Doors Close, Windows Open: A British Columbia Case Study on Widening Access
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
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.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| 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