Non-Formal Adult Learning Programs at Canadian Post-Secondary Institutions: Trends, Issues, and Practices
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
A number of recent policy reports have suggested that Canadian universities and community colleges should play a more significant role in response to the adult education and training needs of Canada’s workforce. This article discusses the results of a study that examined investment trends and the characteristics of non-formal adult learner programming at Canadian postsecondary institutions. Public universities and community colleges were surveyed, and a purposive sample of key informants, representing the broad spectrum of postsecondary education in Canada, was interviewed. The results indicated that institutional investments in non-formal programs for adult learners have trended upward over the past decade. Colleges reported larger average annual institutional expenditures on and larger enrolments in non-formal adult learner programs. However, adult learners comprise only a small minority of the overall student population at post-secondary institutions. Financial barriers at both the institutional and individual levels were identified as key barriers to increasing access and participation. Limited operational funding at the institutional level has influenced the nature and scope of offerings and, for many institutions, has resulted in program offerings that do not necessarily target the needs of nontraditional and disadvantaged adult learner groups. The study findings have important public-policy implications for improving access and participation in non-formal adult learning, including the need for greater incentives for individuals (e.g., tax incentives) and increased support for disadvantaged learners to enhance basic-skills training.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it