The Journey of Ontario Apprentices: From High School to the Workforce and Diving into the Trades: An In-depth Look at 10 Apprenticeship Programs in Ontario

The Journey of Ontario Apprentices: From High School to the Workforce was written by Ken Chatoor and Amy Kaufman; Diving into the Trades: An In-depth Look at 10 Apprenticeship Programs in Ontario was written by Ken Chatoor and Sarah Brumwell ​The Journey of Ontario Apprentices: From High School to the Workforce Diving into the Trades: […]

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Jackie Pichette – Survey of Canadians reinforces need for clear, standard definition of “microcredential”

Micro mania — that’s what we called the mix of excitement and uncertainty brewing around microcredentials in Ontario last Spring. Since then, HEQCO partnered with the Business + Higher Education Roundtable (BHER) to help address some of the uncertainty surrounding microcredentials.  We’re building an evidence base that anyone from the college, university or government sectors can draw from […]

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Jessica Rizk and Amy Kaufman – Lessons from COVID: What the PSE sector can learn from the pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic has forced postsecondary institutions, faculty, staff and students to adapt quickly and without an instruction manual. From the emergency shift from face-to-face to remote learning, to the financial vulnerability of some institutions, to concerns about mental and physical health in the face of prolonged physical distancing, this is a moment in history unlike anything we’ve seen […]

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Jessica Rizk and Amy Kaufman – Revisiting the research: What does good online learning look like?

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 […]

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Jackie Pichette and Rosanna Tamburri — An agile system of lifelong learning is needed now more than ever

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 […]

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Amy Kaufman – Let’s hear it for our dedicated workers, and the institutions that trained them

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 […]

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David Trick – Precedents for the unprecedented (part 2): The year the music stopped

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 […]

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David Trick – Finding precedents for the unprecedented (part 1): A new double cohort?

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 […]

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Jackie Pichette and Jessica Rizk — Micro mania: Making sense of microcredentials in Ontario

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. […]