On another note, I was delighted to have the opportunity to meet many of this year’s incoming steering committee members and student presidents for the first time at the OUSA Transition Conference last week. Over the course of two very intensive days, we managed to pack in loads of presentations, round-robin discussions, interactive seminars and some great networking.

Some highlights of the two days are depicted below…

Remarks and Q&A by the Minister of Training Colleges and Universities, Brad Duguid 

Lobbying Presentation by OUSA Alumnus, David Simmonds

A networking evening during a Toronto Blue Jay’s Game (an OUSA tradition!)

A presentation by Bonnie Patterson, COU

A presentation by Linda Franklin, CO

OUSA’s Presidential Council

OUSA’s new Steering Committee!

Thank you once again to everyone who participated in our event last week. In particular, we would like to extend a warm thank you to our partners who took time out of their busy schedules to meet with this year’s student leaders to discuss the complexities of the PSE sector. We look forward to working with you in the upcoming year!

Becky Hillyer
OUSA Operations Coordinator

After three days of transition, our new Steering Committee and the respective student union presidents have had a variety of opportunities to discuss the challenges facing Ontario’s undergraduates, both amongst themselves and with other stakeholders, senior civil servants, and the Minister of Training, Colleges and Universities, Brad Duguid. The conference has provided them with a crash course on the issues facing Ontario’s postsecondary sector, and these students are ready to face these challenges head on in the year to come.

Over the last year, OUSA’s Home Office has had the pleasure of being led by a group of student leaders who have been committed to furthering our mission of improving the affordability, accessibility, quality and accountability in Ontario’s post-secondary system. While this is the first Steering Committee I have worked with, I understand that OUSA has been privileged year and year again with an extremely high caliber of student leaders. Our Steering Committee demonstrated an unwavering commitment to the values and principles of our organization, remained cognizant at all times that they were representing the students on their campuses as they made difficult decisions, put in the hard work and research that is required to ensure that OUSA’s policy solutions are educated solutions, and gave up countless early mornings, late evenings and weekends to serve as vanguards of OUSA and champions of their student unions. I would like to thank our Executive, who took on the additional responsibility of being involved in issues at OUSA on a day-to-day basis, while carrying out their responsibilities at their home campuses. Alysha, Adam and Huzaifa, I can’t begin to thank you enough for all the work you put in this year.

OUSA’s Home Office is excited to begin the 2013-2014 academic year with our new student leaders next week. Our new Steering Committee will push us further forward, challenge our assumptions, bring up new issues, and ensure that at the end of the day, OUSA’s work improves the landscape of Ontario’s post-secondary system for all Ontarians, regardless of who they are or where in the province they live. We look forward to working closely with our new Executive, who will be elected this morning, and will build upon the work that Alysha, Adam and Huzaifa have carried out this past year.

OUSA’s strength lies in the foundation built by past student leaders, and the commitment, innovation, and energy that new student leaders bring each year. In the year ahead, I am confident that our new Steering Committee and Executive will further push us forward, and leave the 2014-2015 Steering Committee with an even stronger OUSA than that built by their predecessors.

Rylan Kinnon
OUSA Executive Director

I am extremely proud of the progress we were able to make in a short, but eventful year. To start the year off, OUSA actively participated in sector-wide discussions on system transformation. Mental health support was immediately identified as a priority for our students, and OUSA worked with sector partners to develop comprehensive strategies to address these concerns through the $21 million Mental Health Innovation Fund implemented this year. In the months leading up to the March announcement of the new Ontario tuition framework, OUSA worked tirelessly to advocate for fairer tuition fees for students in the province. OUSA also saw recent success in the $295 million investment in youth employment in the 2013 Ontario Budget, reflecting OUSA’s recommendations in both our pre-budget submission and student employment policy papers published this year.

It was truly a privilege to have served as the President of OUSA this year and to have had the opportunity to work with the incredibly passionate people within this organization and the greater higher education sector. I’d like to extend a sincere “thank-you” to this year’s Steering Committee, who have made great strides in representing and advocating for Ontario students. This year would not have been possible without the dedication of our Home Office staff, who have worked tirelessly to make OUSA what it is today.

