Part 2: How Social Media Support and Expand Teaching and Learning
All post-secondary faculty and students use educational technology– whether for classroom-based, blended or fully online learning and teaching.
This three-part series, Three Pillars of Educational Technology: Learning Management Systems,
Social Media, and Personal Learning Environments, explores the learning management system (LMS), social media, and personal learning environments – and how they might best be used for enhanced teaching and learning.
This research report represents the first phase of a multi-year collaborative research initiative of the Association of Colleges of Applied Arts and Technology of Ontario.1 The initiative is designed to develop a cohesive picture of the pathways from secondary school to college. The major purpose of this phase of the research was to identify secondary school students’
perceptions of Ontario colleges and of college as a possible post-secondary educational destination for them, and to determine the factors that have shaped these perceptions. A second purpose was to identify secondary school student achievement patterns, graduation rates and course enrolments in order to consider their influence on current and future college enrolments.
Constant communication, trust and transparency, frequent feedback and offering recognition – these are all things that research consistently suggests managers should focus on in order to improve employee engagement. But you’ve read this before, and we don’t want to tell you what you already know.
One of my doctoral students just got a tenure-track assistant professorship. That’s excellent for her, but a decade ago, it wouldn’t have rated mention in a newspaper column. Of course, that was before the amount of tenure-track openings dropped like a barometer during hurricane season. Today, getting a tenure-track position feels more like a "Man Bites Dog" event.
During that same period, undergraduate enrollment at American colleges and universities continued to rise — as it has for decades. Clearly more and more students need to be taught, so where have all the teaching jobs gone?They’ve gone to the same people who have been doing a lot of our undergraduate teaching all along: contingent faculty members, meaning graduate students and adjuncts. That’s not exactly news to anyone who has been watching the faculty labor market — or to the graduate students doing so much of the work. In the humanities, we’ve seen nontenure-track jobs (NTTs) multiply year after year. As David Laurence of the Modern Language Association has shown in PowerPoint talks he’s given on the subject, the proportion of faculty jobs that are tenured and tenure-track has been dropping steadily over the past two generations.
Nearly every college and university in America has refocused its attention on “student success.” Like many institutions, Cleveland State University, where I work, has erected an entire enterprise devoted to this endeavor. We have reorganized ourselves administratively, invested in new staff, updated technology and taken a deep dive into institutional data to ensure we are best positioned to make sure all our students have a high potential to graduate.We have improved as a result.
Universities are intensely human places and are not immune from the worst impulses of human nature; and while violent incidents on university campuses may belie the ideal of the quad as a place of calm reflection and civil discussion, such incidents take place.
The Ministry’s consultation paper speaks to the risk of violence in the education sector, the sector in which the 15,000 professors and academic librarians we represent work.
Total student debt in Canada has risen by 6.2 per cent a year over the last 10 years to $42.9 new study by research company Strategic Insight.
A lot of that debt, the report says, can be blamed on parents who have spent so much money they don't have enough to save for their children's college or university fund.
Debt may actually be an intergenerational problem, says Strategic Insight's senior managing director, Carlos Cardone.
"There is almost like a spillover effect," said Cardone.
"Families are dealing with more debt, and as a consequence of that, they may not have the capacity to save all the money they would like to save for things like education."
Recently University Affairs published an interview with Kevin Haggerty and Aaron Doyle, two Canadian professors who have written a book of advice for graduate students. The book’s gimmick, if you want to call it that, is that it’s presented as a guide to failing—an anti-guide, perhaps?
—as evidenced by the title, 57 Ways to Screw up in Grad School: Perverse Professional Lessons for Graduate Students. According to Haggerty and Doyle, “students often make a series of predictable missteps that they could easily avoid if they only knew the informal rules and expectations of graduate school.” If only! And this book, we’re told, is designed to help solve that problem.
International learning experiences are invaluable for students. Those who undertake education outside their country of residence develop leadership, self-reliance, language skills, intercultural understanding, sensitivity to local and global issues, and specialist skills when they participate in work placements and field schools. Employers also say that international experience gained through education makes a positive contribution to the workplace.1
Both students and educators have long recognized the value of learning abroad. Despite this, and the fact that almost all Canadian colleges and universities offer education-abroad opportunities (including semester exchanges, short-term study abroad, field school, and service learning), relatively few post-secondary students actually participate. Only 3.1 per cent of full-time university students2 and 1.1 per cent of full-time college students3in Canadian have gone abroad for part of their studies. Compared to some OECD countries, these figures are slim. In Germany, for example, fully 25 per cent of students in bachelors and masters programs have participated in a study abroad experience, and the country hopes to raise this number to 50 per cent by 2020.4
For the second consecutive year, the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) at the University of Toronto has been ranked the 11 best educational institution in the world by the Times Higher Education (THE) World University Rankings.
OISE also placed highest out of all institutions in Canada, and was one of only two Canadian universities within the top 15 spots. The University of British Columbia placed 13, followed by McGill at 35.
