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Outdoor adventure education (OAE) and study abroad share many epistemological and pedagogical foundations and have been on parallel tracks for many years yet rarely intersect. This paper has two goals: (a) to invite study abroad researchers and practitioners to consider findings and practices from OAE to further enhance study abroad, and (b) to explore the benefits of combining OAE and study abroad practices by presenting such a model. Three questionnaires (pre, post, and 1-year after) were distributed to 32 students in 2012 and 2015 who participated in a combined OAE and dual-immersion study abroad experience. Responses were analyzed to identify central learning outcomes and critical elements. Overall, the findings affirm that the combined model of OAE and study abroad provided meaningful learning and point to a number of potential benefits of combining study abroad and OAE as an effective means of enhancing shared learning goals.

This paper presents the Canadian findings from the 2018 APIKS study focusing on the teaching-research nexus. The online, bilingual survey was administered to full-time professors at 64 provincially-funded universities in Canada between October 2017 and June 2018 (n=2968). Findings suggest the majority of full-time, tenure-steam professors prefer both teaching and research and are engaged in both throughout the academic year. These findings are considered in light of broader changes in Canadian higher education including enrolment expansion, the increasing valorization of research, the development of new categories of academic labour, and the growth in precarious contract employment.

This paper analyzes the incentives induced by a formula to fund universities based primarily on enrolment. Using a simple game theoretical framework, we argue that the strategic behaviour induced by those formulas is to favour enrollment. We further argue that if the funding value differs by enrolment type, it introduces incentives to substitute enrolment where most profitable. If the public appropriations do not follow the outcomes induced by the formula, the incentives introduce a dynamic "inconsistency," and funding per student can decline. We use these results to discuss the 2018 funding formula changes in Québec. We argue that Québec's latest reform should reduce substitution effects and increase graduate enrolment. We provide simulations of the reform's redistributive effects and show that some universities gain structural advantages over others. Whilst the reform, on a short-term basis, deploys a mechanism to mitigate these advantages, on a long-term basis the effect introduces a larger gap between Québec higher-education institutions.

This paper presents a case narrative of a university dean who is charged with instituting change within her faculty in order to resolve the faculty's financial issues. The case narrative explores academic conceptualizations of entrepreneurship and describes the dean's context in terms of: her executive leadership team, the financial issues she was facing, the financial contentions in instituting change, legal complexities, programmatic and marketing dimensions, poor academic cultures, and work intensification implications. The teaching notes present five leadership development activities that span these issues and encourage students to engage in a brainstorming, a mind-mapping, a placemat, a jigsaw, and a leadership reflection activities.

Acadia University, a small liberal arts institution, has for over 15 years, offered a unique practicum experience for its teacher interns enrolled in the preservice Bachelor of Education. Students travel to Shanghai, China for a period of four months to teach English as a Second Language in school classrooms ranging from grades kindergarten to six. This paper describes the preparation of interns and the inherent challenges they face as pedagogues in a distinctly different teaching context. This action research account seeks to used mixed methods to identify areas of improvement in the process of preparing beginning teachers for a career in international teaching.

Funded by a Scholarship of Teaching and Learning grant from a University in western Canada, this paper reports on findings from an educational design research study (McKenney & Reeves, 2012) investigating the ways, and the extent to which, particular technological supports and other interventions impacted the acquisition of academic writing skills for Bachelor of Education students working within a blended learning environment. Among the various findings, students emphasized the importance of integrating writing interventions in coordination with one another, as well as introducing a variety of effective pedagogical practices tailored to meet the needs of specific course assignments. Instructors found that by incorporating student feedback into the design and then redesigning the course, they were able to improve students' academic writing abilities without sacrificing course content.

The 2007 Bondar Report, "Shaping Our Schools, Shaping Our Future," generated a vision for environmental curricula in Ontario. It has been the basis for the mandated framework introduced in 2009 by the Ministry of Education for environmental education (EE) in all Ontario schools. Based on our research and personal reflections, this paper provides a summary of the recent developments concerning EE curricula in Ontario's schools. It also identifies the key institutional elements which contribute to and influence the course of EE implementation and focuses on their role in the development of environmental curricula in the province.

