – and found that 85 percent of them had held senior academic administrative positions at another Canadian school before being hired. “We’re very parochial, I believe, and I think we really need to expand that base,” he told the Globe’s Mr. Bradshaw.

Non-academic hires do happen in Canada, but rarely. The best example – the exception that proves the rule? – is Allan Rock, president of the University Ottawa. Mr. Rock was a Member of Parliament and served as a federal minister in various portfolios, including justice and health, and later was named Ambassador of Canada to the United Nations. He is a U of Ottawa alumnus, but had never been a university faculty member and had no previous experience in senior academic leadership.

Two other recent examples are Laurentian University President Dominic Giroux and, most recently, Nipissing University President Michael DeGagne. However, Mr. Giroux is hardly a stranger to the education sector: he served as deputy minister with the Ontario Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Training, Colleges and Universities, and before that as chief financial officer of two French-language school boards in Ontario.

Nipissing’s Dr. DeGagne earned a PhD in educational administration from Michigan State University and also a Master of Laws degree from York University’s Osgoode Hall, but spent his entire career until his presidential appointment outside academe. Prior to his appointment, he was executive director of the Aboriginal Healing Foundation, a not-for-profit private corporation in Ottawa.

So, what do you think: Are Canadian universities parochial in their presidential hiring, or prudent?

Postscript, March 6, 2013: An interesting tidbit I forgot to mention above is that we never know who else might have applied for a president’s position, or whether the chosen candidate applied elsewhere, because the search process is confidential. That is, except at Quebec’s francophone universities, where the search process is public and the candidates are even expected to “sell” themselves to the university community. Because of that, we know that Dr. Fortier had presidential ambitions before. She was in the running for university rector (same as a president) at Université de Montréal in 2004. An advisory committee recommended Dr. Fortier as the top candidate but the university’s board of directors opted instead for Luc Vinet.

Postscript 2, March 6, 2013: I see that Ross Paul has a commentary in the Globe and Mail this morning in which he seems to be in favour of internal appointments. “There are strong advantages to knowing an institution intimately at the outset of a presidency,” he writes, and adds further down: “It is encouraging to see an increasing number of internal appointments in our leading universities. At least, they know what they are getting.”

It’s been a wild ride for tuition fees in England over a relatively short period of time. Tuition fees of £1,000 were first introduced in 1998 then were tripled to around £3,000 starting in 2006. In the current system, all students are eligible for loans to cover the full tuition costs and repayment of these loans begins after graduation.

When the recent policy changes in the U.K. were first announced two years ago, student and faculty groups, among others, warned darkly that it would have a disastrous effect on student enrolment and accessibility. At the very least, one policy wonk said it would be a very interesting natural experiment to test whether that would indeed by the case.

Opponents of the tuition hike appeared to have their fears confirmed when the university application rates for 2012-13 were announced and showed a drop of around 10 percent in England compared to the previous year. But, in January, something funny happened to this narrative. The Universities and Colleges Admissions Service (the centralized service for students applying to university and college in the U.K.) announced the application rates in England for the upcoming 2013-14 academic year rose by 3.5 percent compared to the current academic year. This is still down from the application rates in years prior to the massive tuition hike, but a rise nevertheless. (The full UCAS report can be seen here.) This raises the question: do high university tuition fees affect enrolment rates or not?

The rise in applications for next year was not altogether a surprise. According to Alex Usher (the same policy wonk alluded to above), principal of Higher Education Strategy Associates, this is essentially what happened in the U.K. after both the 1998 and the 2005 tuition hikes – a jump in enrolments before the hike, then a fall immediately after the hike, followed by a rebound in the second year after the change as the system returned to equilibrium. These results, said Mr. Usher, should be sent “to your favourite student leader” and should be plastered “to Pierre Duchesne’s head” (Mr. Duchesne is Quebec’s higher education minister). Mr. Usher added facetiously, “there’s a prize for the first person who can read these and still make a coherent argument for why a Quebec-style tuition increase would have any effect at all on access.”

Of course, not everyone is as sanguine as Mr. Usher. The president of the National Students Union in the U.K. said the UCAS data are welcome, “but they are certainly not the only litmus test against which government reforms are to be measured,” adding, “Excuse me for not engaging in premature backslapping.” Another student commentator said a closer look at the data show that, as a result of the fee hike, students “are shunning humanities and arts degrees, and putting their faith in courses they think will land them a job.”

Claire Callender, professor of higher education at the University of London, said at a recent conference in Toronto that “English higher education should start worrying big time.” In a presentation to the “Academia in the Age of Austerity” conference organized by the Ontario Confederation of University Faculty Associations, she concluded that the U.K. reforms “herald a retreat from the state’s financial responsibility” for higher education and questioned whether they will perpetuate existing inequalities and social class divisions. The title of her talk, “Austerity in England: Dramatic impact, uncertain future,” summed up her views.

I must say I also wonder whether these reforms are a step too far and what the negative downstream effects will be for a generation holding such substantial debts after graduation – an interesting experiment, indeed.

HEQCO is an arm’s-length agency of the Ontario government created in 2005 that, according to its website, “brings evidence-based research to the continued improvement of the postsecondary education system in Ontario.” Following the demise of the Canada Millennium Scholarship Foundation and its research program back in 2010, HEQCO is basically the only government-funded agency in the country dedicated to research on higher education. As part of its mandate, the council evaluates the postsecondary sector and provides policy recommendations to Ontario’s minister of training, colleges and universities, with the aim of enhancing the access, quality and accountability of Ontario’s colleges and universities.

I found it interesting to discover that HEQCO is essentially free to decide what sorts of research it carries out, as long as that research falls generally within its wide mandate (you can see its 2012-2013 research plan here). That being said, the agency still must be careful not to deliberately be a thorn in the side of government, nor to alienate the universities and colleges, whose cooperation is necessary if the agency is to be able to do its work effectively. That’s a tough path to negotiate. It would be ever so tempting for a government to see an unobtrusive place to cut a few million dollars and set the agency adrift. Very few people outside the postsecondary education sector would notice, but the province and government policy would be poorer for it.

I had a chance to sit down with HEQCO’s president Harvey Weingarten while there, and although most of the conversation was off-the-record, he said a few things that I think I can safely repeat because he has said them publicly elsewhere. Dr. Weingarten, a former provost at McMaster University and former president of the University of Calgary, said he believes changes must be made to Ontario’s postsecondary education system, although he is somewhat agnostic (my interpretation) about what those changes should be. Some changes might be better than others, he averred, but what’s important is that the government decide what type of system it wants, and then – most importantly – put incentives in place to get that desired result. With the right incentives, change will happen, he asserted.

Among HEQCO’s recent reports is one released on January 29 which examined the implications of expanding the number and scope of college-to-university transfer arrangements. The report, written by David Trick, concludes that a “2 + 2” transfer system – where students would do the first two years in college and transfer to university for years 3 and 4 – could lead to potential savings for students and the government. (Alberta and B.C. have the most-developed system of such transfer arrangements.)

