Faculty and staff at Ontario’s postsecondary institutions demonstrated Herculean dedication and diligence when they transitioned their face-to-face courses to online and remote delivery in only a matter of days this past March. Despite an impressive collective effort, the virtual learning experienced by many students did not reflect the best-case scenario of planned, intentional, universally designed […]
Adapting to the realities of remote schooling has been challenging. Since the COVID-19 pandemic sent our province into a state of emergency, many students have had to turn bedrooms into offices, kitchen tables into classrooms and parking lots into hotspots. While all Ontario learners have had to adapt to overcome barriers, those barriers have been […]
In the months since the pandemic forced all postsecondary education online, students have been concerned about getting the full value for their money. While most of the attention has focused on the challenges of delivering courses online, we should not forget that classroom learning is not the only reason people attend colleges and universities — students […]
In 2017, the Ontario Government purchased three years of blanket access to the self-service online learning platform Lynda.com (now LinkedIn Learning) for the province’s public colleges and universities. eCampusOntario, tasked with managing the licence, partnered with HEQCO to evaluate the potential for this investment to help address perceived skills gaps among Ontario’s postsecondary students. As part of […]
At the start of the year, the class of 2020 was expecting to graduate from college or university into a healthy labour market. Instead, the pandemic has reshaped the economy — and the career trajectories of new grads — virtually overnight. What does this mean for grads entering the labour market, and how can governments ensure they […]
Measures to stop the spread of COVID-19 have left the economy reeling. Employment in Ontario fell by a record 403,000 jobs, or 5.3%, in March from February, according to Statistics Canada. The province’s unemployment rate rose to 7.6%, up from 5.5%, the largest monthly increase on record.* No one could have predicted the severity of the COVID-19 […]
HEQCO CEO David Trick has mused in recent weeks (see here and here) about how Ontario’s postsecondary education sector can look to lessons from the past to help us deal with today’s exceptional circumstances. This idea of finding precedents for the unprecedented is one that we will return to, but this week I’d like to take a moment […]
Last week I looked at whether Ontario’s experience with the double cohort in 2003 could offer some lessons for the coming years. If large numbers of students decide to take a gap year this September and enrol in September 2021, the planning processes adopted in 2003 might bring some order to an enrolment surge. Sadly, Ontario […]
Current circumstances have caused us at HEQCO to think about whether anything in the history of Ontario higher education might be remotely relevant today. Historical analogies can give comfort that, having solved problems in the past, we can solve comparable problems now. Ken Steele has made an interesting analogy: If many students take the coming academic […]