Abstract
Canadian universities are in the midst of a lengthy period of financial uncertainty and public pressures to change, circumstances that add to the pressures on continuing education units and create opportunities for innovative change. The emergence of MOOCs, demands for research relevance, and concerns about the employability of graduates have forced campuses to consider new approaches, implement alternative financial models, find additional revenue, and search for efficiencies.In this environment, continuing education professionals have significant opportunities to provide to the campus-wide university, even after years of being marginalized on many campuses. Continuing education units work with external audiences and clients, have experimented with new revenue sources, have explored and evaluated distance delivery/ technology-based methods, and have become accustomed to living with constant change.While it will be difficult for continuing education units to attract campus-wide attention, particularly from traditional academic disciplines, there is a strong likelihood that universities as a whole will need the insights, strategies, approaches, pedagogy, and business models that have evolved in the outreach divisions in recent decades.
Highlights
The last twenty years have been challenging for professionals associated with continuing education divisions within Canadian universities
While results vary by region, estimates suggest that close to half of all university graduates face either unemployment or underemployment after they leave university, far removed from the promises made by governments and universities to the incoming students
With much of the institutional budget locked into long-term, tenure-stream faculty contacts, often in areas of declining student and employer demand, universities lack the ability to move resources and personnel in response to changing circumstances. (Community colleges, in contrast, value and capitalize on their flexibility in these same areas.) In sharp contrast to their locked-in relatives on campus, who struggle to innovate with precious little financial room, continuing education divisions can operate without long-term financial commitments to individual subject specialists
Summary
The last twenty years have been challenging for professionals associated with continuing education divisions within Canadian universities. For much of the history of the modern academy, continuing education units have had important roles. As a faculty member and administrator with a long-standing interest in distance and continuing education—I first started working on correspondence courses in the early 1980s— and as a historian fascinated by the history and contemporary changes in the post-secondary environment, I welcomed the opportunity to offer personal reflections on the changing role of continuing education in Canadian universities (Coates & Morrison, 2011; Cote & Allahar, 2007). “Course in a box” distance delivery systems provided university education to students in isolated sites around the country and over time were improved upon by digital technologies. Canadian Journal of University Continuing Education / Vol 39, No 1, spring 2013 Revue Canadienne de L’Éducation Permanente Universitaire / Vol 39, No 1, printemps 2013 http://ejournals.library.ualberta.ca/index.php/cjuce-rcepu
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