Having the highest levels of skills in problem solving using ICT (information and communication technologies) increases chances of participating in the labour force by six percentage points compared with adults who have the lowest levels of these skills, even after accounting for various other factors, such as age, gender, level of education, literacy and numeracy proficiency, and use
of e-mail at home.
How many hours should professors work each week? Everyone has a different answer, especially professors.
Case in point: When Nicholas A. Christakis, a professor at Yale University, asserted on Twitter that graduate students should work more than 60 hours each week, a debate ensued. Professors pointed to studies that suggested not everyone can devote more than 40 hours each week to their jobs — for example, if they have kids — or that the institutions and departments they work for may have different standards of work, research, and competitiveness.
As we move forward into a new millennium and the landscape of higher education continues to change rapidly, there is a growing interest in using technology to improve the student learning experience. With the developing awareness of the science behind learning, an increasing number of higher education faculty and course instructors are looking for means to use their time with students more effectively, and see technology as a potential part of the solution.
The inverted (or flipped) classroom is a teaching approach in which students are introduced to the fundamental ideas of a course through pre-class activities that often involve the viewing of a short video. This enables the in-class time to be used for learning activities that go beyond traditional lecturing. In many ways, this is akin to the practice of requiring readings before
class and using class time for debate and discussion that is common in many humanities and social science courses and seminars. In some sense, the inverted classroom approach is an adaptation of this long-standing instructional method to courses, in such fields as engineering and science, for which readings before class are not typically required or completed. This approach has great potential to create a more student-centred environment that is more conducive to effective
learning. It can be used to support a number of fundamental principles of the science of learning that have been well established over the past 100 years. It enables students to engage in more active learning experiences, process the new material in meaningful ways and incorporate these new ideas into their own existing knowledge framework. It allows for enhanced student-faculty interactions and opportunities for prompt formative feedback throughout the learning process. As
well, it supports the instructor to scaffold the material appropriately, as there is a greater awareness of how much the students understand prior to and during the in-class experiences. Despite the strong theoretical reasons for use of the inverted classroom approach and growing interest in the approach, empirical studies that systematically investigate the effects of the approach on students’ behaviours, perceptions and learning outcomes are not often seen. Therefore, more empirical evidence is needed to support effective implementation of the approach.
We live in a world filled with physical, emotional, psychological, and spiritual violence. This violence has, unfortunately, toxic consequences for us. It is definitely not a question of what doesn’t kill you makes you strong; it is a question of what doesn’t kill you leaves you scarred. This short article, directed at parents and teachers, highlights the emotional and psychological violence children experience at school. As the article suggests, this violence is ubiquitous and damaging.
What does it mean to be a great teacher? Of course credentials, knowledge, critical thinking, and all other faculties of intelligence are important. However, a great teacher should be much more than credentials, experience and intelligence
“First and last class sessions are the bookends that hold a course together.” I heard or read that somewhere—apologies to the source I can’t acknowledge. It’s a nice way to think about first and last class sessions. In general, teachers probably do better with the first class. There’s the excitement that comes with a new beginning. A colleague said it this way: “Nothing bad has happened yet.” Most of us work hard to make good first impressions. But by the time the last class rolls around, everyone
is tired, everything is due, and the course sputters to an end amid an array of last-minute details. Here are a few ideas that might help us finish the semester with the same energy and focus we mustered for the first class.
The history of rankings stretches back to the late 19th century, but it is the intensification of globalisation that has been the most powerful force and explanation for their emergence and success since the turn of the millennium.
Today, as the distribution of economic activity and scientific collaboration has become increasingly international, higher education has been transformed from a local institution into a global actor. It sits at the fulcrum of the geopolitical struggle for a greater share of the global market and the new world-order, facilitating increasing concentrations of wealth and resources and greater hierarchical differentiation and social stratification
Institutions across the country have been considering carefully scripted general-education courses in lieu of
traditional distribution requirements (see “No Math Required,” “Rethinking Gen Ed” and “Gen Ed Redesigns”). Some
months ago, the American Council of Trustees and Alumni issued a report pointing out the efficiencies that would be
realized by sequenced general-education courses with prescribed curricula, little student choice and lots of
requirements.
The same organization also issued a letter deploring the fact that most college students could not identify James
Madison as the father of the U.S. Constitution (most chose Thomas Jefferson) and that 40 percent did not know that
Congress has the power to declare war. Their solution: a course on civic literacy required of every college student.
Across academe, the conversation about career diversity for Ph.D.s has cracked wide open up in just a few years.
That’s equivalent to the blink of an eye in academic (read: glacial) time. The proposition that graduate programs
should prepare students for the actual jobs that they’ll get — not just for professorships — no longer receives the
fierce pushback that it did even five years ago. We’ve gone from "Why should we?" to "How should we?" in a
remarkably short time.
The question has two sides: how to prepare students for diverse career paths and how to prepare employers. Most
of the attention up to now has gone to the former — debating and adopting reforms to train graduate students (and
their teachers) for what amounts to a new reality. We’ve got to change graduate school so that doctoral education
can support students who pursue a range of careers. That’s a big job, and it’s still under way.
“Write an initial post and then reply to two of your classmates.” These are the standard requirements for students participating in online course discussions. Discussions in an online course play a vital role in creating substantive interactions, aiming to capture the spirit of discourse in face-to-face settings. This, however, can look and feel like busy work, making the purpose of online discussions unclear to students.