The definition of experiential education (EE) has both pedagogical and practical implications for higher education institutions. While there is increasing pressure to justify and quantify these experiences, we remain faced with the challenge of ensuring that a demonstration of breadth does not distract from the importance of meaningful depth both in and for student learning. This paper presents a potential reframing of conversations about experiential education and emphasizes the role of high impact practices (HIPs) in defining EE as more than an experience. The value, purpose, and challenges of integrating reflection into these experiences is highlighted through the lens of the defining characteristics of HIPs, supporting the development of meaningful, engaging opportunities for deeper learning.

Digital timelines have been both transformational and supportive in enhancing the ways in which information is shared through text, images, interaction, and creativity to achieve course goals and objectives across numerous disciplines. In analyzing the experiences of teacher candidates (TCs) in their creation of a variety of resources to address the development of their digital competencies, it is worthwhile to further explore the design and effectiveness of one resource in particular, digital timelines. Thus, the aim of this paper is to explore TCs' development of digital timelines in a senior science methods course and to demonstrate the ways in which digital timelines can assist educators in their practice. Through surveys, interviews, and student coursework, the author examines TCs' attitudes towards technology, experiences with creating digital timelines, and their utilization of technology to promote and foster global skills and competencies. Findings of this study indicate beneficial effects of developing digital timelines including flexibility in achieving a variety of learning goals (including multi-scale analyses, visualizing different spatial and temporal arrangements, developing historical contexts, etc.) associated with the assignment, flexibility in application and actualization, and enhanced motivation and engagement. TCs engaged in knowledge construction as they created visually-enhancing and interactive timelines, and in doing so circumvented reducing, simplifying, and imposing linearity on complex scientific discoveries in the history of the discipline. TCs achieved success in developing scientific timelines that effectively immersed their peers in dynamic multimedia learning environments offering multiple sources of text, images, games, video, and audio, among other multimodal components.

This paper presents the results of a pilot SoTL study re: a non-traditional leadership course delivered in three sections of a foundational General Education course at Mount Royal University in Calgary, Canada in 2016-17. This non-traditional course focuses explicitly on ontological change (a change in way of being) rather than epistemological change (a change in knowledge or skill sets). The project aimed at two goals: to replicate a pre- and post-course questionnaire study (Carney, Jensen, Ballarini, Echeverria, Nettleton, Stillwell, & Erhard, 2016) and to attempt to surface possible evidence of ontological change (change in ways of being). The pre- and post-course questionnaires replicated the Carney et al. study. Narrative data also indicates some change in self-perception of leadership capacities. These results suggest opportunities for considering moving beyond the dominant epistemological educational paradigm to explore the potential of ontological approaches to learning, at least in the arena of leadership development.

This article describes the Context Based Learning (CBL) redesign of Nursing courses addressing life transitions, including by implementing group discussion, written concept analysis, group presentations, reflections on thinking and simulation performance, group skills analysis and a final paper. The purpose of the study was to determine how these strategies build metacognition and thinking in the students. Both students and faculty participants agreed the structure of the courses stimulated thinking and metacognition, especially through group discussion of the presentations based on the concept analysis. Students said listening and a safe learning environment helped them think and reflect. However, the larger the group and the more faculty controlled the group, the less thinking developed. This study provides insights into the importance of a safe learning environment, listening, group size and faculty control in the development of thinking and self-reflection in small group CBL format that may be applicable to many disciplines.

Using a project-based learning approach, three teacher educators, teaching three different methodology courses, worked together to create, plan, and assess an arts-based assignment completed by preservice candidates. The preservice teachers created an animation project while applying curriculum expectations in three subject areas: visual arts, music, and language arts. The three subjects were segregated for the purpose of instruction, integrated during the group work and creative process, and then jointly assessed using negotiated reporting. This paper describes the project and details the challenges of integrating teaching and learning across institutionally segregated courses when student expectations are conditioned by their prior experience of siloed, subject-based learning, and discusses lessons learned by the three teacher educators and implications for team teaching across the curriculum.

