Journals @ Ontario Tech
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Connections/Communities Impact on Online Learning
No full textAbstract
Building a sense of community within online learning environments has taken on greater significance during the COVID-19 pandemic, where online learning has become essential given the suspension of in-person classes around the world. Theoretical concepts such as the Community of Inquiry theoretical framework (Garrison et al., 2000) and the Fully Online Learning Community Model (VanOostveen et al, 2016) offer a conceptual basis for understanding the importance of online communities. A method of measuring virtual communities is necessary to track both their development and identify curriculum and instructional practices that foster and maintain their success. Rovai’s Classroom Community Scale (2002) and other measurement tools were found to be critical for measuring student connectedness and learning, and how virtual communities can meet the educational needs of students. Furthermore, analyzing the implications of technology on user perception and sustainability of virtual communities is crucial. Widespread and equitable access to emerging technologies have enhanced multimodal forms of collaboration and interaction. Overall, online communities may prove to be beneficial to online learning, by eliminating the sense of isolation often felt in traditional distance learning classrooms and decreasing the attrition rate of online students as a result.
Keywords: community, online learning, technology, measurement, connection
In Her Own Words: The Impact of Poverty on Health Outcomes for Women in a Central Florida Community
No full textPrevious research suggests that race, gender, and income impact health care access and outcomes for women. Based on the theory of fundamental causes, feminization of poverty, and systematic racism theory, this qualitative study examines the intersections of poverty and health concerns from the perspective of women (n=20) residing in areas of economic disadvantage. This qualitative study explored how minority female residents (N= 20) from an urban neighborhood of concentrated poverty perceived barriers to acquiring a healthy lifestyle. Thematic analysis of focus group transcripts revealed three themes impacting health care access and outcomes for participants: 1) underserved in the medical community, 2) under-resourced in the local community, and 3) under-represented in district policy-decision making. Implications include changing health care policies on both the local and state levels to improve women’s health care in low-income areas to address the structural barriers impeding their ability to seek health care and healthy behaviors
Acquiring Digital Proficiency in Teacher Education
No full textIn this commentary, we look at digital technology use in teacher education and practice, theoretical foundations, definitions, and digital competence frameworks in an educational context. With rapid changes in the domain of technology classroom teaching, teachers need to learn and adapt quickly. We argue that a more comprehensive approach to understanding how student-teacher learning with technology is needed
Editorial
No full textThis editorial gives an overview of our new issue, which deals with community, connections and diversity in education
The Diversity Challenge in Higher Education
No full textThis commentary focuses on considering the work of Michalski et al in the context of Ontario Colleges
An Overview of Current After School - OST STEM Programs for Girls
No full textHistorically, there has been a gender gap within the STEM pipeline, resulting in the underrepresentation of women in STEM fields. Current efforts, both within and outside of educational institutions, have been developed to target girls’ specific needs with the aim of supporting girls\u27 interest and engagement in STEM. The following paper examines the social and cultural factors that perpetuate the gender gap in STEM. It also provides a review and critique of six existing Canadian Out of School Time (OST) STEM programs and the principles used in their development and implementation. Conclusions from this review suggest that OST programs, when developed using best practices, may play a crucial role in encouraging girls to pursue a STEM career. Four primary best practices include: social and collaborative learning, topics related to girls\u27 interests, development of STEM identity, and length of the program (for example, programs done over a longer period of time are generally more effective than programs completed over a shorter duration). Although the COVID-19 pandemic has caused some of these programs to migrate online, these four promising practices transcend face-to-face versus online boundaries. As a result, programs should continue to follow these pedagogical approaches to foster girls\u27 interests in STEM.
Keywords: gender inequality, out of school time programs, social learning, STEM education, STEM programmin
The Authors of the Current Issue
No full textThis file provides brief biographies of each of the contributors to the current issue
From Despair to Hope: A Narrative Journey to Becoming Amateur Intellectuals During COVID-19
No full textIn this narrative paper, we explore our coming-of-age as amateur intellectuals through our collaborative engagement with reflexivity during the COVID-19 pandemic. Situating our reflective acts within technology and our educational contexts we address and analyze feelings of persistent tug of war between despair and hope. Through collaborative autoethnography, we challenged our perceptions and investigated our views on educator identity as “teachers†to challenge perceptions of educator roles and responsibilities. We discuss how the COVID-19 pandemic response narrowed the role of the teacher, ultimately diminishing and destabilizing teacher identity while limiting their sense of agency. We draw on our collective experiences during the pandemic to draw a thread between the pandemic response’s effect on teaching and teacher identity, a conflicting awareness of both complicity and resistance, and our battles with the despair of necessity. By engaging in collaborative doubt and reflexivity, we discovered that we were consistently instilled with an astonishing sense of hope within our community
Covid-19 Risk and Obesity: A discourse analysis of Canadian media coverage
No full textWarnings about the increased risk of contracting and suffering severe COVID-19 among fat people has been in the spotlight of public discourse and media attention since the pandemic began. Added to this has been widespread anxiety about the risks of weight gain that were predicted to follow public health restrictions that compelled Canadians to work and learn from home. Critical scholars assert that obesity and the problematization of the fat body are discursively constructed through the deployment of biopedagogies--instructive lessons about what it means to eat and live right. By framing and deploying lessons in right living, biopedagogies exert social control over individual and collective bodies, including by making the fat body problematic. In this article, the authors present a discourse analysis of the ways that Canadian news media have reported on the connection between COVID-19 and obesity and draws on biopedagogies as a theoretical framework to elucidate how fat phobia is promulgated by such reporting. The authors call for guidelines to curb fat phobic language and the scientifically inaccurate, discursive constructions of bodies, body weight, and health in news media
When Competency is not Enough: The Case for Digital Agency : A commentary on Passey et al. (2018) "Digital agency...empowering equity in and through education"
No full textThis piece comments on an article that proposes a new term for describing people\u27s comfort and skill levels in working with technology: digital agency.