Council of Ontario Universities (COU) Academic Colleague Report to Senate

Submitted by: Dr. John Nadeau

Date: November 4, 2010

Please see the following table for a list of working issues that the Academic Colleagues are currently exploring or plan to pursue. Perhaps, of particular interest to Nipissing faculty are the issues of increasing graduate education in smaller Universities, the role of research in undergraduate education and collaborative online degrees. Further, I have attached a draft discussion paper by Academic Colleagues on the topic of online education. Comments are welcome.

It is also worth noting that the issue of university differentiation has surfaced as a major issue for Ontario Universities. The Academic Colleagues will likely be preparing a discussion paper to circulate among the university executive heads in the coming months.

COU Colleagues’ Issues Update
Issue / Details / Action
Collaborative Online Degrees / Universities are facing increased pressure stemming from a growing interest in university education but also an opportunity to take advantage of the net generation as well as the life-long learning market and offer more courses and programs online. Online education has increased tremendously in popularity with Athabasca leading the movement with an estimated student registration of 15,000 in Ontario and 28,000 course registrations at any given time. Ontario is missing out on an opportunity to service its communities (at home and abroad) and could be partially alleviating pressure on its infrastructure through a coordinated approach to online service provision. Opportunities for collaboration on a number of degrees and programs abound with a coordinated and strategic approach possible among universities and with community stakeholders which can make reaching remote areas feasible. / For discussion among colleagues - see folder for update
Commercialization of Research / Canadian universities are thought to account for one fifth of research and development activity and to generate one third of research and development jobs in Canada. The provincial government of Ontario echoes the federal government's emphasis on the potential for greater commercialization of research, and has established the Ontario Research and Innovation Council to identify research areas and opportunities for collaboration. Yet, concerns have been expressed by groups such as the Ontario Council of University Faculty Associations that the pronounced emphasis on commercialization threatens to divert resources away from basic research (and would be especially detrimental to research in the humanities and social sciences), and ultimately lead to subsidization of business projects. Critics worry that agreements with private sector entities may interfere with the integrity of research or with academic freedom (issues which arose in the case of Dr. Nancy Olivieri), and thus could potentially jeopardize the primary goal of the university, which is public dissemination for the greater public good.
Universities are being criticized for holding onto research that could be commercialized but also that much of its [their] research (especially in social sciences and humanities) are not contributing to economic development. These are two separate issues but with a common problem: communication. Although funding bodies are increasingly requiring that commercialisation or knowledge exchange plans become part of funding applications, perhaps more should be done around communication with communities of interest in the form of regular presentations at practitioner conferences, more active participation in industry clusters , publishing excerpts of research into commercial publications. All of these activities are not deemed ‘academic’ in the normal operation of a university but perhaps need to become recognized as valid activities.
Graduate Academic Accommodations / Accommodating Graduate Student Students with Disabilities. What are we doing? Is it enough? (And when is it too much?) A successor to last year’s paper, Learning Disabilities: A Guide for Faculty at Ontario Universities, by John Logan. To be distributed: October 2009. / Presented to Council
Casualisation of Labour / The increasing use of other than tenure-stream faculty – full-time limited contract, or especially course-by-course contract -- in universities and colleges across North America is well known but U.S. research is more revealing than Canadian. In the U.S. now 68% of appointments are to other than tenure track, and 46% of faculty are part time. According to OCUFA, there is no recent Canadian data. Most studies (again, U.S.) reveal a significant impact on institutions in terms of student retention, especially. None blame the part time faculty, but rather point out that they have little time for student contact outside the classroom, are not involved in curriculum planning, and typically given little notice of which courses they will teach. Salary and working conditions vary wildly. The impact on universities and on the profession is massive: the paucity of positions has implications for graduate programs (and discourages graduate students in programs where academic employment is the principal goal); highly trained scholars are lost to research; and full time faculty have increased workload to cover what part time faculty cannot, by virtue of their status, do (e.g., adjudicate tenure files, serve on committees, and so on). The research agrees that part time faculty are not weaker than those fortunate to obtain full time employment, although, of course, their research activities are curtailed and unsupported. The only benefit to institutions is the immediately apparent difference in cost. In some Canadian universities, typically as a result of unionization, part-time faculty have acquired some benefits and stability, at least through seniority. However, there have been no studies of the Canadian situation.
Impact of Outcomes-Based Evaluation & Alignment with Bologna Accord / The dissatisfaction expressed by a number of engineering companies with the qualities possessed by the engineering graduates they employed, together with the internationalization of engineering, has led to a re-evaluation of the criteria considered in the accreditation of university engineering programs. In Canada an attempt has therefore been made to develop criteria that would lead to a Canadian accreditation being accepted in many other countries. The signing of the Washington Accord, to which Canada is a signatory, and the development of the Bologna agreement in Europe has made it even more urgent that changes in the accreditation process be adopted. A move from prescriptive procedures to outcomes based procedures has now become a feature of most engineering accreditations and Canada will introduce such an outcomes based accreditation procedure in 2010. This is causing the engineering faculties at Canadian universities to examine their curricula and the ways in which they are delivered. This is in many cases proving to be a difficult task made even more difficult by the current shortage of funds.
