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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History of PSE sector in Ontario around general theme of challenges and responses

Multi-party, multi-year project on college-university pathways

Case studies of college-university programs Paper and major conference on “PSE in

Ontario: challenges and responses” The GTA enrolment challenge

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