Volume 4, Issue 1, 1998/1999
Table of Contents

A Vision of Seamless Education - Academic Mobility in Ontario
By Sonia Del Missier
Vice President, Academic, Cambrian College
Member, ACCC Transferability and Mobility Task Group

For all intents and purposes, Ontario colleges and universities have historically worked in isolation of each other. College graduates wishing to continue their studies at a university level have encountered barriers and strong resistance when attempting to acquire fair and appropriate recognition for their college credits. Any transfer of credit would occur on a very informal, individual student basis. Although the education sector, government, business and industry have all witnessed the problem and embraced the vision of a seamless educational system in Ontario, the path towards realizing this concept has not been without its "pot holes" or detours.

Ontario has been slower than any other province in promoting the transferability of credit as a real issue. However, transferability and mobility have taken on significantly greater importance among college educators over the past decade with numerous studies and consultations conducted in this area. For example, the Colleges of Applied Arts and Technology Vision 2000 (1990), the Ministry of Education and Training’s No Dead Ends as well as college advice to the Advisory Panel on Postsecondary Education (1996), have all urged the provincial government to develop a post-secondary education vision that provides the knowledgeable and skilled work force necessary to advance Ontario’s competitiveness in the global economy.

As such, some progress has been achieved. It is fair to say that most, if not all, colleges in Ontario have some sort of collaborative arrangement, of varying degrees of formality, with Ontario universities. Most operate on an individual college-university basis at the local level. Program articulation agreements, sharing of facilities and joint programming are the preferred types of collaboration.

For example, Nipissing University and Canadore College (North Bay, Ontario) have created a new joint degree - the first of its kind in Canada. The new four-year Business of Applied Technology degree reflects the responsiveness of the two institutions to provide graduates with the skill sets necessary to seek employment in a rapidly changing workplace. Students of the blended degree will study two years of information technology at Canadore followed by two years of science and environmental science courses at Nipissing University.

Further to the south, another success story is unfolding. The provincial Ministry of Education and Training recently announced a decision to provide Trent and York universities with over $5 million in operational funding to provide university programming at Durham College. This investment, to be committed over a four year period, is meant to serve as a concrete example of how Ontario’s colleges and universities can work closely and successfully together.

Back up to Sudbury (in northern Ontario), Cambrian College and Laurentian University signed a five-year Partnership Agreement in 1992. During that time period, a number of program-specific articulation agreements were signed. When renewing the agreement in 1997, the two institutions jointly launched a major promotional campaign marketing the advantages of both a college AND a university education. The two institutions are currently finalizing plans to offer an inter-institutional degree program: Bachelor of Fine Arts.

Still other collaborative initiatives are a lot more concrete and visual, literally. For example, Seneca College, in North York, is currently building an entire campus on the grounds of York University. The hope is that Seneca and York will not only be sharing facilities - gyms, bookstores, cafeterias, - but also sharing the cost of expensive technology. York University has also teamed up with Sheridan College (Oakville) to offer a new joint program in design. Students will be taught the theory and history of design while they gain practical applications through coop work. After four years, students will graduate with both college and university accreditation!

In an effort to accelerate these collaborative moves, the Ministry of Education and Training announced the establishment of the College-University Consortium Council (CUCC) in 1996. Mandated to "facilitate, promote and coordinate joint education and training ventures by Ontario’s 25 colleges and 18 universities", the CUCC has funded a number of advanced training projects in an effort to further collaborative partnerships between Colleges and universities in Ontario; sponsored a symposium in February 1998 to provide a progress report on such collaborative projects; and, prepared key research studies highlighting the status of student movement in the province.

In spite of these success stories and the concerted efforts to move forward in terms of systemizing collaboration, many barriers still persist. There is still an overall unwillingness on the part of universities to collaborate with the college sector on a system wide basis. Despite the top priority ranking given to the issues of mobility and transferability, there are many in the education sector who believe that, without government intervention, the vision of a seamless path for education will be just that - a vision.