After one too many students called me by my first name and sent me email that resembled a drunken late-night Facebook post, I took a very fogeyish step. I began attaching a page on etiquette to every syllabus: basic rules for how to address teachers and write polite, grammatically correct emails.
Over the past decade or two, college students have become far more casual in their interactions with faculty members. My colleagues around the country grumble about students’ sloppy emails and blithe informality.
Mark Tomforde, a math professor at the University of Houston who has been teaching for almost two decades, added etiquette guidelines to his website. “When students started calling me by my first name, I felt that was too far, and I’ve got to say something,” he told me. “There were also the emails written like text messages. Worse than the text abbreviations was the level of informality, with no address or signoff.”
One of the commitments emerging from the Canadian Education Association’s What’s Standing in the Way of Change in Education? workshop in Calgary in October 2013 was to convene a series of Regional Workshops designed to expand
the conversation about change in Canada’s education systems. To this end, in the Spring of 2014, similar workshops were held in New Brunswick, Manitoba, Ontario and British Columbia with a final session held in Quebec in August, 2014.
ABSTRACT
This working paper seeks to explore the reasons why educational attainment in the immigrant population varies between North America and Europe. Specifically, the examples of Canada and Switzerland are used as Canada has an immigrant population with a typically higher rate of post-secondary education than that of the domestic population, while in Switzerland the opposite is true. Analysis shows that while differences in immigration policy play a significant role, there are many other variables which affect educational attainment in immigrants, such as the education level of the parents, source region and home language.
RÉSUMÉ
Le présent document de travail tente d‟explorer les raisons pour lesquelles le niveau de formation de la population immigrée varie entre l‟Amérique du Nord et l‟Europe. Il s‟attache plus particulièrement aux exemples du Canada et de la Suisse, les diplômés de l‟enseignement post-secondaire étant typiquement plus nombreux dans la population immigrée que dans la population autochtone au Canada, tandis qu‟en Suisse, c‟est l‟inverse qui s‟observe. L‟analyse montre que si les différences en termes de politiques d‟immigration jouent un rôle important, il existe également de nombreuses autres variables qui influent sur le niveau de formation de la population immigrée, telles que le niveau de formation des parents, la région d‟origine et la langue parlée à la maison.
Many post-secondary institutions in Canada over the past decade have made the transition from college to university status. The researchers on this team were hired in the midst of such a transition at one western Canadian institu- tion. As new faculty we were navigating the normal tides of adjusting to a new faculty position, but our induction occurred in a shifting
institutional context. Our research question, “What is the new faculty experience in a transitional institution?” guided a five-year focused ethnography, beginning as a self- study of the research team and expanding into 60 interviews with 31 partici- pants over several years. The results demonstrate that a more complex theory is required to reflect the experience of new faculty than has appeared previ- ously in the literature. We propose a framework of competing discourses.
Redefine participation. Let it include more than verbal comments. Invite students to contribute electronically—with an email or post on the course website—with a question they didn’t ask in class, a comment they didn’t get to make, or a thought that came to them after class. Remind students that listening is also part of participation! Model and promote good listening skills. “Did you hear what Fredric just said? That’s an explanation that belongs in your notes.” Let the definition of participation honor silence—and give students the time needed to think about a question and assemble an answer. Maybe it’s time to stop grading participation and let students speak because they have something to say.
This is a "best practices" article focused on sharing six new academic scheduling strategies recently employed by the BYU Salt Lake Center to optimize course offerings and increase enrollments. These strategies are generalizable to other academic programs that help extend academic programs at a distance, including online courses. The Center is an extended campus in Salt Lake City, Utah situated 46 miles to the north of the main campus of Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah. The distance between the flagship university and its Center pose unique challenges in relation to course and enrollment optimization. Some of these strategies are made possible with the help of new software tools recently licensed by the university to help mine "big course and enrollment data" (current and historical) of a large university with 30,000 students.