Nursing, dance and studio-based arts, engineering, and athletic therapy are viewed as practice-oriented professions in which the teaching and situated learning of practical skills are central. In order to succeed, students must perform a series of performance-based assessments, which seemingly require an "able" body to enact complex tasks in situated and/or simulation-based contexts (for example, "safe nursing practice"). Our interdisciplinary research seeks to intervene within the culture of professional learning by investigating what we know about the use of smartphone video recording for situated, practice-based learning, and for supporting interactive video-based assessment as a means of accommodation and extending access for students, including students with performance anxiety,mature students, ESL learners, students with disabilities, and students in remote communities. In this paper we employ a scoping review methodology to present our findings related to students' and instructors' perspectives on the use of smartphone video to demonstrate and document practical knowledge and practice-oriented competencies across fields in the arts and sciences. We also examine broader research, as well as the ethical and design implications for the development of our technology-based toolbox project -- an online resource created to advance pedagogies deploying smartphones as tools for practical skills acquisition -- and for accommodation -- within multidisciplinary practical learning environments.

Place-based education (PBE) promises greater social and ecological justice at a time of great planetary need. This paper explores the experiences and beliefs of eight teacher educators from Canadian teacher education faculties who were invited to give their perspectives on PBE as they theorize and deliver it in their teacher education programs. Analysis of their interviews identified the participants' pathways to PBE, their terminologies for PBE, their understanding of PBE's purposes, their pedagogical practices, their sense of the structures (systemic attitudes and administrative supports or exigencies) that affect PBE, and their integration of Indigenous knowledges of place. The participants demonstrate a deep philosophical approach to place that could enhance environmental and perhaps Indigenous education more broadly.

This paper reports on the first stage of an international comparative study for the project "'Digital educational architectures: Open learning resources in distributed learning infrastructures--EduArc,'" funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research. This study reviews the situation of digital educational resources (or (O)ER) framed within the digital transformation of ten different Higher Education (HE) systems (Australia, Canada, China, Germany, Japan, South Africa, South Korea, Spain, Turkey and the United States). Following a comparative case study approach, we investigated issues related to the existence of policies, quality assurance mechanisms and measures for the promotion of change in supporting infrastructure development for (O)ER at the national level in HE in the different countries. The results of this mainly documentary research highlight differences and similarities, which are largely due to variations in these countries' political structure organisation. The discussion and conclusion point at the importance of understanding each country's context and culture, in order to understand the differences between them, as well as the challenges they face.

Many post-secondary institutions are developing policies and programs aimed at improving responses to sexual assault experienced by students. In some areas, such as Ontario, Canada, the government has mandated post-secondary institutions to do so. However significant these initiatives, they are predicated on the assumption that students trust, and want to engage with, the university following sexual violence. This study explores students' perceptions of sexual assault policies and services on one mid-size university campus focusing specifically on how trust factors into reporting sexual victimization and using services. Findings show that students believe that sexual assault policies and programs exist, but this does not mean students are willing to use such resources or that they even trust that their university has students' needs and interests at the fore. This paper discusses policy and programmatic considerations for building student trust in their post-secondary institutions to encourage student use of campus support.

While the fields of work-integrated learning (WIL) and career development share common goals, WIL literature tends to focus on student employability more than students' ability to manage their careers. The Leading Edge program at a Canadian institution, the University of Victoria, brings together these two disciplines as it draws from theory and methodology in WIL and career development to strengthen student experiential learning and prepare students for meaningful careers. Four reflective questions form the core of the program, and support students to become pro-active experiential learners, embrace diversity and become career-ready during their academic journey. The authors present the theoretical underpinnings in career development, WIL and experiential learning that inform the program development, and analyse its strengths and challenges. The paper concludes with an exploration of how the Leading Edge, an online program, can support learners to navigate the challenges of the current labour market conditions created by COVID-19.