A degree or diploma doesn’t necessarily keep hunger at bay. More than one quarter of people who use the Ottawa Food Bank have post-secondary education, such as a university degree, college diploma or trade accreditation, says a new report released by the food bank.
“For the first time, we have data that really tells the local story,” said Michael Maidment, the organization’s executive director, on Wednesday. The new data, collected through a system implemented in 2015, shows that 41,540 people use the Ottawa Food Bank each month.
In the Fall of 2011, the Toronto School of Theology (TST) within the University of Toronto (UofT) underwent a rigorous quality assurance review of its academic programs by its theological accrediting agency in North America, the Association of Theological Schools (ATS). In all, twenty-one scholars from university-related or free-standing accredited theological institutions with an intimate knowledge of North American theological education—in teams of three, one for each of the six member-institutions of the Toronto School of Theology, and one for the TST consortium itself—strongly affirmed the quality of the programs, including the Doctor of Theology (ThD) research degree program.
The implications of these experimental findings for education in the U.S. and around the world are immense. Teachers contemplating the use of reward incentives must avoid them in situations where creativity is at stake. This article explores whether the motivational and performance processes triggered by the promise of a reward are a universal phenomenon or whether they are, at least in part, culturally dependent.
Many international comparisons of education over the past 50 years have included some measure of students’ opportunity to learn (OTL) in their schooling. Results have typically confirmed the common sense notion that a student’s exposure in school to the assessed concepts, operationalized in some sort of time metric, is related to what the student has learned as measured by the assessment. What has not been demonstrated is a connection between the specifics of what students have encountered through schooling and their performance on any sort of applied knowledge assessment such as PISA. This paper explores this issue in 2012 PISA which, for the first time, included several OTL items on the student survey. OTL demonstrated a significant relationship with student performance on both the main paper-and-pencil literacy assessment as well as the optional computer-based assessment at all three levels – country, school and student. In every country at least one if not all three of the constructed OTL indices – exposure to word problems, formal mathematics topics, and applied mathematics problems – demonstrated a significant relationship to the overall PISA measure of mathematics literacy as well as the four sub areas of change and relationships, shapes and space, quantity, and uncertainty and data. Additionally, results indicated that variability in OTL was related to student performance having implications for equality of opportunity.
Quebec's francophone universities are sites of widespread sexual violence where many are victimized repeatedly, according to results of an online survey released today.
The violence ranged from verbal sexual harassment to sexual assault.
A research team based at the Université du Québec à Montréal surveyed 9,284 people who work or study at six of the province's French-speaking universities.
NEW YORK -- Administrators sometimes disagree with faculty members about the value of online education, and nthusiastic instructors sometimes clash with skeptics. But what can colleges do when their students are the ones esisting change?
he question emerged here last week as the Teagle Foundation, which supports liberal arts education, brought ogether grant recipients to provide updates on nine projects involving blended learning -- face-to-face courses with ome online content. The collaborative projects, many of which won’t conclude until 2017 and 2018, have attracted articipation from more than 110 faculty members and staffers and 115 students at about 40 colleges and universities in 16 states.
The Community College Baccalaureate Some references related to presentation - Michael Skolnik
When Bernie trailed Behind me to my office after class looking crestfallen and slumped into the chair to study with some intensity the laces on his sneakers, i realized that a battle of epic proportion was being waged. after some moments of silence, he blurted out that he was dropping out of school, that he just didn’t feel connected to the students in my class or to students in any other of his classes for that matter. he felt much more comfort- able with the construction crew he worked with every summer. maybe, after all, this was his true calling—being in the open air with scuffed work boots and dirt under his fingernails. maybe this was where he really should be. maybe college just wasn’t for him.
Last year, Yukon College announced that, by 2021, it would become Yukon University. The territory’s minister of education, Doug Graham, had approved the institution’s name change in November, but the transition has been in the works for several years, according to Yukon College president Karen Barnes. Also in November, Sheridan College, based in Brampton, Ontario, hosted a town hall meeting to outline its progress in becoming Sheridan University – a journey that started in 2011 when Sheridan’s board of directors approved the institution’s plan. Sheridan College president Jeff Zabudsky expects the process to be completed in 2020.
Here’s a reality many business leaders confront at some point: corporate cultures can eat innovation strategies for breakfast.
The inertia and siloing that can settle into any workplace can be antithetical to the boldness and flexibility required to drive innovation. So, what realistically can be accomplished?
Large organizations typically try to be more innovative by setting up initiatives outside the “mothership,” with mixed results. (Many large teaching hospitals, for example, have adopted this approach). By spurring innovation outside the organization, companies might be able to create incremental change and innovation, but they could have difficulty leveraging these wins in the larger company culture. General Mills, Nestle and Pepsi recently went through experiments with outside incubators, with mixed results. Despite the uncertain evidence, we’re at a tipping point
where if you’re not linked to an incubator, your business is seen as falling behind.