Challenges and opportunities in increasing graduate education in smaller Universities / Provincial government announcement of a large increase in allocation of BIU for graduate students at Ontario Universities in 2006 provided a strong impetus for recruiting new graduate students. Smaller universities were particularly keen on this mainly to take advantage of this new funding. As a result, enrolment was doubled in one year in some universities through increased student intake in existing programs and development of new programs. While the universities were happy to realise the BIUs enrolment sustainability has become a serious concern. It has been alledged that some units have since experienced significant declines and hence could not take full advantage of their allocated quota. Several factors can be identified for this decline. First, the increased enrolment was not supported by the necessary resources (office and lab space, recognition of faculties taking more graduate students, e.g by teaching load reduction, allocating more graduate student stipends/scholarships). These were particularly applicable to science and engineering where the thesis-based graduate students expect a reasonable level of funding in the form of a stipend/scholarship from the supervisor and of especially when the student and/or supervisor must pay for all of the study related laboratory and field costs, most often with very limited research funding. Some units chose as a solution to start course based graduate programs but sustainability in those programs is also becoming a big concern. A more complete plan is required to solve these problems, including an assessment of strengths and weaknesses to achieve a balance between course and thesis-based graduate programs. A second problem could be defined as the supervisors' capacity to supervise additional students. Adding more graduate students to a supervisor's pool of advisees is not the same as adding a few more students to a lecture class. Graduate students, especially when working on a thesis, tend to require a more substantial time commitment than undergraduate students.
The question of whether small and primarily undergraduate universities should increase their efforts in graduate studies may be gastronomic, spec. concerning the size of a slice of pie and the economies of scope to realise the objectives. As with so many academic problems and perils in the university sector, the question is one of limited resources (physical and financial) and what the allocation of resources to graduate programs might do to the missions of these universities. More BIUs at small universities do not noticeably translate into sufficiently profound advances in infrastructure to support these types of programs. For example, a library with 100,000 monographs does not magically transform into a library with resources sufficient to support advanced research in the Humanities, nor does a department of 8 tenured and tenure track faculty with 400 undergraduate majors have the person power to remove those faculty from 3- to 6-credits of undergraduate teaching to supervise 5 graduate students, nor can a biochemistry lab with one spectrometer morph into a world-class engine of advanced research that can accommodate the competing demands of the undergraduate and graduate populations, in one cycle of funding, or one government mandate.
Role of Research in Undergraduate Education / Undergraduate research especially for students in their senior year is often a required activity for graduation in many physical sciences, medical sciences and engineering programs. Research in these fields which is often based on team efforts makes incorporating undergraduates into a lab relatively straightforward. The culture of the Social Sciences and the Arts appears to be different in that individual effort is often the dominant mode of study and therefore, the impact of decisions with regards to research may be different from one discipline to another. There are numerous benefits to including research at the undergraduate level. It can convince students to pursue graduate studies. Furthermore, the granting councils (NSERC, CIHR and SHERC) are now beginning to place the same weighting on highly qualified personnel (HQP) as the merit of the proposal and the quality of the applicant. While undergraduate students are used extensively as researchers at smaller institutions, many faculty members at larger schools also want undergraduates as part of their training portfolio. Despite this, some programs are relaxing a research component as a graduation requirement because this activity is expensive, time consuming for all concerned, and can have real safety liability issues. Furthermore, it has been argued that students entering the workforce with an undergraduate degree do not need to have research experience. It would therefore be interesting and useful to examine the emerging trends in undergraduate research and its perceived value as a function of Faculty culture.
Rethinking Retention / The issue of student retention (with its inverse: attrition) has become a preeminent performance indicator for universities in recent decades, perhaps more visibly south of the border, but increasingly in Canada as well. Whereas universities might once have considered their recruitment efforts at the front of the pipeline to be more powerfully indicative of success (the size and quality of the pool, the selectivity of offers, the yield on those offers and the entering averages of the class), the focus has moved down the pipeline to the production of student success during student matriculation. Indeed, there are now thousands of articles, scores of books, and an entire scholarly journal devoted to student retention.
As a result, university administrations invest heavily in those areas thought to have an impact on student academic success — preparation, transition programming, first year experience (FYE) programming, academic advising that can identify students-at-risk and intervene, academic skills enrichment, and peer advising, to name a few — and the provision of integrated services, curricular and co-curricular, to treat the whole student. And yet, retention remains a summational index, one that responds to the overall quality of the student experience and the world of possibilities offered up to them through challenging and interesting courses, appropriate counseling, effective orientation, engagement with faculty, relationships with students, the quality of the physical environment, the prevalence of dysfunctional and disruptive behaviors, financial and familial stressors, and so forth.In other words, part of the attrition rate would be unlikely to move significantly with the introduction of targeted ameliorations and would take generations address in a significant way. Indeed, most retention efforts ignore the diversity that characterizes attrition causality and aggregate the data in ways that may mask the complex challenges to retention. Among the questions that can be raised concerning this shift to the importance of the retention rate are the following:
• Is there a structural attrition rate that can’t or perhaps shouldn’t be reduced through social-academic “engineering” of the sort discussed above?
• Where is the line separating aggressive student-success initiatives from academically-unpalatable “retention at all costs” strategies? How would we know if a university crossed that line?
• How valuable is the aggregated first-to-second year retention rate as a university performance indicator? Does it capture academically brilliant students bored with the classroom along with the slow students unprepared for university life? Is it helpful to have students experiencing severe emotional and mental distress statistically bundled with those disinterested in academic achievement or unsure of what (or whether) to study? Do we need to disaggregate the data and look at the attrition rate and students-at-risk as more variegated phenomena?
• Put simply, is it time to reconsider the investments in retention and our use of retention statistics in university rankings and comparisons?
Changing Role of Academics / TBD
Impact of Metrics on Liberal Arts Education / TBD
Tiering / TBD
Financial Impact of Academic Quality Programs / TBD