This paper reports on a qualitative research study that examined how 10 literacy teacher educators (LTEs) utilized children's literature to invite teacher trainees to critically engage with social issues, challenge their assumptions about literacy, and begin to develop the knowledge and dispositions to work alongside diverse learners (e.g., culturally, linguistically, socio-economically). The LTEs recognized that teacher trainees often entered their literacy courses with restricted conceptions of literacy and deficit assumptions about children from economically marginalized and/or culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds. Within their courses, the LTEs positioned literacy as a multifaceted social practice, wherein access to a variety of representational resources facilitates the active construction of knowledge and identities. The LTEs modeled instructional strategies and designed assignments that encouraged teacher trainees to use children's literature as a means to connect with issues relevant to the lives of young learners within contemporary classrooms. This research will be of interest to LTEs who endeavor to use children's literature as a springboard to support teacher trainees to develop a self-reflective stance and a critical cultural consciousness.

In recent years significant emphasis has been placed on staff and students as partners in higher education in order to address issues of engagement and transferable skills. However, the concept covers a wide range of meanings. On the one hand it can refer to module feedback questionnaires. At the other extreme it can include student input in curricular design, particularly constructing course materials. These very different experiences require different levels of academic preparation and student engagement. For the purpose of clarity in discussion it would seem useful to have a framework for the different levels of student-instructor partnerships, which emphasizes this range of experience rather than the activity content. This paper presents a framework based on the levels of student initiation of the partnership and of student involvement in the outcomes (referred to as ownership and autonomy respectively). The scheme was arrived at following study of the collaborative activities in two cognate programmes, the Natural Sciences degree programme at the University of Leicester and the Honours Integrated Science program at McMaster University. These programmes adopt pedagogical models which encourage the formation of strong, cohesive learning communities, thereby providing a rich variety of examples and an international perspective.

Although there is a rich critical literature examining international student policy in Canada, very little of it considers the views of Members of Parliament. MPs have limited direct influence over international student policy, but their policy talk about international students defines the context within which such policy is developed. For that reason Parliamentary debate deserves study. This paper examines MPs' discussion of international students between 1984 and 2019, tracing themes in MP policy talk over the globalization era. It finds that MPs evince remarkably consistent attitudes towards international students. Throughout the period MP policy talk shows that Parliamentarians saw international students as outsiders who were only of value to the extent that they could be made to serve Canada's economic or political agenda. The uniformity of this attitude and the lack of dissenting voices suggest that MPs' views may be a significant barrier to reforming international student policy in Canada.

In addition to literacy and numeracy skills, social and emotional skills are increasingly recognized as being essential for success in school and beyond. This commentary paper summarizes the discussions from a 2018 seminar on social and emotional learning (SEL) in tertiary education in Canada, Mexico, and the United States. The summary is framed through the lenses of competition, cooperation, and complementarity. While institutions of higher education compete for students, they cooperate by leveraging knowledge of how students succeed at a particular institution and they seek complementarity by recognizing that student/institutional fit may increase completion. Their shared goal is for students to succeed in getting to, through, and beyond tertiary education.

In March 2020 the COVID-19 pandemic obliged Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) in many countries to vacate their campuses and operate at a distance. We narrate the experience of the Acsenda School of Management (ASM) in making this sudden transition. ASM is a private for-profit business school with some 1,200, mostly international, students based in Vancouver, Canada. Drawing on interviews with ASM staff the paper identifies why the transition was relatively successful. It concludes with reflections on the longer-term impact of COVID-19 and how to integrate online and distance learning more effectively in HEIs around the world.

This paper draws upon a case study of a campus-community partnership program in Ontario that delivers tuition-free college courses to low-income adult learners in community hub locations. By co-locating college classrooms in existing neighbourhood gathering places (i.e., a community centre and a public library), our research explores whether integrating college capacity and resources in community hub locations can help increase the accessibility of post-secondary education. In doing so, we address a gap in the research in exploring how community hubs provide a support structure that can help boost the motivation of low-income adult learners and better facilitate their pathway to a post-secondary education. Drawing upon a thematic analysis of interview data, we (1) analyze partners' perspectives on the community hub-based approach in bolstering the accessibility of higher education; (2) reflect on the process of campus-community engagement underpinning the partnership structure; and (3) critically assess the efficacy of the community hub model in connecting learners with an educational pathway.