One highly anticipated report – by me, at least – to be released sometime this spring, will look at the impact of graduate student expansion and the experiences of PhD grads and their labour outcomes (a hot topic examined recently in University Affairs).

I was invited to HEQCO to talk about my blog, Margin Notes. I took the opportunity while there to ask these bright minds what they thought were some of the key challenges and issues facing the postsecondary education sector in Canada. Here’s the list we cane up with, in no particular order:

• Funding
• Value of a credential and credential inflation
• Credentialism vs. a culture of learning
• Teaching quality and teaching with technology
• System design and pathways (also related: the system “hierarchy”)
• Labour market alignment
• Under-represented groups
• Quality assurance and learning outcomes
• Student preparation
• Financial literacy and student debt
• Tuition
• Global competitiveness
• Data sharing
• Uninformed policy-making by government

It seems as good a list as any, and fairly comprehensive. Graduate education was surprisingly left out, but that may be because we had already discussed it at length prior to the little poll. There was also no mention of institutional governance, which is a very hot topic currently in Quebec but seems to have less resonance in the rest of Canada.

Dr. Weingarten pointed out after the exercise that, of the items on the list – all of which he thought worthy – only two are regularly part of the narrow public discourse as reflected in the media: tuition and labour market outcomes. That’s too bad.

Any other challenges, or comments about the list, that you would like to add?

What was not immediately obvious about the story is that the article contains exclusive data not publicly available elsewhere on the completion rates and times to completion of PhD students in Canada. The data are not comprehensive – they’re from only eight of the 15 most research-intensive universities for which there are comparable data, and none of the institutions were identified. Nevertheless, it’s a start.

The data show that the proportion of students who successfully completed their PhDs within nine years ranged from a high of 78.3 percent in the health sciences to a low of 55.8 percent in the humanities (see graph below). Mean times-to-completion ranged from a low of just under 15 terms – or five years, based on three terms per year – in the physical sciences and engineering, to a high of 18.25 terms, or just over six years, in the humanities.

The data were provided by the group known as the U-15, whose executive director is Suzanne Corbeil. We first requested the information about a year ago and there was quite a bit of back-and-forth with the group before they agreed to share it with us, for which we are grateful. If we hadn’t gotten the data, we were planning to use 10-year-old data which we had published, also exclusively, back in February 2003.

I point this all out because it demonstrates well the difficulty of getting good data about Canada’s universities and the university sector in general, which I think hinders good policy development and analysis. I don’t blame the U-15; they politely reminded us that they are not primarily a data-gathering organization and that their data is usually collected for sharing internally. Statistics Canada is the obvious organization where one would expect to get this type of information, but they have actually cut back on some of their data gathering, most notably their discontinuation in May 2012 of the University and College Academic Staff System, the most complete and reliable source of information in Canada on university faculty.

On a more positive note, I’m pleased to point out the “PhD is in need of revision” story as an example of some of the excellent reporting we’ve had recently in University Affairs. The article’s author, Rosanna Tamburri, is an award-winning journalist and regular contributor to University Affairs whom we rely on greatly and hold in high regard. She’s also the author of “All about MOOCs,” which has quickly risen after just three months of publication to the third-most-read article of all time on our website.

I’d also point to our “Sessionals, up close” article by Moira MacDonald as another example of University Affairs setting the agenda. And, I’d be remiss not to acknowledge the great insight and commentary from my fellow bloggers: Melonie Fullick at Speculative Diction, Jo VanEvery and Liz Koblyk at Careers Café, David Kent and Jonathan Thon at The Black Hole, and Margo Fryer at Taking the Plunge.

I watched the CBC’s recent documentary, “Generation Jobless” (which aired on Jan. 31 but can be viewed now anytime on the Internet), and wasn’t quite sure what to make of it. I kept asking myself, what exactly was the message the documentary was trying to convey? Perhaps, on that point, it’s best that I defer to the CBC, which described the documentary this way:

There was a time when a University degree assured you of a good job, good pay and a comfortable life. Not anymore. Today, the unemployment rate for young people in this country is close to 15% – double that of the general population. But the real crisis is the increasing number of university and college grads who are underemployed – scraping by on low-paid, part-time jobs that don’t require a degree. … GENERATION JOBLESS delves into why so many young Canadians are overeducated and underemployed.

Maclean’s magazine ran a similar story, “The new underclass,” which claims that “a [new] generation of well-educated Canadians has no future.” That premise, I believe, is a crock.

But, before I get into the particulars, let me say that I do think it is tough for young adults entering the workforce right now, due partly to the lingering aftereffects of the world financial crisis of 2008. But this is not the first generation to graduate into a bum market – just ask those who graduated in the early 1980s or the early 1990s. In fact, the share of job losses among youths under age 25 was higher during both those past recessions compared to today.

On the other hand, it does seem, anecdotally, that the nature of employment is changing, with fewer of those coveted full-time, long-term, benefits-paying jobs of the type the previous generation took for granted. However, even if that is true, I doubt that would have anything to do with Canadians being overeducated or mis-educated. I would argue, in fact, that higher education is a buffer for individuals against those trends, providing them with a greater chance of meaningful long-term employment.

Youth unemployment

The first canard raised by the CBC documentary is the 15 percent unemployment rate (it’s actually closer to 14 percent) for “young people.” That statistic refers to those aged 15 to 24, which includes a lot of people who aren’t even out of high school. How can that possibly tell us anything about the usefulness or not of postsecondary education? The more relevant age range to look at is 25 to 29, looking at those individuals who have finished their degrees or college diplomas a few years before and are now in that transition period trying to make their way in the job market. What was the unemployment rate for this group in 2012, according to the Labour Force Survey? Just under six percent.

Ah, but many of these people are underemployed, working in low-paid, part-time jobs, says the documentary. Not true. In 2012, there were 405,000 bachelor’s graduates working full-time across Canada – 40,000 more than in 2008 and 105,000 more than in 2000. What’s more, almost 90 percent of those jobs were in permanent positions. (Those statistics were provided by the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada, again based on the Labour Force Survey. AUCC is preparing a fact sheet to counter claims like those in the documentary, and I’ll provide a link when that document is available.)

Even the CBC website uses a graphic showing that the proportion of all employees under 30 working in non-permanent jobs was just 11.6 percent. To be fair, we don’t have data to show precisely what kinds of permanent jobs the other 88 percent have; some of them are no doubt serving in restaurants as was depicted in the documentary and were hoping for something more in keeping with their career aspirations. I do not in any way wish to downplay or denigrate their experiences. But you can’t build a story on anecdotes. Yes, there are baristas with bachelor’s degrees or, as in the documentary, the one unemployed engineer, but the data is on their side.

And here’s a thought experiment: All those interviewed in the documentary as experts – the young woman from TalentEgg, the youngish TD Bank economist, the senior economist from the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, the futurist – they seem to be doing well in their careers. What do you want to bet they all have at least a university degree? There’s an anecdote for you.

