Professor
Michael L. Skolnik
William G. Davis Chair in Community College Leadership
My current research interests focus on three areas;
This includes the relationship between community colleges and universities on matters pertaining to baccalaureate degrees (like transfer and collaborative programs) and initiatives by community colleges themselves to enhance the opportunities for their students to attain baccalaureate degrees (like applied degrees). My interest in the relationship between community colleges and universities dates back to the late 1960s when I did a study of the effect of the first graduating classes of engineering technologists from Ontario's community colleges on the employment of university engineering graduates. In January, 1999, I prepared a discussion paper on enhancing opportunities for community college students to attain degrees for the College-University Consortium Council of Ontario. This paper is entitled, CAATs, Universities, and Degrees: Towards Some Options for Enhancing the Connection between CAATs and Degrees. At that time, I also served as the facilitator for an historic meeting between officials of the university and community college sectors in which produced the Port Hope Accord for transfer. I have also done several studies which looked at these issues specifically within Nursing Education. Presently I doing further research in this area with the aid of a general research grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
The phrase, 21st Century Higher Education, has been used to connote a number of pressures toward change in higher education which in my view have in common that they may provide much greater flexibility and freedom for learners, and may result in significant changes in the structure of higher education systems. The most dramatic of these pressures for change may be that coming from developments in instructional technology, especially learning over the Internet. But change is coming from many other sources as well: the changes in the workplace which have made lifelong learning a necessity; the growth and impact of corporate colleges; increased privatization and for-profit higher education; the growth of learning networks and collaborative ventures within the education sector (for example, between community colleges and universities) and between postsecondary institutions and organizations that didn't used to be involved in education; and of course, globalization. But, possibly the greatest source of pressure of all is from new ideas about learners and learning, as embodied in learning-centered education and the learning college. Within this broad - and not well defined - area of interest I have been interested particularly in virtualization and the impact of technology and how systems of postsecondary education can be restructured to serve learners more effectively (including being a seamless web of learning and credentializing opportunity). Some of my thinking pertaining to these issues is reflected in: my article, "Higher Education in the 21st Century", Futures, Vol. 30, No. 7, 1998, 635-650; and my chapter, "The Virtual University and the Professoriate". in Sohail Inayatullah and Jennifer Gidley (eds.). The University in Transformation: Global Perspectives on the Future of the University. Westport, Conn.: Begin & Garvey, 2000, 92-115.
Since the wonderful 1995 article in Change by Robert Barr and John Tagg entitled, "From Teaching to Learning - A New Paradigm for Undergraduate Education", and stimulated by the extensive work of Terry O'Banion in such works as A Learning College for the 21st Century. (Phoenix: The American Council on Education and the Oryx Press, 1997), there has been an enormous expansion of interest in the idea of the learning college. I have recently gotten interested in the learning college, and I serve on the North American Advisory Committee for the Vanguard Learning College Project of the League for Innovation in the Community College. In fact, the University of Toronto and the University of Texas at Austin are the two centres for research related this project, and I am hoping to work with Roy Giroux of Humber College and the Senior Academic Officers of the Ontario CAATs to monitor learning college initiatives in the colleges. In May, 2000, I spoke on the relationship between institutional culture and an institution's transformation into a learning college at a League. In the Jackson Lecture which I had the honour of being asked to deliver in May, 2000, I tried to integrate the learning college into a discussion of major issues in higher education - "In praise of polarities in post secondary education".