Learning gain is not a big topic of research in Canada, as it seems to be in the UK and the US. Canadians are, by nature, suspicious of standardized testing, and have taken a more holistic approach to educational outcomes up to now. However, with pressures from government, employers, and parents, learning outcomes are being gradually adopted across the sector. The Province of Ontario, in particular, has embarked on a learning outcomes programme that asks for outcomes to be provided for all university-level courses. Naturally, the late-to-the-game nature of this approach is that Canadians have not thought particularly long and hard as to what this looks like or how things are to be measured. Many institutions have university-wide attainments and benchmarks they would like to see in all graduates, but these are often very broadly defined and in no meaningful way measured. Experiential learning has now come to the forefront of thinking in HE in Canada, and many provinces are trying to make themselves ‘hubs’ of such learning with the idea that they will gain more students from this approach. Time will tell, but students, parents, and employers are all clamouring for more hands-on experiential learning in institutions across the country. At the same time, universities are struggling to comply and to come up with meaningful metrics by which to measure learning gain in experiential activities. No nationwide standard currently exists, nor are we even close to this at this stage
However, the largest movement in Higher Education (HE) right now is the indigenization of colleges and universities across the country in the wake of the report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission regarding Canada’s residential schools. Thousands of indigenous students were taken from their home cultures and put into residential schools, the last of which closed only in the 1990s. The resultant cultural loss to indigenous people has been enormous, and in response Canadian institutions are racing to decolonize and indigenize their curriculums and institutions. This is challenging for learning gain because traditional indigenous ways of knowing, called ‘Indigenous Knowledge Systems’ are drastically different from the traditional learning styles and methodologies of the Western world. We are not looking just to insert indigenous content into individual courses, but wholly rethinking the university as a learning institution in light of these largely forgotten ways of knowing. In addition, indigenous learners learn in very different ways and methods (through self-reflection, storytelling, etc.) which are drastically different from the ways in which we teach, learn, and assess learning in ‘Settler’ culture. Therefore, the largest issue in Canadian HE right now is how we will start to bring together indigenous perspectives, knowledges, and ways of knowing and then how we will assess learning, by indigenous students but also by non-indigenous students, of this new learning content and style.