Sectoral employment changes

Looked at somewhat differently, and using a longer time frame, according to the slide below (Labour Force Survey again), since 1990 there have been 1.4 million more jobs created in Canada in professional areas that require a university degree. The slide after that shows that, at least until 2006, the higher your level of education, the more you earn over time. It’s possible the situation might have changed in the past few years, but I’m not aware of any data proving that.

Click on image to enlarge.

Click on image to enlarge.

That being said, I do think the documentary makes some useful points. Serial unpaid internships, for example, are exploitative and an abomination, and should be regulated; outsourcing and globalization likely are having an impact on jobs in certain sectors; industry could do more to train workers on the job, as was once more common; we definitely could use more national data collection on the PSE system; co-op programs and other experiential learning programs are very effective and can give students a leg-up.

In the end, the biggest disservice of the documentary was its alarmist tone and lack of balance. No doubt Canada could do better in terms of postsecondary education policy and matching people’s skills with the market’s needs. But, in general, we’re doing OK. We are a prosperous and highly developed country, and part of the reason for that is the strength of our institutions, including the postsecondary education sector. It would be a terrible shame if a young person viewing the documentary got the impression that the situation was hopeless and decided, why bother pursuing a postsecondary education at all?

The red square, symbol of Quebec’s student protests.

I, like many others, was fascinated by the slogans, symbols and spectacle of Quebec’s mass student protests last year, known colloquially as the printemps érable, or maple spring. The conflict began as a protest against the then Liberal government’s plan to raise tuition fees by $325 a year for five years, which would have brought tuition to $3,800 a year when fully implemented by fall 2016 – a rise of roughly 75 percent. The Liberals under Premier Jean Charest called an election for Sept. 4 of last year and subsequently lost – in no small part due to the student protests – and the incoming Parti Quebecois government promptly cancelled the tuition hikes.

The protests garnered international attention, yet most Canadians outside Quebec remained essentially bystanders to the action. Some of the Quebec student leaders did tour outside the province to explain to other student groups what was happening and how to get involved, but the reality remains that the conflict was almost entirely a Quebec phenomenon. Although tuition fees are much higher in most Canadian provinces compared to Quebec, students in the rest of Canada have protested rising fees only sporadically and in no sustained way.

Why has there been so little echo of the Quebec protests among students in the rest of Canada? It’s an interesting question, and one which Laura Pin, a PhD student in political science at York University, valiantly tried to answer at the “Academia in the Age of Austerity” conference held earlier this month in Toronto (organized by the Ontario Confederation of University Faculty Associations). She was part of a panel of student leaders discussing “Quebec and beyond.” Prior to her grad studies, Ms. Pin worked as a research analyst on postsecondary education policy for the Ontario Undergraduate Student Alliance.

Ms. Pin suggested four factors accounting for a lack of action outside Quebec. The first involves what she called the “political opportunity” structure. There was a “clear initiating event” – the Charest government’s planned tuition hikes – which spurred students to action.  Speaking of Ontario, Ms. Pin noted that tuition increases have been persistent but incremental, so students haven’t quite faced the same “sticker shock” as those in Quebec. One commentator at the conference referred to this as the “boiling frog” metaphor.

Second, the Charest government was in its third mandate and was seen by many as tired and past its prime. Ms. Pin noted that the Liberals were sitting low in the opinion polls and reaching the end of their current mandate, and many wanted simply to see them go. The student protests were a great opportunity for opposition groups, in general, to oppose and weaken the government.

Third, there is a long history of social action in Quebec regarding postsecondary education going back to the Quiet Revolution of the 1960s, resulting in major student mobilizations every few years.  As well, the tuition hikes were seen in Quebec as being part of broader social issues on equality and opportunity that were raised by the conflict. By contrast, in Ontario, Ms. Pin said there has been “lots of austerity rhetoric” for years now. Media coverage outside Quebec, as well, was “demeaning and vilifying” of the student protests. Plus, university education is increasingly being seen in Canada as a private benefit accruing to the individual, so tuition fees and student debt become more of a personal than a societal issue, she said.

Fourth, and finally, Ms. Pin hypothesized that high tuition in Ontario (and much of the rest of Canada) may in itself stifle protest because there is “more to lose” – i.e., the opportunity cost of protest is higher. Additionally, a high debt load and the necessity for many students to work part-time while studying can impede collective action, she said; it is harder for students with heavy workloads “to engage” with the issues. And, in Ontario, the way student assistance is structured, if you miss your classes you risk losing your financial support.

I think her points are all thoughtful and plausible. A cynic, however, might suggest that they seem more like excuses – in the sense of offering justifications for inaction – rather than causes. But that might be splitting hairs. I do know, however, that in light of recent budget cuts, there are those who would say the protests have been a disaster for Quebec’s universities, but that’s a discussion for another day.

What do you think? Why has there been so little student reaction outside Quebec?

Two of the 12 signatories who drafted the bill are Canadians Bonnie Stewart, a PhD candidate and sessional lecturer in the faculty of education at the University of Prince Edward Island, and Mark J. Gierl, a professor of educational psychology, holder of the Canada Research Chair in Educational Measurement and director of the Centre for Research in Applied Measurement and Evaluation at the University of Alberta.

This is a conversation we all need to be having, say the document’s authors.

The authors have been working on the document since Dec. 14, first brought together by Sebastian Thrun, the computer science professor at Stanford University who founded Udacity, a purveyor of massive open online courses, or MOOCs.

Bonnie Stewart emailed me about the bill, noting that she has been working on MOOCs “for a few years now, since they were an emergent (and solely Canadian) phenomenon.” Explaining the thinking behind the bill, she writes: “The key point … is that as online learning suddenly seems to be hitting the mainstream of administrative and faculty conversations, against the backdrop of MOOCs and fiscal pressures, it’s important that changes be made with learners at their centre.”

The preamble reads, in part:

We believe that online learning represents a powerful and potentially awe-inspiring opportunity to make new forms of learning available to all students worldwide, whether young or old, learning for credit, self-improvement, employment, or just pleasure. We believe that online courses can create “meaningful” as well as “massive” learning opportunities. …

[Yet,] we worry that this moment is fragile … As we begin to experiment with how novel technologies might change learning and teaching, powerful forces threaten to neuter or constrain technology, propping up outdated educational practices rather than unfolding transformative ones. … For that reason, we feel compelled to articulate the opportunities for students in this brave electronic world, to assert their needs and – we dare say – rights.

The bill is framed in the context of learning in the digital age, but is really pretty universally applicable to all learning. The document states, for example:

We believe that our culture is increasingly one in which learning, unlearning and relearning are as fundamental to our survival and prosperity as breathing. To that end, we believe that all students have inalienable rights which transfer to new and emerging digital environments.