I will forever value my time with this organization and its people. Together we work to fulfill OUSA’s vision to improve the accessibility, affordability, accountability, and quality of undergraduate education in Ontario. With the dedication and integrity that I have witnessed this year, I have full confidence that we will continue to push for a brighter future for post-secondary education in Ontario in the years to come.

Alysha Li
OUSA President 2012-2013

My first foray into the world of student government was through the McMaster Students Union (MSU) over four years ago as a teenager with an idealistic, if not grandiose, vision of what I wanted my university education and that of those around me to be.  A desire to be actively involved in shaping the post-secondary experience of my peers led me to attend my first OUSA General Assembly in the spring of 2010 – an important milestone for me as it allowed me to focus my wide ranging ideas through an effective framework and vision for post-secondary education that prioritizes the accessibility, affordability, accountability and quality of education. Since then, I’ve had the privilege of attending six additional OUSA General Assemblies and spent the past year as the Vice President Education of the MSU as well as the Vice-President Finance of OUSA.

Aside from my longstanding involvement with OUSA and student government, I was compelled to apply for the internship to explore my interests in policy and research. This internship is in many ways a logical next step for me,  as it will provide me an opportunity to spend an entire summer exploring these priorities in a broader context, while still retaining the ability to serve a student community that I identified so strongly with during my time at McMaster.

Over the course of the summer I will be updating issue briefings, working on the Student Success and Access Strategy policy papers, assisting home office and steering committee with their preparation for various lobby meetings, conducting literature reviews on student employment policies, and anything and everything that the unpredictable political landscape throws OUSA and our members this year.

Apart from my work with OUSA, I am also a passionate Hamilton resident. When I’m not in OUSA’s Toronto office, I’ll be exploring the various natural trails and attractions that Hamilton has to offer, as well as  volunteering at local Hamilton organizations involved with economic and social revitalization efforts within the city.

Huzaifa Saeed
OUSA Summer Research Intern

In my time, I have often heard it said that Ontario has adequately addressed issues of accessibility within the post-secondary system. Ontario’s impressive achievement in greatly expanding our post-secondary participation rate over the last decade is, for some, a sign that post-secondary policy-makers’ work on access is complete.

Unfortunately, if we look more closely at our post-secondary participation numbers we can see that there is still far more work to be done. The Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario (HEQCO)’s most recent report breaks down university post-secondary participation rates by a number of factors, demonstrating quite clearly that certain parts of our society are unable to access post-secondary at the same rates as the most privileged. Ontario still has a significant gap in post-secondary participation by income, most pronounced with regards to university participation. We continue to have a substantial gap in aboriginal post-secondary enrolment rates: while aboriginal participation in college is slightly above the average, aboriginal participation in university is over twenty per cent lower than the provincial average. Given that this is a sizeable and growing segment of our population, we certainly cannot be satisfied with our performance here. Gaps remain in first generation student participation and for students with disabilities, most noticeable in their significantly lower university participation rates than the general population of the province. As these aforementioned groups make up a significant portion of our population, it is clear that Ontario still has work to do on the issue of access.

Other voices in this discussion argue that even if the province were in a position where it was ensuring equitable access to PSE for all Ontarians, universities would still need to increase enrolment to meet the demands of the labour market. Proponents of this argument note that Ontario’s current post-secondary attainment rate is about 65 per cent, while it has been projected that by 2031, our labour market will need a workforce with a post-secondary attainment rate closer to 77 per cent. Many commentators have discussed the need to continue to expand the number of post-secondary graduates we are producing to meet future labour market needs in our changing economy, even in spite of the discussions taking place questioning the value of a post-secondary education (which are certainly based on a short-term view of the labour market). To limit growth in our post-secondary sector now would almost undoubtedly limit economic growth in the future.

Finally, the false dichotomy of access and quality relies heavily on an assumption that we cannot improve quality with existing resources in the system, and that we cannot teach differently to improve outcomes in a bigger post-secondary system. However, students have made a number of low-cost or cost-neutral recommendations on how to improve teaching quality – recommendations we believe can enhance the stature of teaching, reward teaching excellence, and make teaching a priority of our post-secondary institutions. These recommendations include funding teaching chairs, incentivizing the creation of more teaching focused-faculty streams, repurposing performance funding to improve experiential education opportunities to name just a few. To learn more about our recommendations, please see Educated Reform: Striving for Higher Quality Education at Ontario’s Universities, OUSA’s initial submission to the Ministry of Training, Colleges, and Universities’ Innovation and Productivity roundtables last summer.

