The Ontario government has launched an online database providing centralized course-to-course information for post-secondary students looking to transfer credits.
The ONTransfer.ca website was announced in mid-January and the Ministry of Training, Colleges and Universities is in the early stages of developing the initiative’s functionality and offerings. Similar online transfer guides have been launched in previous years in British Columbia and Alberta.
“What we’re trying to put in place is a system-wide process that ultimately will involve all, hopefully, post-secondary institutions in Ontario,” said Brad Duguid, Minister of Training, Colleges and Universities.
The new website will serve as an interactive guide, building on a static course-mapping initiative by the Ontario Council on Articulation and Transfer. ONCAT was established in 2011 among all 44 public post-secondary institutions in Ontario.
At this point, the University of Toronto, McMaster University, the University of Ottawa and Western University have not signed onto the ONTransfer initiative. Algonquin College, Cambrian College, Confederation College and St. Lawrence College are also not yet committed.
According to McMaster University’s provost, David Wilkinson, McMaster applied to join the database but a glitch along the way led to the university being excluded when the initiative was announced.
“We’re actually very interested in the credit transfer process. The best we can understand is there was a paperwork mix-up somewhere and the courses we accept for credit are not loaded on the database, so we’re in the process of fixing that,” Wilkinson said.
Siobhan Nelson, the University of Toronto’s vice-provost (academic), said the university will be “watching how the mobility and student success rolls out” before participating in the initiative.
“We want to see the concept tested before we go into it fully,” Nelson said. The University of Toronto is part of another credit transfer consortium established in 2011 among seven research-intensive universities in Ontario known as the ‘G7’.
“We looked at our records of where students are transferring into our programs and what courses they are taking credit for. That actually accounts for most of the credit transfer requests the U of T gets,” Nelson said. “Our key issue is we want to make sure we facilitate student success and credit transfer in equal measure.”
A separate consortium for engineering transfers is in the works, again linking the universities in the G7. The consortium would provide transfer pathways primarily among first- and second-year engineering courses.
The ONTransfer initiative, part of a $73.7 million investment by the Ontario government over five years, will unfold alongside the government’s push for greater differentiation among post-secondary institutions. As universities and colleges develop further in niche areas, they will also be expected to find commonalities in course offerings and provide more opportunities for student mobility. How that process will unfold remains to be seen.
“It’s a question that we [at McMaster] ask ourselves and we also engage the ministry on, because the ministry is pushing universities to be differentiated one from another in a number of ways,” Wilkinson said. “So the more we become differentiated, the more difficult it is to imagine a credit transfer system that treats courses that look similar at different universities as being ‘equivalent’ in both content and quality.”
One major challenge in determining course equivalencies is tracking what happens when courses at different universities change year to year.
“When you think about this over time, maintaining the currency of that database is an issue. I think for that reason this will develop perhaps more slowly than you might otherwise imagine, because we do need to make sure that when we accept an equivalence of a course it’s actually the same course that we evaluated,” Wilkinson said.
The ministry estimates that about 21,500 post-secondary students transfer between Ontario post-secondary institutions annually, and that transfer pathways have doubled to 600 over the past two years. By 2015, the ministry intends to “implement a well-established, province-wide credit transfer system” that would “expand and improve” post-secondary transfer pathways.
By Jodie Scoular
McMaster is part of an agreement between seven Ontario universities to launch a new credit transfer initiative. McMaster students taking first-year classes will now be able to take arts and science courses from participating universities in their hometowns that will contribute towards a bachelor’s degree.
The new credit transfer consortium will come together to create one master list of 20 first-year courses that will make transferring a simpler process.
Previously, it was difficult to tell if other schools would accept credits from other institutions without being subjected to a long, drawn-out affair. Now, some universities are looking to create a database of widely accepted courses that students can take to get rid of the guessing game.
Sevan Taghelian, a third-year social science student at Mac, commutes to school each day all the way from St. Catharines. She says that an initiative like this has the potential to help students in her type of situation, and that distance prevents her from taking summer courses at Mac.
“It would cut down commuting time, which is less stressful because that’s less of my time and money wasted on travel,” she said. “Distance is one of the reasons I hold back from summer school because it’s too far and not worth the commute for one class a day.”
At this point, the initiative will only benefit people taking first year courses; the rationale being that these courses cover general subjects that are not specific to one institution.
Ryan Kinnon, executive director of the Ontario Undergraduate Student Association, and the MSU’s Huzaifa Saeed pointed out that the new system will not benefit students who don’t live in the vicinity of Ontario’s ‘leading’ universities.
“Northern and rural students will not benefit from this because all these universities are central. So you can’t really say that we are improving mobility for them,” said Saeed.
Peter Smith, McMaster’s associate vice president (academic), says that eventually the university hopes to include upper-year classes and expand into programs other than arts and science.
Upper-year classes will take more work to convert into universally accepted credits because each institution has their own tailored curriculum.
Ultimately, the new credit transfer system provides a boost to McMaster’s “letter of permission” program, which already has many of the benefits the new system offers. The letter of permission allows all students to take courses from other universities, perhaps in their hometowns, including online classes. A consultation with an academic advisor is necessary to find out which credits are transferrable.
A more streamlined credit transfer plan may benefit summer students and those taking courses through correspondence.
Currently, McMaster does not offer online courses or courses in “distance format” of any kind for undergraduate degrees, so this type of credit-transfer program could be beneficial for students who wish to take online courses offered at other universities.
School officials say that meetings to determine the finer points of the plan for this program have just begun, and specific details will be released once all participating institutions confirm them.
The other six universities involved in the consortium are Queen’s University, University of Guelph, University of Ottawa, University of Toronto, University of Waterloo and Western University.