The experiences of academics caught up in the rise of teaching academic (TA) (teaching-only) roles in Australia, the UK, the USA, and Canada, are not well documented in the literature. This paper describes a recent university restructure that resulted in a significant increase in teaching-only positions being created. Despite the claims by the university that teaching-only roles demonstrate excellence and innovation in teaching, the actual experiences of TA in the last few years have highlighted a common finding of "the perceived low value of the TA role and confusion about what the role entails" (Bennett et al., 75:271-286, 2018, p. 271). We use a more local conception of regime of truth as a tool (Gore, 1993) for reflecting on possibilities for resistance and re-imagining how we might think about ourselves beyond 'second tier'. By understanding that a reconceptualisation of ourselves is simultaneously within a given regime but also outside of it, allowing for reading the regime and thinking about the production of that regime in ways that open up possibilities for creating a space for talking and sharing both research and teaching, which is also within the 'cultural web' of the university.

In this paper we are concerned with the ways in which hosts are often excluded from scholarship and programming of global service learning. By global service learning (GSL), we mean a multiplicity of programs that occur facilitating service work for people across borders, generally with volunteers moving from the North to the South. We present findings from a research project conducted in 2014 with 37 host families. We circulated a survey to better understand host experiences of, expectations of, and hopes for GSL. Drawing on these survey results we provide some prompting questions for GSL participants (both students and program designers) to shift focus from student experience to relationship and mutuality. Using global service learning literature, critical disability theory and critical pedagogy through an intersectional lens, we center questions of uneven labor, accessibility, and structures of inequity. Three main themes emerged from our data: mutuality, gendered labor, and preparation. We present several infographic images capturing themes from the study to facilitate discussions with students who are preparing for GSL experiences and for those who are leading and designing programming. Our intention is to provide tools for educators to center the voices, desires, and motivations of Southern hosts in all of their GSL preparations.

As scholars work to decolonize educational research, new methodologies are needed. In this paper, we present our conceptual premises for a new paradigm, social portraiture, which combines participatory action research (Freire, 1982) and portraiture (Lawrence-Lightfoot & Hoffmann, 1997), and extends to include archival records and social art. This democratic approach integrates student participation, community engagement, and social change, coalescing into an integrated portrait of human experience in education. Our ideas contribute to foundations in arts-based methods in participatory action research, seeking transformative change in educational world views, ways of knowing, and institutional ways of life.

Institutions in many jurisdictions are in the process of implementing Open Educational Resources (OER). This short paper is based on a report commissioned by Contact North/Contact Nord as part of their Pockets of Innovation series to better understand the impact of OER implementations at diverse institutions. The investigation looks into 13 different OER implementations at the postsecondary level: three community colleges and one university. Four are in the United States; three universities and one Indigenous college in Canada; and five international universities--in Africa, the Middle East, South America, and Southeast Asia. The format of the investigation followed a standard five-point inquiry model: (1) Opportunity; (2) Innovation; (3) Benefits; (4) Challenges; and (5) Potential.

What is social justice-informed co-teaching? Why is it important? How can social justice pedagogy deepen co-teaching practices? What are the key challenges and possibilities open to teachers and learners involved in a social-justice informed co-teaching experience? These questions are useful to ask as they begin to address new pedagogical approaches in teacher education, which engage with the current diverse student population. Each of these questions is discussed in this qualitative research paper. This narrative inquiry adds to the literature on social justice-informed co-teaching in an innovative way. It also critically examines the purposeful endeavor of two professors who used a social justice framework to guide their co-teaching practice and pedagogy. At once, this paper is a lived experience, a story, and a research study. In deconstructing two narratives, the authors articulate outcomes and implications of social justice informed co-teaching practice and pedagogy. Further implications for research and practice in teacher education programs, teaching practices and field experiences, and co-teachers themselves are shared in the closing segment of the paper.