Dengting Boyanton, author of Teachers and Students as Co-Learners: Toward a Mutual Value Theory, experienced “extreme culture shock” when she left her native Chinese educational system to begin graduate study in education at the
University of Virginia in 2003. Despite the fact that she had been an enthusiastic and successful learner in her home country, Boyanton often felt perplexed and disappointed regarding the behavior expected of her in U.S. classrooms. She was inhibited about speaking up in class, afraid to ask questions of her professors or classmates, and insecure about offering her opinions and comments.
Boyanton’s international student colleagues, with whom she shared her feelings, reported experiencing the same negative emotions. When Boyanton began questioning American-born students about their classroom experiences—with the goal of helping herself and other international students adjust to American classroom culture—she discovered to her surprise that American students also felt alienated, invisible, and lonely in their classes. For example, one Caucasian male student
told her, “Like most new students here, you feel lonely, nobody knows you, nobody talks to you, and nobody seems to care about you either” (p. xvii).
The Instructional Skills Workshop (ISW) is an internationally recognized, peer-based, educational development program involving 24 hours of structured intensive instruction designed to strengthen instructors’ skills in planning, teaching, feedback and critical reflection through a student-focussed process. For over 30 years, the ISW has been offered at more than 100 institutions worldwide as a method of facilitating the development of student-centred, reflective instructors (Day, 2004). Although based on best pedagogical principles for teaching adult learners (Day, 2005), little empirical research has been performed to assess the impact on faculty of participating in the ISW (Macpherson, 2011). Research performed to
date has typically shown that individuals who participate in this workshop report that it is transformative to their teaching in the classroom (Macpherson, 2011). The present study sought to extend these findings by conducting a pre-post analysis of ISW and non-ISW participants. The goal of this research was to investigate the influence of the ISW on developing a student-centred approach to teaching in university and college faculty.
The idea of “productivity” in higher education is becoming a concern for some policymakers and observers of Ontario’s universities. This interest is fuelled by the province’s challenging deficit situation, which has put a premium on “doing more
with less”. Productivity is featured in the Government of Ontario’s recent discussion paper, Strengthening Ontario’s Centres of Creativity, Innovation, and Knowledge, and was a prominent focus of the Ministry of Training, Colleges, and Universities
strategic mandate agreement process.
Love it or hate it, social media is no passing fad -- and increasingly it’s intertwined with more traditional academic platforms. Numerous scholars have popular blogs, for example, on which they test out new ideas and share research. Other academics have made names for themselves on Twitter or Facebook -- both to the benefit and detriment of their respective careers.
In 2011 Ontario joined the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s (OECD) Assessment of Higher Education Learning Outcomes (AHELO) feasibility study. The Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario (HEQCO) led the project on behalf of the Ministry of Training, Colleges and Universities (MTCU) and in cooperation with the Council of Ministers of Education, Canada (CMEC).
Initiated in 2006, AHELO was a feasibility study to determine if standard generic and discipline-specific tests could be used in different countries to measure what university students know and are able to do. Intending to contribute to the international conversation on establishing better indications of learning quality, the study aimed to develop common learning outcomes and assess student performance at the end of a bachelor’s degree (first cycle) in a variety of educational cultures, languages and institutions through standard tests. The feasibility study developed three assessments: one for generic skills and two for discipline-specific skills in economics and civil engineering.
Seventeen countries1 were represented in this global project and Canada was one of nine jurisdictions participating in the engineering strand. Nine out of ten Ontario universities with civil engineering programs participated in the study, representing approximately 61% of all Canadian civil engineering graduating students.
The following report reviews the experience of Ontario’s participation in the feasibility study, focusing primarily on the implementation and administration activities and the value to institutions. While the institutions did not gain specific insight into their programming, AHELO generated considerable interest in international assessments and comparative understanding and provided significant experience in the administration of large-scale assessments.
The purpose of this non-experimental, cross-sectional, descriptive research was to survey faculty and staff perceptions of mentorship in a postsecondary institution in order to determine gaps and strengths in the current mentorship
environment. The anecdotal activities we present reflect our educational practice environment through the work of our Mentorship Team. Data were collected utilizing Zachary’s Mentor Culture Audit tool. The culture building block measured 4.65 on a 7-point Likert scale, suggesting the presence of a weak mentorship culture. However, the infrastructure building block measured only 3.41, showing that organizational resources and supports are below average. We also present eight hallmark category results to further identify strengths and gaps. This is the first assessment of our mentoring culture at an organizational level. Other postsecondary institutions may benefit from formally assessing the gaps in and strengths of their mentorship culture toassist them with acquiring adequate resources to further develop and sustain their mentoring activities.
