Hi everyone,
A huge thank you to all those who attended and participated in our first Focus Friday on September 18th.
Today, we have Alan Roberts, the CEO of InSite Information Systems, a company that focuses on competency-based assessment, such as the ShiftIQ platform. In today’s webinar, we are going to talk about internationally trained professionals, credentialing, assessment of competency, and skills recognition. Along the way, we’ll be touching on the assessment of internationally trained nurses, intraprovincial barriers to credential recognition, and the future of competency recognition.
I’m especially looking forward to the discussions with the whole group as we talk about the purpose of credentials and competencies.
Focus Friday is 12:30-1:30pm Eastern and you can register here: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/oc5huUhpQa62JRZ-uYqaPQ#/
Looking Back
Two weeks ago, I had a fantastic conversation with Dr. Sterling Crowe, the Associate Dean of Student Wellness and Equitable Learning at Humber Polytechnic and President of CACUSS, and Dr. Jennifer Browne, Director of Student Life at Memorial University, about how the changing environment of Canadian higher education impacts students and what students are talking about this year.
We discussed improving student supports and how students are looking for direct connections with others. While they are very able to navigate all of the online and digital methods of learning and connection, this year’s students are more focused on finding their niches with other students in person.
A major theme of our discussion was the return of food insecurity as a driving concern for students. Recent changes in costs not controlled by institutions, as well as changes to student loan availability, are impacting students’ day-to-day lives in ways that echo into their academic work.
We touched briefly on students’ perspectives of AI use, how they are seeing it as the easy route and as untrustworthy. Students also see AI use as having substantial ethical and sustainability concerns, as well as worries about who is allowed to use AI and who is not. These concerns stem from instructor and institutional use of AI that students are punished for emulating.
Finally, we discussed what is happening across the sector as governments are still indicating that student experience and student supports are important. However, with funding envelopes and targeted funding collapsing, this doesn’t translate into the budgets and staffing needed to provide them.
You can access the recording on our YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2SlIfKaVdpY