These rights are:

• The right to access
• The right to privacy
• The right to create public knowledge
• The right to own one’s personal data and intellectual property
• The right to financial transparency
• The right to pedagogical transparency
• The right to quality and care
• The right to have great teachers
• The right to be teachers

The document also outlines various principles “to which the best online learning should aspire.” They are:

• Global contribution
• Value
• Flexibility
• Hybrid learning
• Persistence
• Innovation
• Formative assessment
• Experimentation
• Civility
• Play

The document finishes with a flourish – a sentiment to which any teacher could acribe: “We must remember that the best learning, above all, imparts the gift of curiosity, the wonder of accomplishment, and the passion to know and learn even more.”

Cathy Davidson, another of the signatories, stresses that this manifesto is not meant to be the last word on the subject: “We see this … as a beginning, not an end, to a conversation we all need to be having with one another.”

The two were Jim Stanford, an economist with the Canadian Auto Workers and the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, and Alex Himelfarb, director of the Glendon School of Public and International Affairs at York University and former clerk of the Privy Council. They were joined by Derek DeCloet, editor of the Globe and Mail’s Report on Business magazine. The three were speaking on Jan. 10 at the “Academia in the Age of Austerity” conference held in Toronto and organized by the Ontario Confederation of University Faculty Associations. It’s a long post that follows, but there were many interesting points made and I encourage you to plow through.

Government spending not the problem

Starting off, Dr. Stanford’s main message was that government spending did not cause the deficit. “It was the recession that caused the deficit – not spending on teachers’ salaries, or university pension plans, or unionized garbage collectors.” Until the financial crisis in 2008 and the resulting recession, in Ontario “we delivered our programs, paid for them, and delivered balanced budgets.”

The current deficit in Ontario will likely be in the $10-billion range this year, which represents about 1.5 percent of GDP, Dr. Stanford estimated. We need to work to reduce this deficit over time, but if it takes a little longer than planned, “it’s not the end of the world as we know it.” There has been “a lot of scaremongering” about debts and deficits, he said, “this ridiculous charade … where finance ministers want to make it look as bad as possible to scare people into accepting tough medicine.”

What’s more, “not only is austerity not necessary, it is not even going to work. It’s self-defeating. If the recession caused the deficit, then trying to solve the deficit by slashing billions of dollars from spending … and throwing lots of people out of jobs, is obviously worsening the underlying problem that created the deficit in the first place.” The International Monetary Fund, the “holy church of free-market economics, has just woken up to this and finally recognized the macroeconomic spinoffs of all this belt-tightening. We see this in Europe, where the more they cut, the more the economy falls and the worse the deficit becomes.”

There “has to be another way”

Dr. Himelfarb said he “more or less” agreed with Dr. Stanford’s analysis, adding that it was a good time to have this discussion because, in the U.K. and Europe, austerity “is beginning to lose its luster.” Why? “It’s not only because of protests in the streets, often violent, and the breakdown of social cohesion – although that’s a good reason,” said Dr. Himelfarb. “And it’s not only because of significant job losses and rising inequality; and it’s not only because of the devastating impact on the most vulnerable – women, young people and the poorest.” But, austerity is also coming into disrepute “because the impact on growth has been even deeper than the critics had anticipated.” Because of austerity, “what you’re getting is continuing joblessness, growing debt, stagnant economies and no end in sight to the cuts. So people are starting to say, ‘There has to be another way. Any other way has got to be better than this.’”

Also, “it has become apparent in this debate how much of the austerity agenda is driven neither by fiscal objectives nor economic policy,” said Dr. Himelfarb. Rather, “it’s driven by ideology – the absolute commitment to reduce the role of government in economic and social affairs. In many ways deficits are a gift to those who would wish to reduce government because they become the cover for doing so.”

Austerity, he continued, is not the same as fiscal responsibility. “Everybody would agree that we should be fiscally responsible, spend wisely, reduce waste, and that we should over time keep revenues and expenditures in balance, and in good times reduce the debt. But, austerity is something different. It’s ‘damn the consequences,’ cut government, even at the expense of growth and increased debt, and irrespective of the human consequences, which are extraordinary.”

The Canadian version of austerity is different than in the U.K. and Europe. Here, he calls it “austerity in slow motion,” but he says the consequences are equally pernicious. “In large part our austerity is self-induced from over a decade of tax cuts that were sold to us as a free good but which we couldn’t actually afford. And that’s true at every level of government.”

As an example, Dr. Himelfarb noted that when the current federal government came to power in 2006, it had a $16 billion surplus, and that was “after the biggest tax cut in Canadian history in 2000.” This, he said, was “a signal that maybe we didn’t have a spending problem.” That extra $16 billion “would have provided some significant resilience in a time of recession, which came shortly thereafter.” Instead, we cut taxes. Just the “two-penny” cut in the goods and services tax (when the GST was reduced from 7 percent to 5 percent) represents a $14-billion annual loss in revenue, he said.

No magic wand

Mr. DeCloet of the Globe and Mail was asked to argue the contrary side for the sake of debate, but his defence of austerity was lukewarm. He said “we can all agree” that the recession caused the deficit. Likewise, “there is lots of academic evidence that austerity curbs growth, it’s just simple math.” And, he said, if you can get the growth rate back up to pre-recession levels, then that will largely solve the issue.

However, the problem, he said, “is that we don’t have a magic wand to get the growth rate up.” Ontario’s sluggish growth is a factor of many problems, many of which are global and beyond our control. You can’t just ignore government deficits, he said, because if you do, “an ever increasing proportion of tax dollars will go towards bond holders in New York and elsewhere,” he said.

“We fell into this trap at the federal level in the 1970s and 1980s,” said Mr. DeCloet, “when we believed deficits didn’t matter, and we woke up one day and found 25 cents of every dollar went to investors rather than being spent on social programs.” The federal government managed to solve the problem through a mix of “good policies and good luck, a lot of that external.” As a result, when the crisis hit in 2008, Canada had the lowest proportion of debt relative to economic output of any G7 country. That meant that “we could run a $50-billion deficit and bail out the auto makers. That was the fruit of what came before. So, if you look at it as a long game, rather than a short game, austerity doesn’t’ look quite so bad.”

Dr. Himelfarb countered that “we talk about austerity in the ’90s and how brilliant it was, but this is not the ’90s.” First, the tax levels then were higher, so revenues “were more solid.” As well, at the time, we were the only country contracting, he said, while other countries were expanding. “So we grew ourselves out of deficit to a significant degree. We fed off the growth in the U.S.” But now, when most countries’ economies are contracting, “you have a problem.”

There was much more back and forth during a question-and-answer period that followed which mainly reinforced the points made. To sum up, I’ll give the last word to Dr. Himelfarb:

“The biggest lesson to learn is that we oughtn’t be shaped by the neo-liberal ideology that has driven us for three decades that less tax, less government, less intervention is the answer. We need a new paradigm, and that paradigm ought to put people … at the centre of the agenda, and not the fisc (the public treasury). We need to ask ourselves, when did the health of the fisc become more important than the health of the people?”

Educational development expert Christopher Knapper.

