At least one university has explicitly restricted students’ use of editors for their assignments.
Over the last several years, staff members at the Centre for Academic Communication at the University of Victoria
reported to administrators some curious conversations taking place around editing. The centre offers free services
to students to assist them with reading comprehension and writing, but staff members are instructed not to correct
students’ work, only pose questions. Students, however, had different expectations and complained when centre
staff wouldn’t “fix up” their papers.
Professors, too, misunderstood the role of the centre; some sent students there because they wanted staff to
improve their students’ work. What’s more, the centre received calls from parents asking how much editing they
could do on their children’s papers without it being considered cheating.
We live in a world where economic, social and personal fulfillment depends less upon what we know, and more upon what we are able to learn, how we think and the degree to which we are able to respond to change around us. As centres of learning and discovery, universities play a crucial role in this process. Universities transform the lives of people, who in turn transform
our communities, our country and the world.
Before choosing a supervisor, get to know them—and get to know yourself.
Ask any of my family members and they will tell you that my middle name should be “indecisive.” I am in a constant battle with the “shoulds” and “shouldn’ts” of life. When choosing my undergraduate institution I couldn’t make a decision, so I did what any rational person would do: I rolled a fuzzy dice. Even numbers were one institution and odd numbers were the other. I rolled an even number and based on that one moment in time, the next four years of my life were decided (please note, I do not recommend this method for others).
Abstract
Some analysts foresee that the rise of automation—triggered by advances in artificial intelligence, robotics, and other novel technologies—will soon unsettle sizable sections of our labour market, prompting the need for mass upskilling and re-skilling. Continuous learning is perceived as the new norm within the future of work. Many believe that solutions to future surges in training demand will require a degree of dexterity not exhibited by traditional postsecondary education (PSE) organizations, and advocate for radical alternatives. However, we outline how basic reforms leading to a more robust articulation and credit transfer system could also improve our PSE system’s ability to handle augmented training demands. In turn, we explore how the Canadian federal government can facilitate these reforms by (a) providing additional incentives for domestic colleges and universities to engage in seamless transfer, and (b) supporting the production of knowledge to inform more strategic forms of pathway articulation.
Keywords: transfer credit, articulation, future of work, policy
Résumé
Des analystes prévoient que la hausse de l’automatisation, stimulée par les progrès de l’intelligence artificielle, de la robotique et d’autres technologies novatrices, va bientôt déstabiliser des segments importants du marché du travail, entraînant une vague de mises à niveau et de requalifications. L’apprentissage continu est considéré comme la nouvelle norme pour le marché du travail de l’avenir. Nombreux sont ceux qui croient que la future croissance de la demande en formation nécessitera un degré de dextérité jusqu’ici non démontré par les établissements d’enseignement postsecondaire traditionnels, et qui préconisent des solutions de rechange radicales. Néanmoins, nous suggérons que des réformes de base pour consolider le système d’articulation et de transfert de crédits pourraient également améliorer la capacité de notre système d’enseignement postsecondaire à prendre en charge des demandes de formation accrues. Ensuite, nous explorons comment le gouvernement fédéral canadien peut faciliter ces réformes i) en offrant des incitatifs supplémentaires aux collèges et universités du pays
pour qu’ils offrent des passerelles plus fluides; et ii) en soutenant le développement des connaissances pour trouver des options d’articulation des parcours qui soient plus stratégiques.
Mots-clés : transfert de crédits, articulation, avenir du travail, politique
I
As a PhD, you can think of research as one of your many useful skills, but it is not necessarily your primary identity.
One of the brow-furrowing moments for me when I read articles on doctoral education or participate in panels is when the idea that “PhDs are researchers” comes up. It’s common for commenters to refer to PhDs in this way.
This is often an intentional move, one that pushes the conversation forward from the limiting notion as PhD as protoprofessors.
In that way, it’s a welcome intervention. The idea is to help doctoral graduates see how their skills and experiences have broader relevance and value. In the U.K. and Europe, “early-career researcher” and “early-stage researcher,” respectively, are used to refer to individuals currently undergoing doctoral studies and/or within the first few years of obtaining the degree. If you think of a PhD as a “research degree” this of course makes perfect sense.
