This book describes the history, structure and institutions of open and distance education in six countries: Australia, Brazil, Canada, Germany, the UK and the US. It discusses how open and distance education is evolving in a digital age to reflect the needs and circumstances of national higher education systems in these countries, and explores…

The Apprenticeship Student Outcomes (APPSO) Survey, which targets former apprenticeship students who have completed the final level of their technical training, is one of three annual surveys that make up BC Student Outcomes. In British Columbia, it is projected that there will be nearly one million job openings by 2022, with 43 percent requiring…

Awareness contexts are useful concepts in symbolic interactionist research, which focusses on how everyday realities are constructed. To provide a fresh perspective on governance in Canada's colleges, I sorted vignettes in interview data collected from administrators and faculty into four types of contexts originally derived from observation of…

University rankings play an increasingly large role in shaping the goals of academic institutions and departments, while removing universities themselves from the evaluation process. This study compares the library-related results of two university ranking publications with scores on the LibQUAL+™ survey to identify if library service quality--as…

An institutional culture that values teaching is likely to lead to improved student learning. The main focus of this study was to determine faculty, graduate and undergraduate students' perception of the teaching culture at their institution and identify indicators of that teaching culture. Themes included support for teaching development; support…

This book advances discussion and disseminates knowledge and global perspectives on what school leadership looks like, how it is enacted and under what circumstances, and when or where lessons might be portable. This book has wide appeal for researchers, policymakers, and practitioners considering school leadership and how to support it…

The Ministry of Advanced Education (British Columbia) continues to work on key deliverables outlined in the "Minister's 2015/16 Mandate Letter" (see Appendix B) and the "BC Jobs Plan" to contribute to a strong economy and secure tomorrow for British Columbians. The ability of citizens to take full advantage of their growing…

Cross-border higher education institutions are considered a main way to fulfill the educational internalization in Mainland China; to some extent they represent the attitude of entering the international market. In this paper, the history, status quo, and future of Chinese-foreign cooperatively-run schools are analyzed and discussed. Cross-border…

The high cost of tuition and textbooks can have a negative impact on potential students from lower socioeconomic backgrounds. Open Educational Resources (OER) offers students a way to save educational costs while utilizing high-quality open textbooks. Up until now, there have been few studies focused on a specific provider of open textbooks. This…

Student feedback is essential to maintaining quality and relevance in the education system. Through surveying former students, BC Student Outcomes provides the information needed to help shape post-secondary education in British Columbia. Every year, BC Student Outcomes collects feedback from former students who took post-secondary programs,…

In recent years there have been significant changes in education across the globe, largely as a result of changing demographics, technological developments, and increased globalization. Relatedly, the changing needs of societies and families, along with new research findings, provide new directions in early childhood education. Consequently, early…

Transnational education is a huge growth industry and a potential source of considerable income for Canadian educational institutions. Canadian educational establishments seem to be missing out on this, and this seems short sighted. Canada has a very good reputation globally; this could be utilized when selling Canadian educational institutions in…

In the opening of this paper, critical questions regarding the role of education are asked. Is it to make a living or to build a better world? To serve the needs of industry or to build a democratic society? Should the "educated citizen" be a critical thinker? A person who lives in a sustainable way and cares for the environment? An…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to discuss how the province over time has addressed problems that are generic to many jurisdictions in assuring quality -- level of aggregation, pooling, definition of new and continuing programs, scope of jurisdiction, role of governors, performance indicators, relationship to accreditation, programs versus…

This paper presents the leadership implications from a study that explored how to increase the quality of teaching in a university thereby presenting data from the bottom up--the academic perspective--to inform leadership, policies, and academic development which generally flows from the top down. We report academics' perceptions of and…