The past several decades have seen an interest in learning surge. It’s always been part of our educational endeavors, but the recent focus on it has been intense—that is, for teachers. Our interest is not shared by most of our students. They are still pretty much all about grades, preferably those acquired easily. They will work for points, but not very enthusiastically, if at all, without them.
It's been more than seven months since Justin Trudeau pledged to develop an Indigenous Languages Act, and a Sudbury professor is hoping that the government eventually develops a preservation plan with "teeth."
Mary Anne Corbiere of the University of Sudbury said that some languages are on the brink of being lost.
"If they are not preserved, they will die when the last speaker dies," Corbiere told CBC's Morning North. "Some languages in Canada now just have fewer than 10 speakers who grew up with the language. Most of those speakers are elderly."
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.
Colleges and universities generally try to make information about mental health services accessible to students. But at Northwestern University, students may start seeing such information in a surprising place: syllabi.
Wanting the campus to be “accessible and welcoming to all students,” Northwestern’s Faculty Senate last week passed a resolution encouraging “all faculty to include language in their syllabi similar to the following: ‘If you find yourself struggling with your mental or physical health this quarter, please feel free to approach me. I try to be flexible and accommodating.’” The statement ends with phone numbers for health and student services.
Picture it — a group of young people hurriedly making their way to Parliament Hill to meet with MPs
and senators.
Maybe it sounds unlikely, but it happened earlier this month, when student lobbyists had nearly 200
meetings with decision-makers to argue their case for accessible post-secondary education.
The Trudeau government says it’s focused on the promise of innovation and human potential.
Universities are a key part of the conversation — but would the Canadian Federation of Students’
idea of free tuition make Canada more
innovative?
To my memory, I have never been physically afraid of a student.
The maddest I’ve ever seen a student was one calling me a “life ruining motherfucker,” when I told the student that passing the course was mathematically impossible.
TORONTO — Ontario's minister of post-secondary education says he's concerned that two publiclyfunded Ontario colleges have opened campuses in Saudi Arabia that don't allow women.
On Wednesday, Colleges and Universities Minister Reza Moridi said decisions on the operation of a campus, including student composition, are up to each college's board of governors.
But late Thursday, after a lot of criticism on social media about the male-only campuses, the minister had a change of heart about Ontario colleges teaching courses that deliberately exclude women.
"I understand and appreciate the concern that has been raised in recent weeks around some of these international activities, particularly around two Ontario colleges running male-only campuses in Saudi Arabia," Moridi said in a statement to The Canadian Press. "I share those concerns."
Student mobility refers not to just the physical ability of a student to move from one institution to another, but the more comprehensive understanding of a student as an independent agent who - as their own needs and desires change - requires the ability to move from one institution to another to achieve their educational goal, be it a college certificate, diploma, or undergraduate degree. The policy has been broken into three key pillars, which cover the mobility parency, Consistency, and
Student Support.
Workshops on how to encourage class participation are a staple of teaching and learning centres across the
country. However, little of that advice is geared to the needs on an oft-neglected subset of introverted university
students: the ones who aren’t shy.
Even though Susan Cain’s book, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking, was a
bestseller, and her TED Talk has been viewed more than 10 million times, I’m not sure that our postsecondary
teaching and learning community has fully appreciated its implications.
If we want to encourage all of our students to participate in class, we have to accept that shy students are not
necessarily introverted. And introverts are not necessarily shy.
It is easy to silo away postsecondary education within the confines of our provincial borders. Our hope with this project is to shed light on an issue with which all students regardless of jurisdiction have to deal. The mental health of students is a unifying theme and priority for student organisations such as ours’ across the country.
Unlike some more-easily defined issues being tackled by student organisations, such as high debt
levels and youth employment, mental health-related problems remain somewhat of a taboo subject for legislators and university officials alike.
Traditional lack of awareness and a societal inability to separate mental illness from physical
ailments has contributed to a grossly underfunded and poorly-equipped postsecondary sector that, while well-intentioned, has failed to grasp the magnitude of the mental health challenges facing its students.
As Canadian universities and colleges face increasing pressure to provide better mental-health services on campus, students are looking to give schools fresh ideas on how to tackle the issue.
"I had a career," she told me, her eyes welling with tears. "I took care of my kids and myself, and I didn’t need anyone’s help … and now, I’m here," she said, referring to Oregon State University’s Human Services Resource Center, a facility for low-income students which I directed until last year. As she spoke, the floodgates opened, and I handed her a box of tissues. She told me she had not eaten and was worried about being evicted. She said she could not get a job to support her family without a degree.
Schools are also looking to encourage domestic students to benefit from international students’ presence.
