Ten with Ken (Video)

Ken Steele pulls together the evidence for a growing majority of college and university students who are "invisible" part-time students -- registered full-time, for financial aid or other practical reasons, but in fact working as many as 34 hours a week. Now that the average Canadian's work week has declined to about 33 hours a week, these students are essentially working full-time, while registered as full-time students too. Whether because they need the income to survive financially, or they value work experience above all else, these students are inevitably cutting corners, cutting short their sleep and spending half the time on their studies that most universities claim to require. As more and more institutions use the NSSE (National Survey of Student Engagement) to measure student engagement on campus, it is clear that Canada's big urban universities are already at a significant disadvantage, perhaps in part because of broader participation and larger class sizes. Students who spend less time on their studies are, by NSSE's definition, less engaged students.

Finally, just #ICYMI, we share clips from a recent video on Durham College's YouTube channel, about a cat named Odey who decides to enrol at Durham College to improve his life.

Videos excerpted in this podcast have been significantly edited. Check out the full, original videos here:

Centennial College: IMPACT Partnerhttps://youtu.be/7Vb3lyBUslM

Gates Foundation, Get Schooled: Balancing Life and Collegehttps://youtu.be/ry2Hedfe1jM

Dalhousie Student Union: The Student Poverty Songhttps://youtu.be/Cr2LiQGrC7A

Odey the Cat goes to DChttps://youtu.be/u5a75Sn7JPY

For exclusive preview access to future episodes of "Ten with Ken", be sure to subscribe to Eduvation's "in the loop" email newsletter, at http://www.eduvation.ca/subscribe/

Ken Steele pulls together the evidence for a growing majority of college and university students who are "invisible" part-time students -- registered full-time, for financial aid or other practical reasons, but in fact working as many as 34 hours a week. Now that the average Canadian's work week has declined to about 33 hours a week, these students are essentially working full-time, while registered as full-time students too. Whether because they need the income to survive financially, or they value work experience above all else, these students are inevitably cutting corners, cutting short their sleep and spending half the time on their studies that most universities claim to require. As more and more institutions use the NSSE (National Survey of Student Engagement) to measure student engagement on campus, it is clear that Canada's big urban universities are already at a significant disadvantage, perhaps in part because of broader participation and larger class sizes. Students who spend less time on their studies are, by NSSE's definition, less engaged students.

Finally, just #ICYMI, we share clips from a recent video on Durham College's YouTube channel, about a cat named Odey who decides to enrol at Durham College to improve his life.

Videos excerpted in this podcast have been significantly edited. Check out the full, original videos here:

Centennial College: IMPACT Partnerhttps://youtu.be/7Vb3lyBUslM

Gates Foundation, Get Schooled: Balancing Life and Collegehttps://youtu.be/ry2Hedfe1jM

Dalhousie Student Union: The Student Poverty Songhttps://youtu.be/Cr2LiQGrC7A

Odey the Cat goes to DChttps://youtu.be/u5a75Sn7JPY

For exclusive preview access to future episodes of "Ten with Ken", be sure to subscribe to Eduvation's "in the loop" email newsletter, at http://www.eduvation.ca/subscribe/

Ken Steele continues his review of recent winners and sinners in higher ed social media, this time looking at orientation week highs and lows.

It seems as though sometimes O-Week brings out the worst in students, who then seek to document their exploits on Instagram and Snapchat. In Sept 2011, it was students from HEC Montreal donning blackface to imitate Usain Bolt. In Sept 2013, it was Frosh Chants at Saint Mary's University in Halifax, and at the Sauder School of Business at UBC, seeming to advocate the rape of underaged girls. In 2014 it was Engineering Orientation songbooks that surfaced at Concordia University and McMaster. The pattern seems predictable now: outrage, recriminations, apologies, resignations, sensitivity training, counselling for upset students, and a fact-finding investigation. In July 2014, a young entrepreneur started promoting Ottawa Frosh Week Kits with hyper-sexualized videos encouraging "bad decisions with good friends" and excessive consumption of drugs and alcohol. But we did find at least one O-Week social media winner: Wageningen University in the Netherlands, which staged a student event with 1,000 smartphones to capture the entire campus for a "Student Street View".

Subscribers to Ken Steele's free email newsletter, the Eduvation Loop, got access to the complete episode 9 of Ten with Ken more than a week early. For exclusive preview access to future episodes, be sure to subscribe to Eduvation's "in the loop" email newsletter, at http://www.eduvation.ca/subscribe/

In this week's 7-minute podcast, Ken Steele summarizes a variety of low-tech and high-tech ways in which universities attempt to bring a virtual campus to the largest PSE trade show in North America, the Ontario Universities' Fair.

At #OUF2015, many universities use large campus photography or ever-larger video displays, capped off with Trent University's "jumbotron" screen. For several years now, Laurentian University has recreated their campus in miniature in their "5D presentation room." This year, Wilfrid Laurier University added a large touchscreen "virtual map" of campus to their exhibit, and UOIT partnered with Oculus Rift to deliver a virtual reality campus tour for the first time. Although virtual maps and VR helmets do give a good sense of the physical buildings on campus, they still need to bring to life the faculty and students who inhabit the campus. St Francis Xavier University had a good idea when they brought a live video wall to the OUF a few years ago, allowing prospective students and parents to interact with faculty and students in real time on the StFX campus.

