Disciplinary experts have a responsibility to engage in nuanced thinking about teaching and learning.
Recently, i had a conversation with a colleague that stopped me dead in my tracks. I was in the middle of extolling the virtues of SoTL (the scholarship of teaching and learning) as a research field that is multidisciplinary, accessible and increasingly relevant as we shape what higher education looks like in the 21st century.
Feeling the wonderful effects of a mid-afternoon caffeine rush, I was exclaiming that SoTL has wide appeal for many members of our learning community and provides: 1) support to inform teaching practices; 2) fresh solutions andnew ideas, such as how to jump-start a sluggish class or reach the latest generation of students or harness a new technology; 3) opportunities for cross-fertilization between research and teaching; and 4) the option to develop a secondary research field without costly infrastructure.
This report provides a systems perspective on the state of skills and higher education in Canada and identifies areas where the sector could improve in producing highly skilled graduates. I
The increases in tuition and fee prices in 2015-16 were, like the increases in the two preceding years, relatively small by historical standards. However, the very low rate of general inflation makes this year’s increases in college prices larger in real terms than those of 2014-15 and 2013-14. Significantly, and perhaps counter to public impressions, price increases are not accelerating over time. However, the average published tuition and fee price of a full-time year at a public four-year institution is 40% higher, after adjusting for inflation, in 2015-16 than it was in 2005-06.The average published price is 29%
higher in the public two-year sector and 26% higher in the private nonprofit four-year sector than a decade ago.
This report examines skill trends in 24 OECD countries over the past several decades. The skill measures used include broad occupation groups, country-specific direct measures of skill requirements from international surveys, and direct skill measures from the Occupational Information Network (O*NET) database applied to both United States and European labour force surveys. Each kind of data has its own strengths and limitations but they tell a consistent story.
Within the span of 20 years, tuition as a source of operating revenue grew from 18 percent in 1988 to 37 percent in 2008.1 The most recent financial reports show tuition alone made up 45 percent of universities’ operating budgets in 2014—51 percent
when fees are included— compared to the provincial government’s 43 percent contribution. 2 As tuition continues to increase the affordability, accessibility, and accountability of a university education is put at risk. Our Tuition policy sets out students’ priorities for addressing their short and long term concerns with regards to the tuition framework and tuition payment processes.
TORONTO — Two Ontario colleges have opened campuses in Saudi Arabia that don’t accept female
students in their classes.
Niagara College offers tourism, hospitality and business courses at its campus in Taif, while Algonquin
College offers 10 programs, including business, accounting and electrical engineering technician, at a
campus in the city of Jazan.
The next new development is the dawning of the post-LMS era where both open and closed learning components and experiences will be crafted into courses to meet current and emergent student, teacher and learning needs.
The wide variety of "web 2.0" services, and especially those focused on disciplinary topics, will continue to expand. These will include open resources, web and networking sites, commercial products and institutional resources. It won't make sense for an institution to try to contain all these resources and networking opportunities within their own walled garden. Opening will allow
both students and teachers the opportunity, and the challenge, of developing their net presence and literacies.
Background/Context: This exploratory feasibility study assesses a mindfulness program in a fifth-grade classroom. The research discussed herein was built on a previous study targeted at a specific population of children within the classroom and assessed the benefits of teach-ing mindfulness meditation to 7- and 8-year-old children who met criteria for generalized anxiety disorder.
Purpose/Focus of Study: The primary aim of this exploratory study was to investigate the feasibility of a mindfulness training workbook written for young children. The mindfulness workbook uses a fictional character in a storybook format. The goal was to help children understand and access their own mindfulness within the classroom setting without instruc-tion by teachers and without using meditation techniques.
More of this year’s freshman class expects to participate in at least one protest while they’re in college than at any other time in the last 50 years. The portion of all students who claim to be these prospective protesters? 10%. Among black students, the proportion rises to 16%.
Interest in the problem of method biases has a long history in the behavioral sciences. Despite this, a comprehensive summary of the potential sources of method biases and how to control for them does not exist. Therefore, the purpose of this article is to examine the extent to which method biases influence behavioral research results, identify potential sources of method biases, discuss the cognitive processes through which method biases influence responses to measures, evaluate the many different procedural and statistical techniques that can be used to control method biases, and provide recommendations for how to select appropriate procedural and statistical remedies for different types of research settings.
