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Informing the Future of Higher Education

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Career Opportunities and Requests for Proposals

Career Opportunities There are no current opportunities. Request for Proposals There are no RFPs at this time. 24/25-RFP-001 Consortium on Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) The results of 24/25-RFP-001 Consortium on Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI). HEQCO has awarded contracts and funding to the following organizations based on the submissions made under the Consortium on Generative Artificial […]

Quick Stats

How many Ontario students applied to the province’s colleges and universities during the last decade? How many enrolled? How many graduated? Find the answers to these and other good questions in Quick Stats, a compendium of data on Ontario’s postsecondary system. Note: All visualizations begin in 2013 and go up to the most recent year […]

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Taking Learning Outcomes to the Gym An Assignment-Based Approach to Developing and Assessing Learning Outcomes

Research Summary: Lessons from the gym: Linking assignments to learning outcomes strengthens core skills Can learning technology “workouts” both develop and assess cognitive skills?  Using a muscle-building analogy, the authors of a new study from the Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario (HEQCO) find evidence that students can strengthen their self-reflective and critical thinking skills […]

The Impact of the Instructional Skills Workshop on Faculty Approaches to Teaching

Research Summary: New study largest to date on impact of Instructional Skills Workshop More than 100 institutions worldwide have offered the Instructional Skills Workshop (ISW) over the last 30 years to develop more student-centred, reflective instructors, but relatively little research has been conducted on its impact. According to a new study from the Higher Education […]

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Donna Kotsopoulos – A radical re-engineering of mathematics education

Guest blogger: Donna Kotsopoulos Recent international and national standardized tests suggest that mathematical ability in Canada is on the decline. There is other evidence, too. Fewer students are completing mathematics degrees. Retention in those degrees is very poor. Many students that endure, struggle in their studies and require lots of additional resources to succeed. Women […]

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Fiona Deller – Need to Read No. 3: Dystopian futures, edtech roundup and the social responsibility of universities

One of the many things we do at HEQCO is read the trades. We try to keep up on the latest research, as well as the media commentary, relevant books and the blogosphere. We read the good, the bad, the controversial and the bland. This year, we thought it might be nice to share with […]

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Harvey P. Weingarten – Managing for Quality: Classifying Learning Outcomes

My previous contributions on “managing for quality” have addressed the challenges of shifting away from our current policy of managing for access and why learning outcomes is a game changer in the higher education world.   To use learning outcomes productively to improve higher education, and to clear up some of the confusion in the current […]

Teaching Scientific Inquiry: Inquiry-based training for biology graduate teaching assistants improves undergraduate learning outcomes

Research Summary: Inquiry-based training improves teaching assistant effectiveness, student outcomes Graduate teaching assistants (GTAs) play a growing role in university education, particularly in lab components of STEM courses. A new study from the Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario (HEQCO) finds that training GTAs in inquiry-based learning techniques in lab settings can improve both teaching […]