First, some of his bona fides: trained as a psychologist, Dr. Knapper was a university teacher for over 40 years and has been a professional education developer for more than 30 years. He was founding director of the teaching resources office at the University of Waterloo in 1977 and went on to establish the Instructional Development Centre at Queen’s University in 1992, where he is today an emeritus professor. He was also the founding president of the Society for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education (where there is a lifetime achievement award named after him) and a founding editor of the International Journal for Academic Development. If Dr. Knapper wishes to impart his wisdom on teaching and learning, you listen.

He covered a lot of ground in his talk, some of which may be familiar to faculty who’ve received some pedagogical training. Nonetheless, his tidbits of wisdom are reassuring. What follows are the parts that I found most interesting.

Universities in crisis?

Though it wasn’t the main theme of his talk, Dr. Knapper started out with a few thoughts on the present state of universities in Canada. His view: all is not well. “There is a bit of a ferment going on outside the Ivory Tower, with a lot of people questioning what we’re doing in universities, what the value of universities is, and what our future will be.”

University presidents talk constantly about having to do too much with too few resources, “while it seems fairly obvious to me they’re not going to get more money.” Meanwhile, politicians are beginning to ask what universities are doing with the money they get. Also of concern, he says, is that the public increasingly sees university as an individual good rather than a societal good – the commodification of higher education.

Interestingly, Dr. Knapper also sees technology as a threat – he says he’s “a bit of cynic” when it comes to much educational technology. On MOOCs (massive, open, online courses), he finds it interesting that the model is “almost entirely information-based.” But it’s not information we’re lacking, he says. “We are overwhelmed with information. The problem is how the learners process and deal with the stuff that’s out there.”

The five “-ations”

Asked what goes on at a university, most of the public would say “an education.” But Dr. Knapper says of equal importance to a student’s experience are four other “-ations,” three positive, one mainly negative.

Relocation: You move away from home and go to a place you’ve never lived in before, a “hugely important step” in becoming an independent person. This is linked to …

Maturation: The age at which most students go to university, around 18 to 22 years of age, is a transformative time for people as they move from adolescence to becoming adults, and that accounts for a lot of change that occurs with our students, he says.

Socialization: You meet new friends, which is an enormously rewarding and influential process.

Acculturation: Students come to university thinking it will be an exciting and truly transformational experience. But, what happens is “their high ideals rapidly get acculturated out of them.” They encounter large classes, trivial testing and very little interpersonal contact with teachers. They get told by older students, “this is the way it is; get used to it.”

Factors that promote deep learning

These may be familiar to many educators, but bear repeating.

• Good teaching: staff are well prepared, confident;
• Openness to students: staff friendly, flexible, helpful
• Freedom in learning: students have a choice in what they study
• Clear goals and standards: assessment standards, expectations are clearly defined;
• Vocational relevance: courses are seen as relevant to future careers
• Social Climate: good relations between students, staff (social, academic).

Changing university teaching and learning

There are already many changes underway, mainly for the better, in university teaching, says Dr. Knapper. Among these are a wider range of teaching methods, including many that stress research and inquiry skills, and a greater awareness of diversity and ethical issues. As well, teaching is better documented and evaluated than in the past, and there are more conversations and more reflection about teaching and learning happening at our institutions.

On the problematic side, Dr. Knapper says teaching remains overwhelmingly didactic and reliant on traditional lectures which stress content “coverage.” Assessment methods of student learning are often trivial and “lack authenticity,” and the evaluation of teaching effectiveness and learning outcomes is often superficial. Other problem areas:

• Curriculum development relies too much on disciplinary traditions and faculty preferences, rather than on student and societal needs;
• The “tyranny of the academic disciplines” can mitigate against integration of knowledge and insights from different fields;
• Too much time is spent in formal classes instead of independent study;
• Evidence for transfer of learning to students’ later lives is elusive.

Depersonalized teaching

A big worry for Dr. Knapper is that teaching is becoming increasingly depersonalized. “Interpersonal contact between teachers and students, to me, is something that is so important. … If you change universities to the point where that is not possible for most students, than I think you might as well abandon universities as teaching institutions.”

And, “it’s not just the interpersonal talk; it’s not just the conversation,” he says. Rather, these connections allow the teacher to be a catalyst. “The teacher plays a sort of validating role in allowing the learner to make leaps to the next thing, to do things that perhaps they didn’t think they were capable of doing.”

If there is one final message he wishes to convey, it is the following: Build into your class some way to meaningfully interact with students on a one-on-one basis (or one-on-two, or whatever is practical) so that “you can get to know them, you can get to know their needs, you can explore what they think learning is.” And, “listen to students, as well as tell them stuff.”

To students, he would say: the one thing you should do in your first year in university is go knock on the door of a professor in your department and ask if you can talk with him or her for 20 minutes about how your program’s going. “I’ll bet you any money that you will not be refused if you do that. Most professors, even the most belligerent, would be pleased to have such a conversation.”

Despite what shopping mall speakers are trying to make me believe, this is not the most wonderful time of the year, not yet at least. As usual, there’s one giant roadblock standing between students and a winter break filled with spiked eggnog and endless consequence-free procrastination: the almighty and universally dreaded exam period.

As per the season, Globe and Mail columnists Margaret Wente and Gary Mason fired shots back and forth last week, debating whether today’s universities are breeding a generation of self-entitled students incapable of dealing with pressure or the inevitable challenges of “The Real World.” This, coupled with hundreds of panicked news stories about record-breaking levels of student stress has once again given rise to the ever-circular debate over today’s lazier-than-ever students and our culture of mediocrity in the face of challenges.

Yet, from what I can see, the bulk of the criticism is stemming from baby boomers like Ms. Wente who see today’s education system as coddling and unrealistic, causing the very same stresses they’re seeking to alleviate. But are today’s students really being bred for failure or are critics like Ms. Wente deliberately seeking controversy by comparing apples and oranges?

I don’t think stress levels have reached pandemic proportions, but I do think I belong to a generation that loves to complain, especially when all our worldly woes can be validated by our peers with the click of a “Like” button. Once the season hits, we all know to brace ourselves for the onslaught of whiney exam-related social media posts that are undoubtedly coming. We’ve unfortunately all made peace with this, many choosing to join in on the fun.

But now we see the emergence of new methods aimed at trying to decompress students, from puppy petting rooms to seasonal counselling and even free cocoa.  But are we being coddled or are the squeaky wheels just getting their grease? Many boomers like to believe that since we’re better at communally acknowledging our discontent and anxiety, we must therefore be completely incapable of coping with it.

Do we think we have it any harder than previous generations of students? No. However, does this mean that we’ve thereby earned the condescension we’re seeing from boomers? Absolutely not.

Maybe university isn’t meant to be easy, but stepping on students’ heels doesn’t make our work any more rewarding or the work of others any more valid. Baby boomers talk about how universities have “watered down the standards,” which to me is like being lectured about how students used to have to walk home from school, uphill both ways and without shoes.

This never-ending competition over who had it worse is getting a little ridiculous. I feel like we live in a revolving door of complainers and sanctimonious sympathy seekers, with every generation wanting the next to recognize how bad they had it and how much easier things are now. Molehills become mountains and the persistence of human memory takes for granted the aging mind’s tendency towards a “grass was always browner in my day” mentality.

