By David K. Foot. For the past 15 years, Canada’s postsecondary institutions have benefited from educating the children of the Boomers. The Echo, or Gen-Y, generation includes those born between 1980 and 1996. They are now aged 18 to 34. Those born in the peak year, 1991, are 23 years old, possibly finishing undergraduate studies or doing a graduate degree. More...

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...

By Rosanna Tamburri. Amid growing controversy over unpaid student internships and stagnant economic conditions, co-op programs continue to thrive and grow at Canadian universities and colleges. But some people question whether the rapid expansion can continue without compromising the quality of students’ experiences.
“Co-op is definitely growing, and our membership is increasing,” said Christine Arsenault, past president of the Canadian Association for Co-operative Education (CAFCE) and director of management co-op programs at the University of Toronto Scarborough. According to CAFCE, 55 universities, 26 colleges and three institutes offer some 1,100 co-op programs. More...

By Jean François Bouthillette. By mid-May, the first cohort of students at the Institut des sciences, des technologies et des études avancées d’Haïti (ISTEAH) will finish their first year of studies. Since the fall, 61 students on three Haitian campuses – in Cap-Haïtien, Port-au-Prince and Hinche – have benefitted from the teaching and support of foreign professors working at the new school. More...

By Cassandra Hendry. University and college presidents are increasingly using social media to engage with their constituencies, says Dan Zaiontz, who works in strategic planning and public affairs at Seneca College in Toronto.
As a capstone project for his recent master’s degree in communication studies at McMaster University, Mr. Zaiontz conducted confidential interviews with 22 presidents (11 each from Canada and the United States) about their social media use. Twitter was the most popular platform, with all 22 presidents using it, followed by Facebook with 16 users. LinkedIn was a distant third while tools such as Instagram, Google+, Reddit and Flickr barely registered. More...