The standard blueprint is safe but has been exhausted. “Initial posts” can be counterintuitive—in essence, they require students to complete small writing assignments individually before giving other students feedback on their work (Liberman, 2019). How can we think outside of the box of posting and replying when it comes to these discussions? One way is to use online discussions as an opportunity to promote student autonomy and ask students to be active participants not only in how they respond to class discussions, but how they initiate them. Here are five considerations for promoting student autonomy while also
breaking the online discussion mold:
An emerging priority in medical education is the need to facilitate learners’ acquisition of quality improvement (QI) competencies.
Accreditation bodies in both Canada and the United States have included QI and patient safety in their core competencies.
When I teach workshops about designing the flipped classroom, I always encourage faculty to think carefully about the first five minutes of class. In my lesson plan template, one of the first tasks we discuss when planning in-class time is to prepare what I call a “focusing activity.” A focusing activity is designed to immediately focus students’ attention as soon as they walk in (or log in) to the classroom. When used in conjunction with flipped and active learning classroom models, focusing activities allow you to minimize distractions, maintain momentum between pre-class and in-class activities, and maximize the amount of class time you have to engage students in learning.
For me, as for many others at Cardiff University, the recent news coverage of Malcolm Anderson’s suicide has been a real blow. I did not know the accounting lecturer personally. The thing that was so shocking about reading the articles was just how familiar many of the details felt. I have heard numerous stories from colleagues who feel like they are barely holding on. People are struggling with unmanageable workloads and feel as though they are constantly failing.
The longer I teach (I’m now in my 32nd year) the more I’m convinced that the best thing we can do for our students is help them learn to think for themselves.
That involves explaining what critical thinking actually means — a step I fear we often skip — as well as equipping them with the requisite skills. That’s why I recommend talking to students on the first day of class about critical thinking. What is it? Why is it important? How can they learn to do it?
What follows is an example of my opening-day remarks. For graduate students and Ph.D.s new to teaching, if this talk resonates with you, feel free to adapt it for your own classrooms.
In Educational Leadership for a More Sustainable World, author Mike Bottery uses Rittel and Webber’s (1973) framework of tame and wicked problems across the book’s three sections. This situates and contextualizes current complex and seemingly intractable issues in education by connecting them to equally wicked issues in economics and the environment. Each of the three sections is comprised of three to four chapters.
Conventional scholarship within the sociology of education and organizations posits that schools achieve legitimacy by virtue of conforming to normative standards, abiding by government regulations and mimicking the forms of successful peers. Through this study, an examination of a sample of 751 Canadian for-profit colleges (FPCs) is performed, revealing the presence of
an alternative logic. Rather than conformity, organizations within this sector engage in niche-seeking behaviour, using promotional materials to carve out unconventional identities. They do so by directly drawing on symbolic resources
and affiliations from the industrial sectors which they service. These findings are interpreted through the prism of contemporary theorizing within organizational sociology.
With PhD in hand, I joined the academy without any real teaching training. As I sought to establish my teaching routine and define my teaching philosophy, I found an author who provided useful guidance: James M. Lang in his first book Life on the Tenure Track:
Lessons from the First Year (Lang 2005). Lang captured my attention immediately with his suggestion that one day per semester you should cancel classes spontaneously to recharge yourself. Beyond this provocative statement, Lang’s practical tone was appealing, and he challenged me to think creatively about how to get the most out of my students. Lang has gone on to author several more books on teaching and learning (Lang 2008, Lang 2016) and a series of highly useful shorter blog posts, many of which are cited in this article. My aim is to build on Lang’s approach by collecting in one place a number of teaching tips. These are practically oriented suggestions in the spirit of Faculty Focus’s interest in publishing pieces on “how it works.” Many of these suggestions are applicable to online learning.
Instruction of team skills is quickly emerging as an important and missing dimension of engineering education. This project evaluated a new framework for guiding students in providing self- and peer assessments of their effectiveness in teamwork. This framework is the foundation for a new web-based tool that offers students structured feedback from teammates, along with personalized exercises and actionable strategies that guide targeted learning in the areas thereby identified. Specifically, the study documented in this report investigated whether the feedback framework, when used for intra-team self and peer feedback, increased students’ abilities to learn about and improve their team-effectiveness in executing design projects.
Some thoughts about change—not so much what to change, as the process of change, offered in light of its slow
occurrence.
Yes, lecture is a good example. In a recent survey, 275 econ faculty who teach principles courses reported they lectured 70 percent of the class time, led discussion 20 percent of the time, and had students doing activities for 10 percent of the time. The article cites studies in that field from the mid-’90s reporting similar percentages. Maybe some other fields have changed more, but evidence supports a continuing reliance on lecture in many fields.
However, lecture isn’t the only example of where we’re slow to change. Many aspects of teaching—course design, approaches to testing, assignments, and grading—have also changed little. Granted, some faculty do change, a lot and regularly, but not the majority. The question is, “Why?” Here are some possibilities I’ve been considering.
This fifth annual report on national college completion rates offers a look at the six-year outcomes for students who began postsecondary education in fall 2010, toward the end of the Great Recession. It looks at the various pathways students took toward degree completion, as well as the completion rates through May 2016 for the different student types who followed each pathway.