As the blip-blip-bloop of the classic Skype ringtone connects me with Zack (Guanglong) Pang at Wilfrid Laurier University, it occurs to me that a little box like this on a computer screen may be the only window through which this international student has seen his family for the past few years – they live half a world away in his hometown of Shenyang, an industrial city in the northeastern part of China. Mr. Pang, who at the time of this interview was finishing his bachelor of science degree at Laurier and preparing for a master’s in geography at York University starting this fall, cheerfully returns my wave at the screen.
“But why do I have to go? School is not fun!” That quote is from a first-grade child, asking his mom why he has to go every single day to this place that he was told was going to be a lot of fun, but has not lived up to the hype. If he could articulate further, he might say, "I am only six. I like to have fun, but school is not fun and from what I can tell, it's going to get worse every year, not better."
Abstract
A number of factors have been identified in the research literature as being important for student success in university. However, the rather large body of literature contains few studies that have given students the opportunity to directly report what they believe contributes to their success as an under- graduate student. The primary purpose of this study is to explore students’ descriptions of the personal resources that they use to succeed while attempt- ing to reach their goals as well
as those personal characteristics or obstacles that keep them from reaching their goals. Prominent themes supportive of student success included having a future orientation, persistence, and executive functioning skills such as time management and organization. Results also demonstrate that stress, inadequate academic skills, and distractions are detrimental to student success in university. This study is unique in that it gathers the content data directly from the population of interest; it is one of the few qualitative studies of undergraduate students’ self-generated percep tions. Implications for university administrator and academic counsellors and directions for future research are discussed.
Résumé
Des travaux de recherche ont déjà relevé certains facteurs comme étant importants pour la réussite des étudiants de niveau universitaire. Mais bien qu’abondante, la recherche n’a cependant pas donné aux étudiants de premier cycle la possibilité de communiquer directement leur avis quant aux raisons de leur réussite. Le but principal de cette étude est d’explorer les descriptions que les étudiants font des ressources personnelles qu’ils utilisent pour atteindre leurs objectifs et, ubsidiairement, les caractéristiques personnelles ou les obstacles qui les empêchent d’atteindre leurs objectifs. Parmi les thèmes importants menant à la réussite des élèves on trouve l’orientation vers l’avenir, la persévérance et des compétences exécutives telles que la gestion du temps et l’organisation. Les résultats démontrent également que le stress, des compétences académiques inadéquates et les distractions représentent des obstacles à la réussite des études universitaires. Cette étude est unique car elle collige les données directement de la population concernée. Elle est aussi l’une des rares études qualitatives portant sur la perception des étudiants de premier cycle. On y examine les conséquences pour les administrateurs universitaires et les conseillers scolaires, de même que les orientations possibles de futures recherches.
Since the mid-1980’s, student unions across Canada and within the United States have been advocating to governments and Universities-alike for increased safety measures for those affected by sexual violence and harassment. Student unions have played a crucial role in creating campus culture and social expectations. We have also been at the forefront of programming and processes around staff training to combat sexual violence, gendered-violence, and sex-based harassment, bystander intervention, and health and protective services. We offer important peer-to-peer and survivor services as well, recognizing that survivors prefer to seek peer support. Therefore we offer much to be listened to on this topic and have been given great opportunities over the past year to speak to some of these issues.
Harvard recently rescinded admission offers for some incoming freshmen who participated in a private Facebook group sharing offensive memes. The incident has sparked a lot of discussion: Was Harvard’s decision justified? What about the First Amendment? Do young people know the dangers of social media?
I’m a business school lecturer, career services counselor and former recruiter, and I’ve seen how social media becomes part of a person’s brand—a brand that can help you or hurt you.
College admissions staff, future employers and even potential dates are more and more likely to check your profile and make decisions or judgments about you.
Here’s what you should know so you don’t end up like those Harvard prospects.
Audio, visual, textual—most people are willing and eager to identify themselves as a certain type of learner. And it follows pretty quickly that they learn better and faster when teachers approach a lesson in their “style.” Based on that logic, many school districts have poured money into training and materials to help teachers tailor their lessons to the various learning styles of their students. But haste makes waste, write Harold Pashler of the University of California, San Diego; Mark McDaniel of Washing-ton University, St. Louis; Doug Rohrer of the University of South Florida; and Robert A. Bjork of the University of California, Los Ange-les. There just isn’t sufficient evidence to support customizing education in this way.
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.”
A growing body of research shows that college students who enroll full-time, taking even 12 credits’ worth of course work in a single semester, are much more likely stick with college, save money and eventually graduate.
Yet while the researchers behind these studies encourage efforts to nudge more students to go full-time (ideally taking 30 credits in a year), they warn against neglecting the many who will continue to attend part-time because of work and family demands -- currently only 38 percent of community college students are enrolled full-time, according to the American Association of Community Colleges.