Category: Institutions

Time for a New Duff-Berdahl?

Reading Peter C. Kent’s book on the Strax Affair at UNB – in which the case’s denouement was significantly affected by the then-recently-released report of the Duff-Berdahl commission – got me thinking about university governance. In Canada, university governance has mostly been run on a bicameral Senate/Board model for over a century.  In 1963, the Englishman, Sir James Duff, and the American, Robert O. Berdahl, were jointly appointed by AUCC and CAUT to look into how to modernize university governance, and reduce the

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No to “World-Class” Research in the Humanities

You often hear talk about how Canadian institutions need to do more research.  Better research.  “World-class” research, even.  Research that will prove how smart our professors are, how efficient they are with public resources, and, hence, justify a claim to an even greater share of those resources. In medicine, the biological sciences, and engineering, this call is easy to understand.  Developments in these areas can – with the right environment for commercialization – lead to new products, which, in turn,

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More Data on Credit Transfer (Part 3)

So, yesterday we saw that, in fact, the vast majority of transfer students receive credit for their previous work, and in quite substantial amounts as well.  But what about the credits that didn’t get recognized? There’s a pretty clear correlation between non-recognition and changing programs.  Overall, university transfer students said that more than 60% of their credits were accepted for transfer (among those who had any credit accepted, it was roughly 75%).  But as the figure below shows, the results were

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Actual Data on Transfer Credit (Part 2)

It’s easy to make transfer credit seem like a really big deal.  Outside of BC and Alberta, institutional credit transfer policies are pretty ad hoc, and there’s no shortage of anecdotes about students having to re-do courses they’ve already done.  But little data has hitherto been available to help us understand the extent to which credit transfer policies affect times-to-completion. Until now. Using HESA’s CanEd Student Panel, we examined this question from a couple of different angles.  Figure 1 gives

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Understanding Credit Transfer (Part 1)

Every once in awhile, the issue of credit transfer pops up.  Usually, it’s in the context of “learning efficiency” – some politician or deputy minister starts off with, “why can’t my son/daughter/constituent get full credit for previous learning”, and follows that with some diatribe about how universities and colleges “just don’t get it”, etc, etc. Right now, this script is playing out in Alberta, where the Advanced Education Minister is asking institutions to create ten per cent more “seamless learner

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