Tag: Ontario

The Road to Three

Glenn Murray is a man in a hurry. He talks – it’s never clear how seriously – about shortening degrees to three years within the lifetime of this government. Let’s be generous and grant that the McGuinty government will actually last a full four years – what are the odds of getting to achieving this? Honestly? Zero. Zip. Bupkis. Here’s why: There are only two feasible routes to three-year degrees – the compression model and the re-design model. The former is

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Re-designing to Three

So, we’ve covered the ideas of cutting graduation requirements, bringing back grade 12, and degree compression as ways to get to a three-year degree. That leaves course re-design. There are some examples out there of full-on re-design of programs from four years of seat time to three years of competencies. The best known is probably at Southern New Hampshire University (SNHU), which was the subject of a recent book called Saving Higher Education: The Integrated, Competency-Based Three-Year Bachelor Degree Program. The

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Compressing to Three

As we noted yesterday, there are four ways to go about getting university degrees from four years to three. One, cutting grad requirements from 120 to 90 credits, isn’t serious. A second, upping the use of prior learning assessment (or, in extremis, bringing back grade 13), is barely half-serious. That leaves curriculum compression and curriculum re-design. Curriculum compression is the significantly easier path. No need to change anything other than the speed of students’ path through the system. By getting them

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Four Ways to Three

The Ontario Minister of Training, Colleges and Universities, Glen Murray, has a bee in his bonnet about three-year undergraduate degrees. Basically, he’s been told there’s some fiscal consolidation coming, and he thinks three-year degrees are the way that institutions can deal with the coming troubles without – allegedly – affecting quality. There’s nothing inherently wrong with three-year degrees. All over Europe they are now standard (although in many countries, 80-90% of bachelor’s graduates go on to do a two-year Master’s

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The Ontario Budget

Well, I don’t think anyone quite expected that. The quick summary: faced with enormous structural deficits, the Ontario government chose to close the fiscal gap with delays in capital projects, some cross-government efficiency measures and – not to put too fine a point on it – sticking it to public sector workers. The upside is that as a result they managed to avoid program cuts in most areas, which to be honest is a bit of a miracle. If you

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