This report describes a study exploring the impact of academic community-based learning (CBL), course community-service learning (CSL) and other in-course learning activities (ICLA) on student learning. Informed by Kolb’s (1984) experiential learning cycle, the study used a survey instrument, adapted from several existing survey instruments, examining students’ self-reporting in a number of areas such as:
Student engagement
Depth of learning
Perceptions of course environment including teaching quality and course workload
Educational outcomes
The purpose of this commentary is to consider the role of contemplative practices in the teacher preparation curriculum. Contemplative practices help reduce stress, improve a sense of well-being, and increase coping abilities for professional demands. They can be particularly useful in managing stress in transition situations. We suggest
that students preparing to teach be provided specific training on how to use contemplative practices for sustaining positive personal and professional development.
Most universities still offer Learning Management Systems (LMS) as the ‘one size fits all’ technology solution for all teachers across all disciplines. Using LMS across diverse campuses has resulted in efficiencies-of-scale for administrators, however LMS integration into teacher practices is minimal (e.g., Conole & Fill, 2005) and teachers’ creative space can be limited for discipline-based innovation. Together, these realities indicate that there are significant barriers to the effective use of LMSs, especially for teaching and learning purposes.
To overcome such barriers, the complex and less visible internal space of teacher beliefs must be understood in relation to teachers’ pedagogical contexts and the affordances they can identify. This paper reports on the findings of six qualitative case studies of teachers at different stages of LMS integration and the extent to which teachers reconciled their beliefs. The results highlight the need for technology environments that better accommodate teacher diversity.
Keywords: teacher beliefs, teacher diversity, affordances, LMS, university teacher education
Top motivations to study or train abroad remain the same as in recent years: the opportunity to live abroad and meet new
people, improve foreign language proficiency, develop transversal skills. Just after comes the wish to enhance employability abroad for more than 85% of students.
On average, Erasmus students have better employability skills after a stay abroad than 70% of all students. Based on their personality traits, they have a better predisposition for employability even before going abroad. By the time they return they have increased their advantage by 42% on average. While 81% of Erasmus students perceive an improvement in their transversal skills when they come back, 52% show higher memo© factors. In all cases, they consider the improvement of skills to be greater than they expected before going abroad.
Teacher empowerment requires investing in teachers' right to participate in the determination of school goals and policies and the right to exercise professional judgment about the content of the curriculum and means of instruction. Implications of this conception and the kind of school leadership it requires are discussed. (Source:ERIC)
Two central questions should arise for anyone who attends to the rhetoric of empowerment that is being used in current discussions of improvement of teaching as a profession: (1) What is teacher empowerment? and (2) Toward what ends are teachers to be empowered? Discussions of teacher empowerment have proceeded as if all of those who use the term were in agreement, when even a cursory review of what has been written on the subject reveals that this is clearly not the case. In the literal sense, to ize or license. It is also to impart or bestow power to an end or for a purpose. An obsolete definition ng back into the history of the word, is to gain power or assume power over.1
ize or license. It is al ng back into the history of the word, is to gain power or assume power over.
The role of copyright within the Canadian education system was once an issue of interest to a relatively small number of scholars, librarians, authors, and publishers. With limited means to copy and distribute educational materials, the primary battle was over payments for photocopies of works that were distributed...
Want to make Gen Y good financial stewards? Let them learn from
each other—and be prepared to give up control.
Before they set foot on campus, most had already undergone a significant process of researching university choices, course options and the potential for employment after graduation.
They are already anticipating the benefits – skills gained, a good job and a rewarding career. They are on the right track. Evidence shows high employment and strong incomes for university graduates. The investment pays off. The myth of the underemployed graduate is just that – a myth. Jobs for the university- educated in any discipline are growing across
Canada. In Alberta, for instance, 56 percent of net new jobs since 2008 have been for university graduates. That’s almost double the result for college grads and triple the result for tradespeople.
In 2009, a 50-year-old worker could expect to continue working for an average of 16 more years, which means retiring at the age of 66. In the late 1990s, expected working life at age 50 was 13 years. Workers have therefore increasingly been delaying their retirement. These findings from a previous study are analyzed at greater length in this article, as are the unexpected personal and economic factors that push some workers to retire early. When such ‘involuntary’ retirements are taken into account, are workers still more likely to retire later than in the late 1990s?
The purpose of this study was to document the implementation of an intergenerational literacy program that incorporated authentic literacy activity with the goal of raising low-English literacy levels of the parent and the English emergent literacy levels of their non-English speaking young children.