On Thursday, the provincial government recommitted itself to expanding university enrolment over the next three years in the 2013 Budget – a position students have long supported. However, perhaps what we should be considering, as some have suggested, is tying increased enrolment funding to expected improvements in teaching quality. This could allow Ontario to pursue both an access and quality strategy simultaneously, if done correctly.

None of this is to say that the current level of funding in Ontario’s post-secondary system is sufficient. We continue to operate with the lowest per-student funding in the country, and this is something that must be addressed. However, as long as funding increases continue to be limited, we must commit to improving access and quality simultaneously with the resources that we have already – while it may not be easy, it certainly is necessary.

Rylan Kinnon
Executive Director of the Ontario Undergraduate Student Alliance

In OUSA’s 2013 Budget submission Unlocking Student Potential: The Key to Ontario’s Success, students recommended that the government invest in a student employment strategy to address students’ need for high quality employment in four areas. “Students recommended that a strategy address the need for improved opportunities for summer employment, in-study employment, experiential learning opportunities, and better job prospects upon graduation,” said Alysha Li, President of the Ontario Undergraduate Student Alliance (OUSA). “We appreciate the government’s commitment to working with youth to design the Youth Jobs Strategy, and hope that it will address students’ employment needs in these areas.”

OUSA’s Budget submission also recommended that the government mandate significant improvements in credit transfer, to reduce costs incurred through learning duplication for both the government and students. “While the Budget remains silent on the issue of credit transfer, we will continue to work with the government to ensure that Ontario speed progress on improving student mobility,” continued Li.

Although students appreciate the commitment to youth employment and enrolment growth, the 2013 Ontario Budget still fails to address the fact that Ontario universities operate with the lowest per-student funding in the country. “Students hope that in future years the Budget will demonstrate a more focused commitment to improving the affordability, accessibility, accountability and quality of Ontario’s post-secondary system. For Ontario to maximize the value of our higher education system to our economic growth, we must ensure post-secondary becomes a higher priority for the province,” said Rylan Kinnon, Executive Director of OUSA.

About the Ontario Undergraduate Student Alliance (OUSA)

OUSA represents the interests of over 145,000 professional and undergraduate, full- and part-time university students at eight member associations across Ontario.

For further information or to arrange an interview, please contact Brandon Sloan, Director of Communications.

W: www.ousa.ca
T: (416) 341-9948
E: communications@ousa.ca
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/educatedsolutions
Twitter: @OUSA

Although the pursuit of a degree is likely to always remain the primary motivation for students to attend a post-secondary institution, almost any current undergraduate student will be quick to point out that learning and personal growth is not constrained to the confines of the classroom in any of our province’s university communities. My own time at Queen’s saw me gain just as much from my in-class learning as I did from my volunteer and work experiences on campus and in the Kingston community.

But what value would something like a co-curricular transcript actually provide a student? In some instances, a co-curricular transcript may in fact be more telling of a student’s ability and learning than their academic transcript. For a student who was unable to access a diverse array of teaching pedagogies and experiential learning opportunities, the classroom experience may have had less of an impact on some of their learning and skills development, including leadership, teamwork, and communication skills, than some of their extra-curricular pursuits. A term on student council, contributing to a student newspaper, organizing a conference, or participating in a club may supplement, if not replace in some circumstances, the development of these skills in the classroom.

With an increasing number of universities offering co-curricular transcripts to students, including Guelph, Windsor, Wilfrid Laurier, and Acadia to name a few, do we really know how these transcripts are affecting graduate employment outcomes? No conclusive data exists in Ontario concerning how co-curricular records impact a student’s post-grad employment opportunities, but it’s likely that they would at the very least compliment a student’s academic transcript and résumé when approaching a potential employer.  At a time when youth employment rates for university graduates have slipped to 73.7 per cent, might a co-curricular transcript give an applicant a leg up over another candidate in some instances? And with more and more Canadian universities offering students these transcripts, will co-curricular transcripts eventually become an expectation for potential employers?