This paper examines the experiences of two colleagues working in close collaboration over several years to create, implement, and assess an innovative and integrative cohort-based, preservice-teacher, field-experience curriculum in a new Bachelor of Education program. Engaging a duoethnographic narrative approach, this paper both inquires into the experiences of the authors, and traces the complex interrelational work, and personal work that was required to do "good" work together on behalf of preservice students and partners in the "field."

Critics have suggested that the practice of psychology is based on ethnocentric assumptions that do not necessarily apply to non-European cultures, resulting in the underutilization of counselling centres by minority populations. Few practical, culturally appropriate alternatives have flowed from these concerns. This paper reviews experiences from a doctoral-level practicum in counselling psychology that targeted aboriginal and international university students outside of the mainstream counselling services at a western Canadian university over a two-year period. It recommends an integrated approach, combining assessment, learning strategy skills, and counselling skills while incorporating community development methodology. The paper concludes with recommendations for counsellor training that will enhance services to both international and aboriginal students.

Contemplating my graduate student experience overseas, I constantly viewed myself as an isolate, one who did not belong in the new community of practice. I encountered numerous lingua-cultural, academic and social challenges which led to my lack of community and belonging. This paper is a reflection of my experiences as an international graduate student in a Canadian university. Through this reflection, I explore some of my most potent experiences and how these influenced me as I sojourned through the not-so-easy road of study overseas. This paper also describes the processes I used that enabled me to successfully maneuver and negotiate my journey on the not-so easy-road of studying in a post-secondary institution overseas.

It is increasingly understood that university education must be accessible to persons with disabilities. The responsibility to make the university accessible is arguably shared by all of us and yet, the extent to which it has become fully accessible is certainly suspect. By undertaking qualitative, discursive analysis of websites, online texts and other materials provided by Ontario's teaching and learning centres, this paper seeks to do two things. First, it provides a critical overview of the types of training currently available at Ontario universities for teaching assistants on accessibility and teaching. This review will outline initiatives directed towards compliance with Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act (AODA) requirements, those focused on education and advocacy (as well as areas of overlap) and broader equity training which encompasses accessibility. Second, this paper, considering the content of the reviewed material and informed by critical disability studies, offers up an articulation of future directions for research, writing, advocacy, and training on teaching assistant development on accessible teaching.

This paper examines the stages of development for a framework of teaching assistant (TA) competencies initiated by the Teaching Assistant and Graduate Student Advancement (TAGSA) special interest group (SIG) of the Society of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education (STLHE). TAGSA initiated an iterative consultative process to inform the creation of the competencies that sought input from the STLHE community on four occasions. At each stage of the consultations, the competencies were formed and re-formed, their purpose and value debated, and the challenges of creating a development framework recognized. This process, described in this paper, resulted in a clear, succinct and flexible framework that can be used across institutions in multiple contexts.

In this paper, we (a faculty member and an educational developer) discuss our attempts to be more mindful in the academy with attention to mindfulness practices in the classroom and the development of a community of practice at our institution as ways to foster community and deepen learning. Included within the paper is an introduction to mindfulness and the benefits of mindfulness and mediation practices--generally and within education. In addition to providing current resources we include details of our own experiences as examples through which others may be able to incorporate these practices into their own classrooms and institutions.

The narrative form is everywhere. It can be as common as our daily stories and as significant as a great novel. Narrating can be a process of self-assessment and introspection around a certain theme. In this sense it is important in education. In this paper I argue that people learn not only by listening to narrative but also by teaching others through narrative and by reflection, which is really a form of narrative where we tell stories to ourselves. I propose a model of narrative learning adapted from the work of Mary Catherine Bateson (1994) that involves recognition of experience, reflection, and reconstruction, which are interrelated to each other as a spiral. In this paper I will first describe my understanding of the importance of narrative and my own experience with narrative learning, then I will describe the narrative learning spiral model. I claim that narrative is ubiquitous and that it is essential for learning.