A DISCUSSION of educational leadership in these troublous times might concern itself with an attempt to review our social and economic ills, to show their relationship to education, and to propose the way out by means of economic and social reconstruction. I shall assume that all of you are familiar with current discussion concerning the maladjustments in our society. I shall take it
for granted, as well, that you are conversant with the opposed points of view of those who see the
need for complete reorganization of our economic life, our government, and indeed the whole social
order, and those who believe that progress lies in the more gradual evolution of our society. I
feel sure that you will agree with me that leaders in education and in all other walks of
life will need to cooperate in finding and putting into effect those changes which will contribute to the common good. I take it, as well, that you would agree that those of us who work in the field of education must depend for guidance on experts in economics, in government, in psychology, in sociology, and in anthropology if we are to have a sound basis in fact for our thinking with respect to social change.
To develop and conduct feasibility testing of an evidence-based and theory-informed model for facilitating performance feedback for physicians so as to enhance their acceptance and use of the feedback.
The University community has an interest in improving the happiness and well-being of graduate students for a straightforward reason: to enable graduate students to do their best work. Balanced, happy people are more productive, more creative, more collaborative, better at pursuing long-term goals, more likely to find employment, and more physically and psychologically resilient, among other things. Positive emotion is associated with curiosity, interest and synthetic thinking. In contrast, depression is associated with loss of interest, helplessness, difficulty concentrating and remembering details, and worse. For more on this, see Part VI, “The Objective Benefits of Subjective Well-Being,” from the World Happiness Report.
Education in general, but post-secondary education in particular, is supposed to provide individuals with the skills to participate as citizens in the civic and cultural life of the community. Additionally, education is supposed to equip individuals with a basic or in some cases, a specific armamentarium to provide for their economic well-being and that of the wider communit
I want to speak to you tonight about the cooperative movement in Canada and internationally, and its place in a balanced, pluralistic economy. In the aftermath of the financial crisis of 2008 and the continuing economic challenges we face, it’s more important than ever that all three legs of our economic stool are strong and balanced: the public sector, the corporate sector and the cooperative sector.
I also want to suggest ways we could strengthen the partnerships between the public and cooperative sectors for the benefit of Canadians.
The provincial government has established policies that obligate universities to produce skilled graduates and cutting-edge research that will contribute to Ontario’s economic development. This “strategy for prosperity” seems innocuous. However, these market-based higher education policies and targeted research funding programs are narrowing the scope and function of our universities, and perpetuating the business model of higher education.
A confluence of social, technical, economic, and other factors have created the demand for improvement and change in U.S. postsecondary education. Many of the drivers for change are quite prominent, and include access to postsecondary education, cost, and students’ success. At the same time, many innovations are taking place, including numerous new modes of delivery, access, and instruction.
However, education outcomes are influenced at the micro level, where incredible variation among advisors, teachers, students, and methods leads to a process which is systemically difficult to map in detail, and hence to understand and support. In this environment, it is crucial to understand faculty members, both as stakeholders, and as potential creators and drivers of innovation, and as the direct, front-line drivers of student success.
The 2012-13 Senate Academic Planning Task force was asked to explore "virtualization and online learning" at Queen's. In the early days, we became familiar with the history of the discussions and identified a number of controversies that had made it difficult to reach a consensus on the role of online learning at Queen's. As new and familiar themes emerged, we realized that the issue of online learning is far more complex than it had seemed, reaching into areas such as course quality, curriculum
planning, staffing, resource allocation, unit autonomy, and academic freedom. We hope that the report provided will address many of the issues about online learning that have been raised within the community. Recognizing that some of our recommendations will fall short of unanimous agreement from the community, we hope that the report will be received as balanced and progressive.