If thinking of yourself as a researcher frees up your imagination and helps you move toward a fulfilling career, then by all means embrace the term. But if it leaves you as cold as it does me, I’m giving you permission to jettison it.
College presidents’ partners and spouses aren’t all wives hosting receptions in the president’s house.
Many work jobs outside of their role as presidential partners. A growing number are men. And many say the expectations placed upon them by a college or university influence their spouse’s decision to work as the institution’s president.
A new study from University of Minnesota researchers examines the role of the presidential spouse or partner at a time when it is becoming increasingly complex and challenging. Researchers called the survey, which was released Monday after being presented at the Council of Independent Colleges’ Presidents Institute last week, the “largest and most diverse known sample of presidential partners to date.” The results of the study, which involved the leaders of public and private colleges, were earlier presented at a CIC meeting.
This week, Harvard Business School launched its first annual Leading People and Investing to Build Sustainable Communities program, which set out to equip professionals from First Nations and native-American communities with new ideas for managing their businesses and resources.
Over 60 Indigenous people from across Canada and the United States attended the four-day course, in which professors taught investment practices and governance strategies, and provided opportunities for participants to put their heads together to solve issues in their communities back home.
Canada needs to take an integrated and innovative approach to enhancing student mobility, according to participants at a workshop held December 2014 by Universities Canada. The workshop – held in Calgary and attracting university and private sector leaders – called for Canada to step up its efforts to get university students moving beyond their province and beyond our borders.
Purpose: The aim of this study is to explore if straight-line assimilation, segmented assimilation, and immigrant optimism
hypotheses explain the relationships between schools, justice, and immigration, as well as the potential role of gender, race,
and ethnicity in immigrant youth perceptions of justice, fairness, and order.
What annoys me about the teaching profession, more than anything else, is the constant grousing about students. A certain slice of the faculty seems to enjoy complaining about how bad their students are — especially, of course, today’s students, who are clearly worse than any other generation in history. I’ve been hearing the same gripe for my entire 33 years of college teaching.
This article explores the literature that focuses on the various roles librarians and libraries play in distance education settings. Learners visit libraries either in person or via networked computing technology to ask for help with their online courses. Questions range from how to upload a document with a learning management system, to how to use software and hardware, to more complex questions about how to locate and research articles for term papers. The literature reviewed provides a
glimpse into the historical roles, current roles, as well as possible new roles that libraries and librarians may play in the future. This article identifies various library services that are essential to distant learners and distance education settings, and will explain how librarians and libraries are providing these services online.
Mike simply does not understand parametric statistics. He uses an app to connect to Uber-U and a tutor is online
from Chicago, Illinois, in just three minutes from the moment Mike asks for help. The tutor is offering an hour at a time support. After three hours of this tutoring, Mike completes the online assessment, passes this component of his statistics course and earns 0.33 credits towards his statistics course at ABC University. ABC accepts this credit because the transactions involved –
tutoring, online assessment, grading – are all recorded in the very detailed transaction record, which Uber-U uses, and which is compatible with their learning platform system. Six weeks later, Mike is struggling with a chemistry problem and makes a call to Uber-U. Five minutes later, a tutor from Nicosia, Cyprus, connects via FaceTime and spends an hour and a half with Mike. He completes the rich simulation assessment online, passes, and secures 0.25 credits towards his chemistry course, which is again automatically accepted by ABC. He uses Uber-U for a total of 42 credits towards his 120 credit degree.
Background/context: Over the past 40 years, the composition of the professoriate has changed substantially across all institutional types. Once predominantly tenure track, now nontenure-track faculty (NTTF) constitute more than 70% of the faculty. While these major changes have occurred, we know little about key stakeholders views (accreditors, policy makers, presidents) of these changes.
Purpose: In this article, we explore the following research question: What are the beliefs systems (logics) related to the changing professoriate of the key entities within the higher education organizational field?