The quest for higher education has always been difficult, and different generations of students have faced different challenges and subsequently dealt with them in very different ways. I like to think that when Plato complained about his exams, Socrates probably whacked him upside the head and mumbled something about how scrolls in his day were harder to unfurl.

Just because some like to recall their university experience as a school of hard knocks, it doesn’t mean their education is somehow more worthy of ours, or the world’s acknowledgement. I come from a generation that encourages students to talk about anxiety and depression, in the hopes not of being coddled, but rather of making peers understand that these feelings are not only mutual, they’re universal. In this way, we create a university culture that is understanding and empathetic rather than relying on the need to step above those we feel aren’t up to schoolyard snuff.

Instead of bickering over who’s got the biggest academic scars, let’s use a little inter-generational relativity and cut each other some slack. Exams have always sucked, but regardless of what we do to cope, the ultimate test of worth should be whether we chose to flounder or flourish in the face of adversity.

Learning that lesson is the true value of higher education, not the ingrained sense of pride and entitlement that some seem to take away from it.

There’s sure to be an opening soon.

For a while now, University of Victoria President David Turpin has been wondering about the turnover of university presidents in Canada. This was prompted partly by the sudden departure of 12 university presidents within three years of their appointments – i.e., before the end of their appointed terms – between 2005 and 2010. This compares to just three unexpected departures in the previous five-year period.

By virtue of their appointments, university presidents are members of the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada. As Dr. Turpin said in a Sept. 2011 article in University Affairs, “By my count, close to 20 percent of the AUCC membership has had a presidential term cut short. Is this unusual? We all think it is. But we don’t have any data.”

I bring this up because Dr. Turpin presented some initial research for his “Canadian University Presidents Project” at the annual AUCC membership meeting in April 2012. It was a closed meeting, so I didn’t hear the presentation. However, I recently discovered that he posted the slideshow of his presentation online at the UVic website, available publicly.

A lack of experience could be playing a part in the spate of sudden departures over the past few years. The average length of service of university presidents has been declining, according to Dr. Turpin’s data, from an average of about 13-14 years in the 1950s to under six years in 2010. Looking at the data somewhat differently, Dr. Turpin found that a currently serving university president had, on average, 3.6 years of experience in 2010, compared to an average of 4.9 years in 2004. (More after the jump.)

Click on graph to enlarge.

Click on graph to enlarge.

At University Affairs, we’ve written about the generational turnover of university presidents in Canada since at least 2008. In 2009, I noted in a blog post that 53 university heads (out of a total of 94 member institutions) were currently serving a first term. I just rechecked those numbers, and since the beginning of 2009 there have been 49 new presidents appointed (out of 95 member institutions), so the generational turnover continues (I discounted two appointments where the appointees had previously served as president at another institution). The Globe and Mail picked up on the theme in a recent article.

Dr. Turpin hypothesizes a number of reasons for the early departures:

• The role of president has become more complex (a theme we looked at back in 2007)
• The pool of candidates has declined
• There’s been an increase in “external” appointments
• Use of search consultants may decrease the engagement of the Board of Directors in hiring decisions
• Board activism has increased (there has been a number of recent Board-initiated early departures)

Dr. Turpin says he plans to continue to build his database and that he hopes it will provide more answers about university presidents’ career paths and how these have changed over the years. He may soon find himself with more time to devote to the project: he steps down as president of UVic in June 2013 after 13 years at the helm.

Mere semanitics? Not necessarily. The legality of student strikes in Quebec was never seriously contested before this year, but the massive social disruption caused by the recent protests has underlined to many observers the importance of clarifying the issue before the next time students take to the streets.

In Quebec, student associations are governed by legislation known as Law 32, which sets out students’ rights of association and representation, but which makes no mention of the right to strike. That “right” was more of a social consensus, a tradition built up over the years, says Alec Castonguay in an excellent blog post on the issue.

But many people started to question that right as the student protests escalated, particularly the manner in which the strike votes were organized by the student associations. In some instances, only 10 percent of eligible students participated in strike votes. As well, some students complained of feeling intimidated from voting against a strike as these votes were sometimes held by an open show of hands. “The spring protests in effect exposed the gaps in the practices of the associations, to the point of putting in doubt the legitimacy of their decisions,” wrote Brigitte Breton in an editorial in Le Soleil entitled “Student democracy or anarchy?”

Further questions were raised about the right of students to set up picket lines on or adjacent to campuses to prevent dissenting students from attending classes. Some students went to court seeking injunctions against the student associations from blocking access to campus while others filed a class action lawsuit against educational institutions for their failure to deliver courses, further exposing the legal landmines created by the protests.

Crucially, as some commentators have pointed out, the right to strike – such as that accorded to labour unions – is also counterbalanced by certain responsibilities and obligations on the part of those unions. “The privilege is granted carefully and jealously, with legal regulation of the decision-making procedures that lead to a strike, as well as of the picketing and protesting activity that can accompany it,” wrote  Jacob Levy, the Tomlinson Professor of Political Theory and an associate professor of political science at McGill University, in a recent article in Academic Matters. He continues:

“The [student] boycotters helped themselves to the privileges accorded to labour unions and claimed the right to be able to create a ‘strike’ binding on dissenting students (not to mention instructors) while upholding none of the responsibilities of labour unions: publicly authorized quorum rules and voting procedures agreed upon in advance, limitations on the time and place of picketing, and so on. This was the source of the ugliest confrontations on campuses. Many universities and CEGEPs sought to remain open for students who wished to attend class, and ultimately called on police to enforce court injunctions against their classrooms being blocked by protesters.”

This led to something from which we should all recoil, said Dr. Levy: “professors who wanted to teach and students who wanted to learn being prevented from doing so by aggressive masked protesters who blocked classrooms or disrupted classes … This left the universities and colleges affected by the boycott with no tolerable choices; they were cornered by the boycotters’ claim that they could legitimately decide to shut classes down.”

Recently, in response to these issues, Quebec’s new minister of higher education, Pierre Duchesne, mused openly that perhaps student associations in fact should be given the legal right to strike. That idea was quickly condemned by La Presse editorial writer Andre Pratte as “one right too many.”

The inconveniences of such legislation “would be much greater than its advantages,” he wrote.  “It would create a precedent: for the first time, it would give to a group of beneficiaries of a service provided by the State the right to deprive other persons of that service.” An editorial in the Montreal Gazette made much the same point, calling the idea “folly.”

Interestingly, Martine Desjardins, the head of Quebec’s university student federation, FEUQ, is also against the idea of granting students the legal right to strike. Speaking to Alec Castonguay, she said her federation has begun looking at other jurisdictions in the world where students have this right and said it’s “frightening.” Essentially, the restrictions that these laws impose “would make student mobilization impossible,” she said.