Have you had any experience with co-curricular transcripts and post-grad employment? If so, OUSA would love to hear from you!  Please contact Brandon Sloan, Director of Communications, at brandon@ousa.ca.

Brandon Sloan
OUSA Director of Communications

Curiously, there is widespread dissent in the higher education sector over the conceptualization of this trend as a problem. Most notably, evidence from the National Survey on Student Engagement (NSSE) has shown that some in-study employment can actually be correlated to increased levels of active and collaborative learning. While few students would truly dispute the value of real-world employment activities, OUSA’s 2011 student survey indicates that few students would cite their in-study work experiences as particularly beneficial from an academic perspective.

OUSA’s 2011 survey asked university students whether they had worked while taking classes. Over 41 per cent of respondents indicated that they worked in-study. This result is low in comparison to other estimates such as the 2012 CUSC survey of graduating students, which reports that about 60 per cent of students worked in-study. A variety of possible explanations exist for this disparity, but it is worth noting that the CUSC survey’s larger sample size and response rate leads me to believe our survey result might be lower than reality, as opposed to the CUSC rate being higher. Further, the CUSC survey is inclusive of the entire country, rather than just Ontario. However, in-study employment and participation rates collected in the Labour Force Survey for students in Ontario do not differentiate substantially from the national averages, making this an unlikely explanation for the massive difference.

The hours students worked varied significantly, with no category achieving a clear majority of students. About half of students who work appear to do so between 1 and 10 hours per week. However, 40 percent appear to work between 10 and 25 hours per week. Considering that only 242 part-time students completed this question (compared to over 2,400 full-time students) reporting a median response of 35 hours of employment per-week, it is unlikely that this result is being skewed upwards by part-time students. There are indeed a significant number of students working upwards of 11 hours per week.

So, we know that a significant proportion of students are working in-study; we also know that about half of them are working over 11 hours per week. What effect does all this work have on student academic performance?

Only 10 per cent of students agreed that working in-study had improved academic performance in any way. The majority (56 per cent) believed that in-study employment had somewhat or significantly hurt academic performance. 29 per cent of students indicated that in-study employment had no effect on academic performance. The roughly 60/40 split in negative and neutral/positive impact on academic performance isn’t too far off from the 50/50 split in those working a limited amount of hours (10 or less) per-week and those working a substantial amount of hours weekly (11 or more). I would suspect, as many researchers have before, that there is a link between hours worked and the respective positive or negative effect in-study employment has on student success. Our recent student employment policy paper goes through the research on these links in detail.

However, even if this is true, the in-study employment situation in Ontario should still give policymakers cause for alarm. The fact that 6 in 10 students working in-study describe their experience as negatively impacting academic performance is bolstered by a follow-up question the survey asked. When asked if they would still work in-study if they had enough money to pay for school, 57 per cent –nearly the same total- indicated they would not.

Not all in-study employment is negative. However, I believe that our survey indicates that the majority of working students would rather be in-class than in the workplace.

Chris Martin
OUSA Director of Research

Making matters worse, large textbook-publishing companies are constantly releasing new versions of their texts, resulting in students being unable to re-sell old editions. To speak from experience, during the second year of my undergraduate career, I purchased a French textbook for about $100.00 in early September. The following semester I returned to the “buy-back” counter of my university’s bookstore, where they offered me a whopping price of $3.00 to re-purchase my gently used book. A new edition had been released, they informed me. What else should I expect?

On a similar note, along with being quite expensive, traditional textbooks allow for little flexibility when it comes to professors picking and choosing learning material for their lessons. On numerous occasions, I have been in classes where disgruntled professors, unable to find a singular text that encapsulates their course content, will assign a handful of chapters from several textbooks, each selling for upwards of $70.00 to $100.00. This leaves students in a difficult situation: should they spend big bucks to have the appropriate reading material for only a few weeks of their course? Or should they take the risk of not doing the required readings, at the doubtless expense of their grades?