Abstract
In the context of the increasing focus on harms, psychological safety, and mental health in post-secondary settings, this qualitative study explores the challenges and opportunities for harm reduction through focus groups with student leaders, service providers, and administrators in one large Canadian university. Key themes explored by participants include a pervasive work hard, party culture, clashes regarding how to define and operationalize harm reduction, broad approaches to harm reduction in tension with the risk of becoming a band-aid solution, and knowledge transfer and privilege in an academic context. These findings suggest possible avenues for harm reduction that could be implemented as part of the new post-secondary standard,
as well as in society as a whole.
Keywords: harm reduction, mental health, post-secondary, Canada
“Any time a student learns, at least in part, at a supervised brick-and-mortar location away from home and, at least in part, through online delivery with some element of student control over time, place, path, and/or pace. The modalities along each student’s learning path within a course or subject are connected to provide an integrated learning experience.”
The most significant piece of the definition is the “element of student control” highlighting the flowing instructional models to enable improved student-centered learning, giving students greater than before control over the time, place, path, and/or the step of their learning tracks.
Rachelle Peters is exactly the kind of student colleges are hoping to attract more of.
She went back to school at 40, after years of boom then bust. Her career had been in art publishing in Vancouver, a niche business of finding artists whose artwork is then reproduced, say, 2,000 times. The company would frame and sell the prints with an eye to home decor trends. Think record company, but selling art reproductions instead of music.
Context: Generalization is a critical concept in all research designed to generate knowledge that applies to all elements of a unit (population) while studying only a subset of these elements (sample). Commonly applied criteria for generalizing focus on experimental design or representativeness of samples of the population of units. The criteria tend to neglect population diversity and targeted uses of knowledge generated from the generalization. Objectives: This article has two connected purposes: (a) to articulate the structure and discuss limitations of different forms of generalizations across the spectrum of quantitative and qualitative research and (b) to argue for considering population heterogeneity and future uses of knowledge claims when judging the appropriateness of generalizations. Research Design: In the first part of the paper, we present two forms of generalization that rely on statistical analysis of between-group variation: analytic and probabilistic generalization. We then describe a third form of generalization: essentialist generalization. Essentialist generalization moves from the particular to the general in small sample studies. We discuss limitations of each kind of generalization. In the second part of the paper, we propose two additional criteria when evaluating the validity of evidence based on generalizations from education research: population heterogeneity and future use of knowledge claims.
Higher education is increasingly looking to technology as a means of tackling persistent equity challenges and improving student outcomes. Yet technology in and of itself is not a solution -- unless people use technology to create new systems, behaviors and student experiences.
Research on role congruity theory and descriptive and prescriptive stereotypes has established that when men and women violate gender stereotypes by crossing spheres, with women pursuing career success and men contributing to domestic labor, they face back- lash and economic penalties. Less is known, however, about the types of individuals who are most likely to engage in these forms of discrimination and the types of situations in which this is most likely to occur. We propose that psychological research will benefit from supplementing existing research approaches with an individual differences model of sup- port for separate spheres for men and women. This model allows psychologists to examine individual differences in support for separate spheres as they interact with situational and contextual forces. The separate spheres ideology (SSI) has existed as a cultural idea for many years but has not been operationalized or modeled in social psychology. The Sepa- rate Spheres Model presents the SSI as a new psychological construct characterized by individual differences and a motivated system-justifying function, operationalizes the ideology with a new scale measure, and models the ideology as a predictor of some important gendered outcomes in society. As a first step toward developing the Separate Spheres Model, we develop a new
measure of individuals’ endorsement of the SSI and demonstrate its reliability, convergent validity, and incremental predictive validity. We provide support for the novel hypotheses that the SSI predicts attitudes regarding workplace flexibility accom- modations, income distribution within families between male and female partners, distribu- tion of labor between work and family spheres, and discriminatory workplace behaviors. Finally, we provide experimental support for the hypothesis that the SSI is a motivated, system-justifying ideology.
Among the most heartwarming experiences of my academic career has been serving on university committees. You don’t often hear a faculty member say that, but in this instance, the committees involved awards for teaching at the college and university level.
Determining the best instructors on a campus involves reading through numerous files. In doing so, one learns about the wonderful accomplishments of colleagues and the innovative things they are doing in their classrooms. Perhaps most compelling are the letters from students who describe the life-changing experiences that come from a particular teacher.