An Exploratory Case Study into Program Coordinators’ Leadership Practices in an Ontario Public College: A Grounded Theory Study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Academic program coordinators (APCs) play a significant role in the public colleges in Ontario. Their role includes interrelated dimensions with many challenges and complexities that have not been studied sufficiently in earlier higher education research. This thesis investigated their situation at Centennial College to understand how they experienced and practiced their complex role. Using a grounded theory method and interviewing APCs, Student Advisors (SAs), Program Advisory Committee (PAC) members and Associate Deans (ADs), the study explored that while the Collective Agreement (CA) positions APCs in terms of the academic leadership of their programs, their leadership was subtle and in question. The findings showed that they worked in a loose context for their duties and responsibilities, impacting their workload and compensation. While they took on this combined role of teaching and coordinating, their employment status impacted their role. They faced many decision nodes through an ongoing learning and developmental process, from when they started thinking of the role to when they quit. The role of ADs influenced APC’s role and was crucial to their success and decisions related to continuing in the position. The study found that a group of APCs who were the founders of programs viewed as successful could create dream teams of faculty and were likely to continue in the role for extended time periods.
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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 | 0.009 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.016 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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 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".