The minister has opened a Pandora’s Box, commented Mr. Castonguay. But, he added, if the students’ federations want to avoid the strict obligations imposed by a right to strike, the only solution is for them to do the necessary internal work to clean up their practices regarding student protests to ensure the process is democratic and has legitimacy. “That may not solve everything,” he wrote, “but it would be a huge step in the right direction. Whether it comes from government or from the students’ associations directly, the time for clarification has arrived.”

Doom to the left, gloom to the right.

There is an ever-expanding body of reporting that has been dubbed “the crisis literature” in higher education. I’ve commented before on how apocalyptic some of the prognostications are for the future of universities.

An example of this doom-and-gloom analysis is a recent report out of Australia. The university system Down Under is quite similar to our own here in Canada so it’s interesting to see what’s being said. Its conclusions could presumably apply to Canadian universities.

The 30-page report, prepared by the international consulting firm Ernst & Young, is entitled, The University of the future: A thousand year old industry on the cusp of profound change. The report’s author, Justin Bokor, executive director in Ernst & Young’s education division, states baldly: “There’s not a single Australian university that can survive to 2025 with its current business model.” He continues: “We’ve seen fundamental structural changes to industries including media, retail and entertainment in recent years – higher education is next.”

The report explains that the dominant university model in Australia (and, he might have added, in Canada) – a “broad-based teaching and research institution, supported by a large asset base and a large, predominantly in-house back office” – will prove unviable in all but a few cases. At a minimum, “incumbent universities will need to significantly streamline their operations” while also “incorporating new teaching and learning delivery mechanisms.”

Mr. Bokor says that “government funding is tight and is going to be tighter still in the next couple of political cycles” – a statement one might easily hear in Canada. Universities, he says, “While they are not exactly businesses, they will have to run like businesses. They need to be lean and mean.”

The report notes, apparently without irony, that, “Exciting times are ahead.”

The report identifies the main drivers of change it says will bring about this transformation of higher education (I’m cribbing here from University World News, which has a good summary of the report). These drivers are:

• The democratization of knowledge as a consequence of massive expansion of online resources (think MOOCs).
• The contestability of markets and funding as a direct consequence of declining public investment and the adoption of market design policies to fund and regulate higher education.
• Digital technologies changing the way courses are delivered.
• Global mobility of students and staff.
• Integration with industry to differentiate programs (through work-integrated learning) and to support and fund applied research.

Not everyone is buying the argument. In Campus Review (subscription required), Australian Senator Lee Rhiannon, education critic for the Green Party, described the report as “over the top” and “all doom and gloom.” She acknowledged that the report made some valid points, but was concerned with what she saw as a push by Ernst & Young for more involvement of the private sector in universities. “The report is fashioned to smooth the entry of private sector providers at the expense of a robust and equitable public university sector,” she says. “‘Market contestability’ and ‘competition’ are buzz words designed to paint increased funding cuts to public universities as inevitable and the private sector as the saviour of universities.”

The U.S. and Canada

Nowhere is the higher-ed crisis literature more vocal than in the U.S., where many experts also are predicting profound changes for universities. It’s hard to overstate the unease felt south of the border. According to a recent survey sponsored by Time magazine and the Carnegie Corporation of New York, 89 percent of U.S. adults and 96 percent of senior administrators at colleges and universities said higher education is in crisis, and nearly four in 10 in both groups considered the crisis to be “severe.”

Here in Canada, we’ve been mostly immune from the doom and gloom, so far. (A few commentators such as Don Tapscott of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto echoes some of the doomsday themes, but somewhat less apocalyptically.) I wonder why that is so.

That’s not to say that universities in Canada don’t face enormous challenges – although what those are depend on who you talk to – but there seems to be little sense of an impending crisis.

This might be in part because we have fairly little involvement of the private sector in universities in Canada, apart from charitable donations/sponsorships and industry-university research collaboration. There are a few, generally small, mainly faith-based, private colleges and universities, but that’s about it. This is quite different from the U.S., where many of the elite universities are private and the largest online education provider is owned by a for-profit corporation.

It may be that entrepreneurs look at the current situation in Canada, with its bias towards a robust publicly funded system – and seemingly little public interest in changing that – and just don’t see much prospect for profits. And I suspect it’s the prospect of big profits by those who would gain them that is pushing a lot of the doomsday scenarios. Anyway, it’s a theory.

As it happens, there is some interesting research on this by Pamela Gravestock which she presented at the annual meeting of the Society for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education this past June in Montreal (you can view her abstract by clicking here and scrolling down to session CS2.03). I attended and recorded her presentation and had intended to revisit it at some point. Now seems to be a good time!

Dr. Gravestock is the associate director of the Centre for Teaching Support and Innovation at the University of Toronto. Her research doesn’t necessarily answer the question of whether research is valued over teaching, but it definitely gives some clues as to why this perception persists. Where are these clues? She found them in the tenure policies at Canada’s universities.

(Dr. Gravestock’s 2011 PhD thesis, entitled, “Does Teaching Matter? The Role of Teaching Evaluation in Tenure Policies at Selected Canadian Universities,” covers these issues in a much more extensive manner, including a full list of the universities studied.)

Like many others, Dr. Gravestock agrees that there is a perception that only research matters, or is at least privileged, in hiring and promotion. “I’ve worked in the field of faculty development for just over 10 years now, and I’ve heard this concern about the undervaluing of teaching from faculty, from administrators and even from my own students. So it’s a common refrain,” she said at the STLHE conference.

She wondered about the source of these beliefs, which led her to take a systematic look at the tenure policies at 46 of Canada’s universities. She collected the data up until the spring of 2011. These policies do change from time to time, she noted, and therefore some of the data may be dated.

All of the universities’ policies noted that tenure-stream faculty were expected to engage in teaching, research and service. Research was usually defined as scholarly inquiry and the dissemination of those results. Multiple terms were used, but the focus was generally on impact. Teaching was almost always understood as a set of activities but was seldom understood in relation to student learning or through the concepts of Ernest Boyer’s model of the teacher-scholar. As well, the standards of performance that the institutions were looking for in these areas were often undefined and frequently ambiguous. The standards also often differed: for instance, one university called for “excellence” in research but “competence” in teaching. The policies also differed in terms of the sources of evidence on which to base teaching contributions, and rarely was there clear direction of how to review that evidence. Even when the policies were clear, noted Dr. Gravestock, there was no evidence whether they are actually being followed or how they’re being applied. Prevailing institutional culture may have an impact.

Summing up, she said, “My study has revealed that tenure and the evaluation of teaching are institution specific – there is no one specific approach.” Teaching was a recognized and stated criterion for tenure in all of the policies, and no policy explicitly stated that research was the primary criteria for tenure. “But, I think the policies could be vastly improved. Institutional understanding of teaching and expectations for teaching aren’t always clear or transparent; data are often optional or recommended but not required. Standards of performance are not clearly defined.”