Subscribers to Ken Steele's free email newsletter, the Eduvation Loop, got access to the complete episode 9 of Ten with Ken more than a week early. For exclusive preview access to future episodes, be sure to subscribe to Eduvation's "in the loop" email newsletter, at http://www.eduvation.ca/subscribe/

Ken Steele and the Eduvation team present some recent highlights of the Youtube channels of Canadian colleges and universities. This episode we look at some of our favourite back-to-school videos from September 2015, from a safety video for an extinction-level event, to a pyromaniac’s delight, to a puppy outfitted with a GoPro…

This 4-minute episode includes excerpts from newscasts Humber Today (Humber College), This Week at UBC (UBC), The Caper Buzz (Cape Breton University), The DiscoverUNB Show (UNB), and MoCast (Mohawk College).

We also take a look at back-to-school safety videos, including the University of Calgary’s Emergency App, and Dorm Room Burns at the University of Saskatchewan and Georgian College.

Last but not least, a truly unique campus tour video from Great Plains College in Saskatchewan, shot from a Dog’s Eye View.Subscribers to Ken Steele’s free email newsletter, the Eduvation Loop, got access to the complete episode 9 of Ten with Ken more than a week early. For exclusive preview access to future episodes, be sure to subscribe to Eduvation’s “in the loop” email newsletter, at http://www.eduvation.ca/subscribe/

In this special extended 15-minute episode, Canada's most trusted higher ed monitor and futurist, Ken Steele, returns to North America's largest PSE exhibition, the Ontario Universities' Fair. Attracting about 120,000 prospective students and parents each year, the OUF is the second-largest annual event held at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre.

Ken spent two full days onsite, capturing the university exhibits, contests, and viewbooks, and interviewing front-line recruiters, deans, presidents and others about the latest trends and news.

In this episode, we review how the OUF has evolved in its 19-year history, how exhibits and staffing have changed, how the audience has expanded, and how the questions posed by prospective students have shifted toward a focus on experiential learning, mental health supports, and career prospects. We'll also hear why the OUF seems so important to university presidents and staff.

The episode ends with a sneak peek at the other 12 hours of footage, which will be featured in upcoming episodes of Ten with Ken. (And, as usual, stay tuned for a couple of bloopers after the closing credits.)

For exclusive preview access to future episodes of "Ten with Ken", be sure to subscribe to Eduvation's "in the loop" email newsletter, at http://www.eduvation.ca/subscribe/

On The Radar: In September 2015, the world's highest-trafficked pornography website, PornHub, announced it was launching a charitable foundation, PornHub Cares, with a $25,000 college scholarship. Eligible students have to submit a 5-minute video explaining how they seek to make others happy. Also this fall, hookup app Tinder released its ranking of American university campuses based on their ratio of "right swipes" - the hottest males seem to attend private Christian colleges and military academies, while the hottest females were at campuses in the deep south.

Social media winners and sinners: Ken shares a few examples of the best and worst in higher ed social media from his keynote at the 2015 PSEWEB conference. Sinners range from Nobel-prize-winning biochemist Tim Hunt and his ill-advised joke about "girls" in the lab (and his botched apology), to Rick Coupland's violently homophobic Facebook post. In response, though, some winners appeared, like the #DistractinglySexy viral campaign, or the NoHomophobes.com campaign at the University of Alberta.

The Big Picture: Like it or not, libraries are moving paper books into underground storage vaults and textbook publishers are rushing to embrace access codes that defeat the most common student efficiencies (photocopying, piracy, sharing, buying used, borrowing from the library, etc). What's promising are the institutions bundling textbooks into student fees, often providing free iPads in the bargain, like the Northern Ontario School of Medicine, College Boreal, Olds College, and more. Some studies have found that 77% of students don't even buy mandatory textbooks - so small wonder that Algonquin College is finding substantial improvements in student learning and success when etexts are provided to 100% of students. Since the government of California committed to creating free, peer-reviewed open-source online versions of the textbooks for the 50 top college courses in 2012, the governments of British Columbia and Manitoba have followed suit. We're likely to see a lot more provinces jump on the bandwagon to score political points on the cheap.

Stay tuned after the credits for a few bloopers, as well!

For exclusive preview access to future episodes of "Ten with Ken", be sure to subscribe to Eduvation's "in the loop" email newsletter, at http://www.eduvation.ca/subscribe/

Canada's most trusted higher ed monitor and futurist, Ken Steele, finally explains the metaphor of Brand Chemistry™ for higher education marketing. He summarizes evidence that students are more sleep deprived than ever, connects the issue to mental health, and outlines some solutions campuses have tried to implement. And, he explores the plight of adjunct and contingent faculty, who can earn more writing essays for cheating students than they make grading those papers for universities.

Canada's most trusted higher ed monitor and futurist, Ken Steele, reviews some new developments from Coursera and EdX, the evolution of visual identities for Canadian religious colleges and affiliates, and some apocalyptic projections for the future of the labour market.

Canada's most trusted higher ed monitor and futurist, Ken Steele, reviews a few examples of recent developments affecting gender equity on campus, continues his survey of college rebrandings with a look at those given new university status, and explains LinkedIn's new plans for world domination.