There is increasing interest in the use of learning outcomes in postsecondary education, and deliberations have surfaced with regard to their potential to serve as a tool for advancing credit transfer. Learning Outcomes, Academic Credit, and Student Mobility assesses the conceptual foundations, assumptions, and implications of using learning outcomes for the purposes of postsecondary credit transfer and student mobility. Through a critical review of current approaches to the use of learning outcomes across national and international jurisdictions, scholars and practitioners in postsecondary education provide a multivalent examination of their potential impacts in the unique context of Ontario and recommend future directions for the system. The collected works are the culmination of a multi-year study entitled Learning Outcomes for Transfer, funded by the Ontario Council on Articulation and Transfer. Contributions are authored by prominent international scholars across countries with significant outcomes-based experience and education reforms (South Africa, the United States, Australia, Europe, and the United Kingdom) and an Ontario research consortium comprising college and university experts working to advance student pathways.

There is increasing interest in the use of learning outcomes in postsecondary education, and deliberations have surfaced with regard to their potential to serve as a tool for advancing credit transfer. Learning Outcomes, Academic Credit and Student Mobility assesses the conceptual foundations, assumptions, and implications of using learning outcomes for the purposes of postsecondary credit transfer and student mobility. Through a critical review of current approaches to the use of learning outcomes across national and international jurisdictions, scholars and practitioners in postsecondary education provide a multivalent examination of their potential impacts in the unique context of Ontario and recommend future directions for the system. The collected works are the culmination of a multi-year study entitled Learning Outcomes for Transfer, funded by the Ontario Council on Articulation and Transfer. Contributions are authored by prominent international scholars across countries with significant outcomes-based experience and education reforms (South Africa, the United States, Australia, Europe, and the United Kingdom) and an Ontario research consortium comprising college and university experts working to advance student pathways.

Understanding Student Mobility in Europe interprets student mobility in European higher education through an active dialogue between disciplines, voices and variables of interest. Providing the conceptual, methodological, pedagogical and empirical foundations of an interdisciplinary approach, this book advances readers’ understanding of the student exchange experience, whilst outlining guidelines and resources for approaching student mobility and considering how students can gain from cross-border education. Intersecting voices from different disciplines and sojourners, including exchange students, international students and highly skilled immigrants, the book outlines practical guidelines for intercultural curriculum development and assessment, and provides insights, practical ideas, useful terminology and resources to maximise the learning gains of this student population. Split into three distinct parts, the book initially lays the foundational substructure in which an interdisciplinary approach is based. It then addresses questions of practical application by considering the experiences of 50 sojourners in Portugal and the UK through an interdisciplinary lens, and summarises the implications of interdisciplinarity with regards to student mobility in European tertiary-level education. This book is essential reading for academics and postgraduate students interested in student mobility, education abroad practitioners, and policy-makers at institutional, national and international levels.

Student mobility or academic mobility involves students moving between institutions during their post-secondary education, and one of the challenging tasks in this process is to assess the transfer credits to be offered to the incoming student. In general, this process involves domain experts comparing the learning outcomes (LOs) of the courses, and based on their similarity deciding on offering transfer credits to the incoming students. This manual im- plementation of the task is not only labor-intensive but also influenced by undue bias and administrative complexity. This research work focuses on identifying an algorithm that ex- ploits the advancements in the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP) to effectively automate this process. A survey tracing the evolution of semantic similarity helps under- stand the various methods available to calculate the semantic similarity between text data. The basic units of comparison namely, learning outcomes are made up of two components namely the descriptor part which provides the contents covered, and the action word which provides the competency achieved. Bloom's taxonomy provides six different levels of com- petency to which the action words fall into. Given the unique structure, domain specificity, and complexity of learning outcomes, a need for designing a tailor-made algorithm arises. The proposed algorithm uses a clustering-inspired methodology based on knowledge-based semantic similarity measures to assess the taxonomic similarity of learning outcomes and a transformer-based semantic similarity model to assess the semantic similarity of the learning outcomes. The cumulative similarity between the learning outcomes is further aggregated to form course to course similarity. Due to the lack of quality benchmark datasets, a new benchmark dataset is built by conducting a survey among domain experts with knowledge in both academia and computer science. The dataset contains 7 course-to-course similarity values annotated by 5 domain experts. Understanding the inherent need for flexibility in the decision-making process the aggregation part of the algorithm offers tunable parame- ters to accommodate different scenarios. Being one of the early research works in the field of automating articulation, this thesis establishes the imminent challenges that need to be addressed in the field namely, the significant decrease in performance by state-of-the-art se- mantic similarity models with an increase in complexity of sentences, lack of large datasets to train/fine-tune existing models, lack of quality in available learning outcomes, and reluc- tance to share learning outcomes publicly. While providing an efficient algorithm to assess the similarity between courses with existing resources, this research work steers future re- search attempts to apply NLP in the field of articulation in an ideal direction by highlighting the persisting research gaps.

The large scale publicly funded system of postsecondary education in Ontario developed in the 1960s has been largely successful in fulfilling important societal needs in the areas of education, human resource development, and research. Existing approaches, however, are unlikely to be sufficient to address the challenges of the coming decade. Academic Transformation: The Forces Reshaping Higher Education in Ontario examines the developments that are re-shaping the province's post-secondary system, including higher enrollment, further development of a knowledge-based economy, increased demands for research focused on competitiveness and productivity, and Ontario's transition to a multicultural, internationally connected, urban, and aged society. Universities and colleges are also adjusting to internal changes in the composition of the student body and staff, faculty work profiles, and funding arrangements. The authors consider possible changes in the system's structure, policy, and governance that may be helpful in dealing with the anticipated changes in societal needs, and expectations related to post-secondary education.

This edited volume brings together the perspectives of a diverse group of international scholars to explore the intersections of study abroad and social mobility. In doing so, it challenges universalist assumptions and power imbalances implicit in study abroad across the Global North and South, and explores the implications of COVID-19 for equity within study abroad programs, policy, and practice going forward. Offering empirical, theoretical, and conceptual contributions, Critical Perspectives on Equity and Social Mobility in Study Abroad foregrounds critical reflection on the stratification of access to study abroad and examines the varied outcomes of international study in relation to graduates’ entry into domestic and international labor markets. Focusing on the experiences and outcomes of students from varied backgrounds, chapters identify a number of power imbalances relating to student race, ethnicity, religion, local and international policies and politics, and put forward valuable recommendations to ensure greater equity within the field. Against the backdrop of growing criticism over the power imbalances in international exchange, this text will benefit researchers, academics, and educators with an interest in higher education, international and comparative education, and multicultural education. Those interested in educational policy and the sociology of education more broadly will also benefit from this book.