Doors Close, Windows Open: A British Columbia Case Study on Widening Access
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This essay addresses ways of widening access to university degree-completion programmes for mature, mid-career people. Our focus is on the Integrated Studies Program (ISP) at Simon Fraser University, Canada. The ISP, leading to a Bachelor of General Studies degree, is designed for students who would otherwise feel unwelcome in a mainstream university environment, or who would simply not be able to complete a course of study in a reasonable time-frame, given their responsibilities in the workplace and at home. This innovative programme relies on implicit prior learning and recognition (PLAR) credits and a compressed teaching framework that allows students to maintain full-time employment as well as a cohort-based approach that fosters co-operation among students and reduces student attrition. The leadership focus of the ISP means that students will be involved in courses from the humanities and social sciences and that they will be able to apply new concepts, methods, and approaches in their workplace and community. We present findings from a case study of access patterns undertaken through the SFU Centre for Integrated and Credit Studies. Special attention is paid to the cohort-based Integrated Studies Programs in Liberal and Business Studies (LBS) and in Justice & Public Safety Leadership (JPSL). We trace a pattern of declining representation of older students with full-time employment and family responsibilities and discuss how the ISP may contribute to greater diversity and social inclusiveness at this University. We also caution that despite provincial and national interest in lifelong learning, access to post-secondary programs may be hindered for many other interested applicants who face rising tuition fees, uncertain access to courses, and inflexible and possibly irrelevant course content.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.015 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.039 | 0.011 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.010 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 0.001 |
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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".