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 […]
We’ve been seeing the word “micro” a lot lately — microcourses, microdegrees, micromodules. It’s an interesting contrast to the introduction of massive open online courses, or MOOCs, from the beginning of the last decade. But much like the MOOC discourse, it feels as though there’s almost as much uncertainty as there is hype over microcredentials. […]
Ontarians with a university or college credential earn more, on average, than those without, and they tend to lead longer, healthier lives. This is why, over the years, Ontario has implemented policies aimed at increasing educational attainment, and part of the reason why the province’s postsecondary attainment rate is among the highest in the world. […]
What can be done to improve numeracy skills among Ontario PSE students? Our workshop participants had some great ideas, like integrating more problem-based learning in university and college programs (and also in high school), designating numeracy faculty leads who can spread knowledge and facilitate communities of practice, creating a repository of numeracy modules and resources that all Ontario institutions can access and incorporate into their programs, and developing and sharing relevant assessments to continuously improve numeracy teaching and learning.