Humanities and Learning Outcomes in Ontario Higher Education
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
Governments in western liberal economies, such as Ontario, are shifting to outcomes-based systems that ‘tune’ higher education curriculum to stakeholder interests. Globally, governments are using learning outcomes for quality assurance, to modernize curriculum for societal interests, and to apply government and market influence upon the curriculum. This thesis applies new institutionalism and the capability approach to examine how humanities leaders in Ontario higher education perceive and react to the new administrative layer of learning outcomes. According to institutional theory, responses may include superficial strategies for compliance, non-compliance, or the layering of new policies among existing traditions. The research asks, “How do Ontario university leaders in the humanities perceive and implement the shift to learning outcomes?” The study aims to understand to what extent an outcomes-based system aligns with the curricular priorities of the humanities in higher education. Narratives of 19 university humanities leaders were analyzed through qualitative interviews within 10 Ontario universities. The data was reviewed using thematic analysis, inductive and deductive analysis, and compared within the context of the outcomes-based education literature. The overarching narrative of participants indicated that learning outcomes were both an innovative opportunity for pedagogical reflection and a new burdensome administrative layer. The process of tuning the humanities curriculum with administrative pursuits, targeted government funding, and specified career outcomes was not widely accepted by the participants in the study. The approach of passive compliance with learning outcomes became more evident when asking about the consistency, and verifiability of outcomes achieved. Participants shared political challenges and chronological alignments with program restructuring, displaced curriculum, and in some cases program cancellations. Participants said that students were generally unfamiliar with learning outcomes. When discussing opportunities of learning outcomes, participants said that they were an effective discussion tool to envision curricular strategies for enrolment management, experiential learning, interdisciplinary programs, and large elective courses. The study adds to the literature by providing an in-depth view of the agency of department heads to manage the curriculum in the humanities, an understanding of the implementation of Ontario’s learning outcomes policy, and the political positioning of the humanities in Ontario’s higher education system. Key Words: Learning Outcomes, Ontario, Higher Education, New Institutionalism, New Public Management, Neoliberalism, Humanities, Capability Approach, High Participation System.
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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.013 | 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