By Carl Straumsheim. Library directors at selective liberal arts colleges may this fall found a new open-access publishing house. In the months ahead, the libraries still need to convince faculty members the effort would be worth the time and money. The Lever Initiative, founded last summer by the liberal arts college libraries that make up the Oberlin Group, is investigating the possibilities of establishing an open-access publishing house for scholarly short-form monographs. After a review of the market and a survey of faculty attitudes, the task force published its first report in March, summarizing the first phase of the effort. Read more...
13 avril 2014
Worth the Effort?
12 avril 2014
How Western got its weather data
By Alan MacEachern. Warning: I’m going to talk about my own work in this column. I don’t usually like to do that, because it smacks of self-promotion. I prefer my self-promotion masked as self-deprecation. That’s the Maritime way.
In 2008, I had a meeting at the Environment Canada headquarters in Downsview, Ontario. Other visitors probably get to see where they make the weather, but because I’m a historian, they showed me the old stuff. We went to the basement and walked down aisle after aisle of weather observations: all of the original paper forms that volunteers and paid observers had filled out, multiple times a day, across thousands of stations across Canada, from 1840 onward. More...
Atlantic universities try to boost enrolment amid a declining university-aged cohort
By Rosanna Tamburri. It is crunch time in Eastern Canada.
Cape Breton University is a long way from home for Chinese student Qiang Zhang, who prefers to go by his chosen English name “Kelex.” But he has nothing but praise for CBU, where he is pursuing a bachelor of hospitality and tourism management degree. Not even the unusually harsh winter has dampened his enthusiasm. Earlier in the day he had a job interview with a major Halifax hotel. If all goes well, he plans to stay. More...
10 avril 2014
Utah higher education selected for multi-state collaboration
By Benjamin Wood. The Utah System of Higher Education was selected Monday to join 12 other higher education systems nationwide in exploring solutions for at-risk student populations.
The multi-state collaboration, organized by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, includes a $200,000 grant as state education officials work to increase access to and outcomes from Utah's colleges and universities. More...
University of Ottawa declared a Fair Trade Campus
By Don Butler. University of Ottawa students and staff who buy coffee at university-run food outlets can “sleep a little better tonight,” according to Jonathan Rausseo, the campus sustainability manager — and not because it’s decaffeinated. The university became the seventh in Canada Tuesday to achieve Fair Trade Campus designation. Fairtrade Canada awards the designation to institutions that demonstrate “outstanding commitments” to increasing the availability and awareness of fair trade products. To receive the designation, the university has to offer only fair trade coffee in the 15 or 16 food outlets it operates on campus. It also must offer three fair trade teas at each location and, if chocolate bars are sold, at least one must be fair trade. More...
Loyalty lightens financial burden
Aeroplan has made going back to school a little easier for Stephenie Dykeman.
A working mother with a five-yearold son and two-year-old twins, Dykeman is upgrading her academic qualifications to become a social worker.
"It's a struggle to work and go to school when you have three children to look after," she says. More...
First Nations have a right to design on-reserve education systems: national chief
By Nick Martin. First Nations that contract with public education to operate their schools should continue to do so — if that’s what they think is best for them, native leader Shawn Atleo said Tuesday.
"Existing agreements, if they’re working, there’s no need to change them," said Atleo, national chief of the Assembly of First Nations. More...
07 avril 2014
Here’s proof graduates aren’t an underemployed ‘lost generation’
By Alex Usher. Alex Usher is the president of Higher Education Strategy Associates.For the past couple of years, one of the things that both the Canadian right and left have agreed on is that the transmission belt from higher education to the labour market is broken. For the right, this has been expressed in terms of “skills gaps” (or, when that proved a stretch, “skills mismatches”), which is code for “we need fewer BAs and more college grads.” For the left, the discussion has turned on the theme of a “lost” or “squeezed” generation that is highly skilled but is having its transition to the labour market blocked by government austerity, temporary foreign workers, etc. Read more...
A curriculum by academics for academics
By William Patrick Leonard. United States tertiary institutions pursuing a teaching mission should fulfil the expectations of two primary stakeholder groups in order to sustain themselves. They are prospective and enrolled students, and employers who may subsequently hire their graduates. Read more...Liberals axe graduate tax rebate
The provincial Liberals have eliminated a tax rebate that provided up to $15,000 to post-secondary graduates.
The graduate retention rebate was intended to act as an incentive for young people to remain in Nova Scotia after graduation.
Finance Minister Diana Whalen told reporters during the release of the provincial budget that the rebate was scrapped because it wasn’t serving its purpose. More...