Now that we have conceptualized the issue of textbook costs in PSE, let’s take a look at what is being done to address the challenge of affordability. In the past, the Ontario government offered something called the “Textbook and Technology grant,” which provided all full-time students receiving OSAP with a cheque for $150.00 per year. In 2012, the government spent over $37 million dollars on this grant program, which is a fairly sizable amount of cash considering it only saved OSAP students about 10-15% of their textbooks costs.

By comparison, the government of British Columbia has taken the lead with an entirely different model of creating and distributing knowledge for post-secondary students. Beginning in September of this year, the province plans to roll out free, online and ‘open’ textbooks for students enrolled in many first and second-year university courses. The philosophy behind the idea is that course content for many popular lower-year courses is widely transferrable between institutions, students and faculty. The online format allows professors to selectively add or remove course content based on their preferred course design, and open licensing removes many of the fees and limitations of traditional copyright laws.

Thus, the system could be a win-win situation for students and professors alike. Interestingly, the BC model is also ideal for today’s economic climate since, unlike the $37-million dollar “Textbook and Technology Grant” detailed above, the BC government estimates that open courseware will cost taxpayers between $600,000 – $1 million per year.

Though the proposal shows a great deal of promise, some important questions must be asked. Has any quality been sacrificed in order to achieve this new model? Who will write these open textbooks? Who will be in charge of ensuring that textbook content is both accurate and appropriate for teaching and learning purposes?

Indeed, BC appears to have answers to all these questions, as they have set-up a diverse panel of university faculty, students, administrators and other professionals to review key content. In addition, much like traditional textbooks and academic journal articles, all information will undergo a peer-review process. This project is certainly not without its critics however, and it is still too early to predict the extent to which the program will be both sustainable and efficient for long-term usage.

Despite the challenges and potential obstacles of deploying an initiative such as this, I am delighted that the BC government has taken the risk of developing non-traditional course resources that not only save students money, but also encourage professors to be more creative and flexible in their teaching practices. I am anxious to hear more about the rollout of this program in the coming months.

Becky Hillyer
OUSA Operation Coordinator

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What are your experiences with purchasing textbooks? How much have you spent on them in the past? OUSA wants to hear from you!

Given that this was the first time OUSA had created comprehensive policies on online learning, it was extremely important that the paper was able to identify the ways in which online learning fell under our pillars of affordable, accessible, and quality education for all willing students. One of our biggest concerns when addressing online learning was the issue of quality assurance. While writing this paper, I wanted to make sure it was clear to the reader that OUSA was advocating for improved access to high quality online learning, rather than what I have anecdotally referred to as the dreaded “YouTube Lecture” style of online instruction – an instructor merely lecturing at a camera. Whether technology is fully utilized in an online course or an in-classroom course is adapted with methods of blended learning, all courses must allow students to fully engage with both the material and the instructors, and when possible, with their peers. The ultimate goal of our Online Learning policy paper is to emphasize that well-produced online learning can provide flexible, accessible and cutting-edge alternatives to the traditional degree-building process.

Many of the building blocks for online learning already exist within Ontario and the international post-secondary community. By drawing from existent online learning models (including one of the most prolific, Open Universities Australia), Ontario can build a collaborative system amongst all Ontario universities and maximize the transferability of credits across institutions. This would not only create a vast network of online courses, but greatly increase student mobility as well. In terms of accessibility, online learning has the potential to reach those students who experience significant barriers to accessing a post-secondary education, including aboriginal students, rural and northern students, and students with dependents. To ensure that online learning is accessible to these students, OUSA is urging the government to invest in expending high quality Internet access to all communities in Ontario. Finally, the paper stresses that online learning must be held to the same standard of quality as traditional in-class learning, and that instructors must be encouraged and incentivized to develop quality pedagogy for online mediums.

This paper was very thoroughly reviewed and edited during OUSA’s Spring General Assembly at Brock University in March in order to emphasize the need for an appropriate expansion to the existing quality assurance framework to better-fit online learning. After almost four hours of debate and discussion at our spring Plenary, I was very happy to see our General Assembly adopt our Online Learning policy paper and commit OUSA to working towards expanding online learning opportunities across Ontario.

Meghan Condon
President of the Trent in Oshawa Student Association