So does teaching matter? “I think it does,” says Dr. Gravestock. “However, institutions, and in particular the directions and the messaging contained in our policies, don’t always demonstrate this. And while policies may not be the sole cause for ongoing perceptions that teaching is undervalued in higher education, they do play I think a really significant part. There’s enough missing in these policies to enable the inaccurate interpretation and application of policies, and thus insufficient assessments of teaching, which can result in a culture that really perceives teaching to be undervalued.”

1. Create a national strategy

This was the main theme of her closing piece, in which Ms. Anderssen notes that, among developed countries, Canada “is unique in its failure to develop a national approach to universities and colleges.” (Similarly, the Canadian Federation of Students calls for a “federal postsecondary education act.”) The arguments in favour of a national strategy are legitimate, but irrelevant. It’s not going to happen, period. The current federal government has no interest whatsoever in inserting itself in matters of provincial jurisdiction and the provinces themselves have had a poor track record of accomplishing anything of substance through the Council of Ministers of Education Canada (an intergovernmental body founded by the provincial ministers of education).

Now, should the educational institutions work more cooperatively, particularly in terms of credit transfer and program partnerships? Yes, certainly. This is already happening, but the institutions could do much more. Perhaps CMEC could help facilitate a national credit-transfer system, but I won’t hold my breath.

2. Make teaching central

I might quibble with the idea of making teaching “central” (rather than “equal to” research), but I wholeheartedly agree that teaching and learning must be valued more at universities, and that this should be better reflected in faculty tenure and promotion decisions. But good teaching requires resources, particularly human resources. This means hiring more full-time, tenure-track faculty. Who’s going to pay for that?

3. Expand internationally

There is much merit in attracting more international students to our campuses and to encourage Canadian students to study abroad. What I’d ideally like to see is a Canadian version of the Erasmus student exchange program that would entice students to do a term abroad or even elsewhere in Canada. Perhaps that is the sort of “national” program that would interest the federal government without stepping too much on the toes of the provinces, but again I’m not holding my breath.

As for Canadian universities opening campuses abroad, which was part of Ms. Anderssen’s suggestion, that can be a financially risky endeavour, so I’m not surprised that few of our universities have taken the plunge.

4. Establish accountability benchmarks

A better idea would be to adequately fund a robust education division at Statistics Canada, rather than the recent cutbacks that we’ve seen at the federal agency. In far too many areas of postsecondary education, we simply lack the data to really know what’s going on. We also need more nationwide research of the kind being undertaken in Ontario by the Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario. These two things would go a long way to keeping universities and colleges accountable.

5. Support Canadian online platforms

Sure, but I wouldn’t restrict the promotion of innovative teaching practices to the online realm. Innovative teaching in all its forms should be encouraged, promoted – and funded. See item 2 above.

Now it’s your turn. What are your ideas for improving Canadian higher education?

P.S. (added on Oct. 24): I do applaud the Globe, Erin Anderssen, James Bradshaw and the others who worked on the re:education series. I might have emphasized certain issues differently, but their coverage was very good and touched on a lot of the key contentious areas. As for their colleague Margaret Wente and her caricature of universities and faculty, perhaps the less said the better.

Léo at the Canadian Online Publishing Awards, photo by colleague Melonie Fullick.

P.S. #2: Margin Notes was chosen best blog (in the blue division, for business-to-business, professional association or scholarly publication) at the Canadian Online Publishing Awards on Oct. 22. I am honoured. It is the second time that Margin Notes has taken the gold in these awards. The blog first won in 2009.

My only previous experience reading a “popular” book on theoretical physics – A Brief History of Time, by Stephen Hawking – ended badly. I was thrilled by the deep concepts and insights it contained, but like many other readers, I got bogged down in the equations and never finished it – hence my reluctance to pick up Dr. Turok’s book. But, after several colleagues inquired excitedly about the two books on my desk, and one colleague actually made off with one of the copies, I decided to take the plunge.

I finished the book within a week and enjoyed it (there were mercifully few equations), but with some reservations.

The book offers an excellent historical overview of mathematics and physics, from the Pythagoreans through to Galileo, Copernicus and Newton, the Scottish enlightenment, and Einstein and his contemporaries. It was also a sobering reminder of the vast amount of physics of which I remain ignorant.

Among my realizations from the book is that many of us – I won’t presume to speak for everybody – are stuck in a kind of classical Newtonian understanding of physical reality. We understand the falling apple, the rattling lid on a pot of boiling water, the concepts of force and mass. We also even vaguely understand the moon’s gravitational pull on the tides, the flow of electricity through wires, and so on. We understand these things because they are mostly visible; they are part of our common everyday experience.

But physics has moved far beyond the sorts of mechanical inventions that led to the Industrial Revolution and into mysterious quantum realms many of us can barely conceptualize. Which led to one of my other major realizations: the strange new world of quantum theory isn’t really that new. It was the likes of Einstein, Heisenberg and Schrödinger who ushered it in in the early part of the 20th century, a “golden age” for physics. Their work enabled the development of transistors, integrated circuits, lasers, the Internet, digital cameras and all the other modern gadgetry that has transformed our lives.

In perhaps the key insight of Dr. Turok’s book, addressing the gulf between our common understanding and our great achievements, he writes: “We are analog beings living in a digital world, facing a quantum future.” Heady stuff.

The humanist

Another pleasure of the book was to learn a bit about Dr. Turok the humanitarian and optimist. He was born in South Africa, where his parents were jailed for being anti-Apartheid activists. He seems to have been deeply affected by that, and by the notion that justice and the power of ideas can change the world. He has an obvious affection for Africa and over the past decade has helped to found the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences, or AIMS. His goal: to “unlock and nurture scientific talent across Africa, so that within our lifetimes we are celebrating an African Einstein.”

Dr. Turok also believes strongly in science as a force for good and states that science and society’s mission are one and the same. “Science is, in general, open-minded, tolerant and democratic,” he writes. “In its opposition to dogma and willingness to live with uncertainty, science is in many ways a model for society.”

The coming revolution

There was one major part of the book, however, that left me somewhat dissatisfied. Much of the premise of the book is to set the stage for the coming quantum revolution, of which Dr. Turok is very enthusiastic:

“A wonderful new world is beckoning. … Quantum physics has revealed that the behaviour of the universe, and the way in which we are involved in it, is stranger than anything anyone could have expected. On the horizon are technologies and understanding beyond anything we have experienced so far. We are quite literally being challenged to rise to the next level of existence, the next stage of evolution of ourselves and of the universe.”

Try as I might, I remain unmoved. As Dr. Turok mentions, quantum physics – with its multiverses, superpositions and singularity theorems – is revealing that the universe is very, very strange indeed, behaving in ways which defy our common understanding of classical physics. I find it hard to grasp fundamentally what he’s talking about and what this future will actually hold. I hear his admonition, “The future is bright, if only we can rise to it,” but I’m not sure I’m up to the challenge.

Dr. Turok began his series of Massey Lectures in St. John’s on October 10 and delivers his fifth and final lecture on October 24 in Toronto. CBC Radio will broadcast the lectures on its Ideas program the week of November 12 to 16. Have a listen … or buy the book!