Mission, Mandate and work plan Ken Norrie Vice-President, Research NATVAC University of Guelph...
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Transcript of Mission, Mandate and work plan Ken Norrie Vice-President, Research NATVAC University of Guelph...
Mission, Mandate and work plan
Ken NorrieVice-President, Research
NATVACUniversity of Guelph
October 11, 2007
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HEQCO is an independent agency with a mandate to conduct research and offer policy advice on all aspects of post-secondary education in Ontario
Review and Research Plan 2007 released in July, 2007 (available at www.heqco.ca)
Priority research areas ◦ Accessibility◦ Learning quality◦ Accountability◦ System design
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Council, chaired by Frank Iacobucci President and CEO – Jim Downey Research team
◦ Vice-president ◦ 3 research directors (2 in place, advertising for 3rd)◦ 2 research analysts (currently interviewing)
Support staff Budget
◦ $3 million, going to $5 million in steady state◦ Minimum 70% directly on research
Bulk of research activity to be conducted via external contracts
All research public; authors encouraged to submit to peer-reviewed venues
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Understand how PSE registration and persistence rates are related to◦ Students’ personal characteristics – financial and
non-financial Already considerable research and an emerging
consensus ◦ The pathways chosen – college then university, etc
Much less research and no emerging consensus Recommend policy options that might
improve the probability of success◦ Not even much research
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A multi-party, multi-year accessibility project covering the PSE participation life-cycle◦ Piecing together data from various national and
provincial sources◦ Modeling students’ choices and testing hypotheses
Explaining inter-provincial differences in accessibility and persistence rates ◦ Focus in particular on supply-side factors
Interventions (experiments) aimed at identifying effective policy instruments◦ E.g., replace loans with grants
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Input measures suggest that Ontario’s learning quality compares poorly to that in other jurisdictions, and that it is has been in slow decline for several decades
Yet output measures suggest the opposite conclusion
We have very little direct evidence on learning quality in Ontario (or anywhere else for that matter)
But NSSE can perhaps serve as an instrumental variable for learning outcomes, making empirical testing and experimentation possible
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Examining variations in NSSE outcomes among Faculties and programs within institutions
Interventions at 9-10 universities in 2008/09 ◦ Experiments with various learning
methodologies/approaches◦ NSSE results as instrumental variable for learning
outcomes International, multi-disciplinary symposium on
teaching and learning, Fall 2008 Workshop on graduate and professional
education for Spring, 2008 based on recent GPSS survey
Question: time for a Canadian DEEP (Documenting Effective Educational Practice)?
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Accountability does not imply ranking! There is considerable variation among Ontario
institutions in how they assemble and use PIs for academic planning purposes
Challenge is to identify a set of performance indicators that ◦ Disseminates information to students and other
stakeholders ◦ Supports differentiation in institutional missions and
visions Common University Data Ontario (CUDO) and the
proposed Common University Data Canada (CUDC) are promising avenues
G-13 data exchange a model for more rigorous benchmarking?
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Workshop on university performance indicators (date: Nov 23)
Paper on a data architecture for a PSE quality framework
Paper on lessons for PSE from the health care sector
Papers on best quality assurance practices internationally and in other provinces
Analysis of Multi-Year Agreement (MYA) experience
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Ignore the supply side at your peril!◦ Can the system accommodate all qualified PSE applicants?◦ Can it provide them with a quality learning experience?◦ How do we at the same time sustain and enhance research
capacity? What exactly do we mean by accommodating demand?
◦ College or university◦ Geography ◦ Institution◦ Program◦ Learning approaches
College/university transfers and collaborative programs a key feature of system design
View system design as a classic example of a principal-agent problem◦ Incentives, not coercion
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