Professional Development 2017

OCMA Professional Development (PD) Session

Seneca College

7th Floor Boardroom

Room 770

Markham Campus

8 The Seneca Way,

Markham, ON L3R 5Y1

Thoughts on mathematics education from an international perspective

Jos Nolle, Dean, Seneca International

The world in this 21st century is rapidly changing. Population movements happen in higher frequency and in larger numbers than previous decades. For Canada the job market is expected to change drastically as well as for most developed and emerging economies around the world. Nobody can predict with certainty but it is likely that scientific knowledge and skills, mostly in an applied sense, will be expected from all future employees in corporations and organizations. Understanding statistics and being able to analyze (big) data and products/processes steered by artificial intelligence will be required from all higher education graduates. How will this affect the way math is being taught at primary, secondary and tertiary levels? Do the educators in Finland have it right or will the Asian countries with their consistent discipline on memorization come out as winners? Based on some story telling we can reflect together on these questions.

Video recording of session

Jos Nolle

Jos Nolle was born, raised and educated in The Netherlands where he graduated with a Bachelor Degree in Industrial Design Engineering and a Master Degree in the Management of Product Development Processes. After backpacking around the world for a year, he started his professional career at Fokker Aircraft in 1984, where most of his time was spent in Argentina, Brazil, Mexico and Spain. In 1988, he made a drastic career change and joined MSF (Doctors without Borders) to Mozambique as a non-medical country coordinator. In 1990, he was asked to set up MSF Canada and, in 1992, he became the first Director of Human Resources & Training for MSF Holland based in Amsterdam. In 1995, his career changed to the Ontario college system where he started out at Niagara College building their international activities from a small $0.5M/year to a $30M/year operation. In 2013, he was on loan to the Canadian government to start a capacity building program in Colombia for artisanal gold mining communities, and, in 2014, he started his position at Seneca College as the Dean, Seneca International, an operation bringing approx. $90 M annually to the institution.

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