This paper is set in the context of my experience in advanced ESL writing classes at two Canadian universities. Based on my experience and the research literature, several types of feedback should be administered by teachers to create more effective learning opportunities among advanced ESL writing students. In this paper, I examine the advantages and disadvantages of three main types of feedback: peer feedback, teacher feedback and online feedback with anonymity used in university advanced ESL writing courses. I also present evidence as to which types of feedback are the most effective, how online feedback with anonymity plays an important role in processing peer feedback and how feedback should be administered. I conclude that among advanced ESL writing students written feedback with oral explanations will improve the accuracy of writing faster than only providing written feedback. At the same time, online feedback with anonymity will encourage students to provide more objective feedback than class discussion. I will illustrate what I consider to be an effective feedback which will conclude as my suggested model.

This paper explores the integration of Open Educational Practices (OEP) into an institutional strategy to develop distinctive excellence in teaching, learning and scholarship. The institution in the case study is a public polytechnic university serving a metropolitan area in Canada. If emerging Open Educational Practices are to flourish at our university, support for OEP must integrate with and contribute to our broader efforts to clarify and enhance our strategic position. We have identified three focal points where our institution can focus attention in order to ensure that our use of emerging Open Educational Practices will best align with, contribute to, and benefit from our institutional strategy for distinctive excellence in teaching and learning: (1) Opening up the pedagogy underlying exemplary OER, to enable a deeper faculty engagement in integrating and mobilizing diverse sources of knowledge in teaching; (2) Opening up that process by which individual faculty improve teaching and learning, as a model for our students' own engagements with knowledge; (3) Opening up our collective faculty work in innovation networks, as a model for students and as a signature institutional strength and outcome. We summarize the rationale and planned next steps for each of these focal points, which are intended to cumulatively build on each other as a value chain to support the development of distinctive graduate capabilities as signature outcomes of our teaching and learning. [This paper was presented at the Open Education Consortium Global Conference (Banff, Canada, April 22-24, 2015).]

An increasing number of Chinese students pursue their higher education degree in an overseas university. This research paper sets out to raise a discussion about some of the major challenges that such Chinese postgraduates might experience when studying at universities in English speaking countries drawing from ethnographic and sociological perspectives. The paper seeks to enhance understanding of a growing phenomenon amongst student communities in Higher Education institutions in English speaking countries. The challenges faced by Chinese students can be disorientating and stressful but overcoming them can lead to opening up of a range of opportunities from which the students can benefit particularly after they have graduated from their study. As many HE institutions come to depend upon the growing number of Chinese students enrolling with them the paper touches upon an issue of cross national concern. Both authors have experience of students seeking to study in English-speaking countries. They are currently pursuing research at the Institute of Education, University College London. The present paper is drawn from a wider programme of research into student exchanges and flows.

At the time of writing, the first community colleges in Ontario were preparing for transition to an accreditation model from an audit system. This paper revisits constructivist literature, arguing that a more pragmatic definition of constructivism effectively blends positivist and interactionist philosophies to achieve both student centred learning and predetermined outcomes. Relevant Ontario College Quality Assurance Service (OCQAS) and College Quality Assurance Process (CQAAP) standards and requirements are presented along with their implications for college policy and constructivist teaching methods. This paper provides practical suggestions for integrating both constructivist philosophies and policies translated from accreditation standards into instructional methods.

With widespread adoption of Learning Management Systems (LMS) and other learning technology, large amounts of data--commonly known as trace data--are readily accessible to researchers. Trace data has been extensively used to calculate time that students spend on different learning activities--typically referred to as time-on-task. These measures are used to build predictive models of student learning in order to understand and improve learning processes. While time-on-task measures have been used in Learning Analytics research, the consequences of their use are not fully described or examined. This paper presents findings from two experiments regarding different time-on-task estimation methods and their influence on research findings. Based on modelling different student performance measures with popular statistical methods in two datasets (one online, one blended), our findings indicate that time-on-task estimation methods play an important role in shaping the final study results, particularly in online settings where the amount of interaction with LMS is typically higher. The primary goal of this paper is to raise awareness and initiate debate on the important issue of time-on-task estimation within the broader learning analytics community. Finally, the paper provides an overview of commonly adopted time-on-task estimation methods in educational and related research fields.

This paper considers education abroad (EA) and its relationship to global citizenship and colonialism by describing and analyzing the agitated interactions of one EA course through a post-colonial lens. Rather than claim the EA experience as emancipatory or colonialist, the paper illustrates the ways that colonialist tendencies can manifest in particular moments and through specific dynamics of an EA course. This paper illustrates the ways that colonialist tendencies related to a reifying of consumerist ideologies, a westernizing of the EA experience, and an ongoing employment of an objectifying tourist gaze became manifest in an education abroad context. The paper concludes with a discussion of the findings that includes some ideas for how education abroad programs can address its colonialist tendencies.

In 2013 the Ontario Ministry of Training, Colleges and Universities released Ontario's Differentiation Policy Framework for Postsecondary Education, for colleges and universities in the province. All 24 Ontario colleges responded to this Framework by presenting their Strategic Mandate Agreements (SMA). The Framework contrasts the original provincial mandate for the Ontario colleges, which was to provide accessible comprehensive institutions throughout the province. This paper examines, at a programmatic level, how this "Framework" affects Broadcasting Media programs in 13 out of the 24 colleges that offer this vocational discipline. The paper presents the vertical, inter-intra institutional, formal reputational hierarchy that exists amongst these programs. This paper argues that the Broadcasting Media programs are elite, differentiated, and diverse; their formal and informal hierarchical status creates deeper, intentional stratification, entrenching programs as positional goods with positional power competing for supremacy, regardless of the intent of the original mandate for the Ontario colleges. If the Strategic Mandate Agreements are executed by the Ontario Ministry of Training, Colleges and Universities, then this hierarchical, programmatic stratification will become further stratified and inaccessible. Although this paper focuses on one particular vocational discipline, the theoretical and research approaches have the potential to affect other programs within these comprehensive, community-based colleges.

Many researchers believe that the modern university is in a state of crisis like never before. One of the main reasons cited for this decline is that the modern university has a closer resemblance to a transnational corporation than to a traditional scholarly institution (Lewis, 2005). This paper attempts to define the term "university" from a classical perspective and to describe the gradual incorporation of vocational pursuits into its scope. Focusing on modern North American university models, it asks whether business schools, in particular, should be operating within academia. An alternative is discussed, which focuses on the vocational attributes of business rather than theoretical knowledge. I draw on secondary sources as well as my own personal experience as a student and researcher to make suggestions on how interdepartmental tension developed and how it can be reduced. The paper finds that the business school does have a place in the modern university; however, the classical representation of the university must be abandoned for it to be fully embraced.

EARLI SIG 24, Researcher Education and Careers (SIG-REaC), was founded because increasing interest has emerged within the EARLI community into understanding different aspects of doctoral and post-PhD researcher educational and career development. This special issue brings together the outcome of our first scholarly discussion at the SIG-REaC inaugural meeting in September 2014 in Barcelona. The goal of each of the five co-authored papers is to make visible what has been overlooked, and to attend to methodological considerations in order to draw out future lines of research. As a collection, the papers address multiple levels and issues of researcher education: establishing the multifaceted phenomenon that is researcher education and careers and providing key concepts that others might take up, e.g., informal/invisible curriculum; the personal as a sphere of activity that may collide with the sphere of work; drivers of education that can provide cross-national points of comparison. Further, by identifying gaps in the literature, these papers together lay out an ambitious research agenda in a number of areas related to researcher education. In the process, they provide an extensive list of references well worth exploring since they represent the knowledge networks of over thirty researchers. In this editorial paper the Sig-REac is presented, and the characteristics of the papers, their limitations and some future challenges of researcher education are discussed.