Well here it is already — the end of my first year of full-time teaching. With 25 years of experience in the music industry, and 20 of those years teaching music as an adjunct, I’d felt well-prepared for academia. In fact, I was raring to go.
Last fall, as I walked across campus during the first week of classes, I felt the excitement of being part of the whole enterprise. I traveled the hallowed halls, bustling with the commotion of students. I sat in faculty meetings and glanced around at my new colleagues, the collective braintrust charged with developing, monitoring, scrutinizing, and ultimately teaching the curriculum. I met with my classes for the first time, and in between, retired to the solitude of my very first faculty office. It felt exhilarating. It was what I’d been preparing for all those years in grad school.
The debate over how universities and colleges should relate to one another has been lively in Ontario for at least two decades.
In this ongoing series focused on flipped and active-learning classrooms, we’re taking a deeper look into how to create successful learning experiences for students. We’ve examined how to encourage students to complete pre-class work, how to hold students accountable for pre-class work, and how to connect pre-class work to in-class activities. Now let’s focus on the challenge of managing the in-person learning environment.
The retirement patterns of senior faculty are an issue of ongoing interest in higher education, particularly since the
2008-09 recession. If a significant share of tenured faculty works past “normal” retirement age, challenges can arise for institutional leadership focused on keeping the faculty workforce dynamic for purposes of teaching, research and service. Buyout packages and phased retirement programs have been common responses to encourage faculty retirement, but colleges and universities are increasingly interested in alternative and complementary strategies to manage faculty retirement patterns.
International students are being warned they may be the target of scammers who run elaborate virtual kidnapping schemes. (Darryl Dyck/Canadian Press) International students in Calgary are at risk of falling victim to an elaborate "virtual kidnapping"
scam that forced one man into hiding and terrified his family in China, police say.
There have been two such cases reported by Chinese students in the city since the start of May, following reports of the scam elsewhere in the country, the Calgary Police Service said.
In this commentary, I reflect on the value of qualitative research methodology classes. As I show in my discussion of the classes I teach, what students learn from the class is not solely a methodological approach to inquiry, but a different (and for many, a new) way to ask questions, and as I suggest, to see the world anew.
Grounded and reliable measurement instruments grounded in theory are essential to move the field of servant leadership forward.
Canada seems perpetually fixated on the "knowledge economy," no matter the political stripes of the government in power. Budget 2017 will roll out the Innovation Agenda, where significant funds will be dedicated to supporting "super clusters" around the likes of aerospace, cyber security, or nanotechnology.
Policy-makers wish to prepare job markets for disruptions that will stem from automation, artificial intelligence, 3D printing, and the industrial internet. The skills for the future? If you believe the pundits, they are coding, sales talent, and everything digital. Is Canada's economy of the future a place where the skilled trades will survive, let alone thrive?
Chrarismatic leadership has been largely overlooked by organizational theorists. In part, the problem can be attributed to the lack of a systematic conceptual framework. Drawing from political science, sociology, and social psychology, this paper addresses the problem by proposing a model linking organizational contexts to charismatic leadership. A series of research hypotheses is offered.
Enrolment declines
Capacity constraints
Budget pressures
Image programs
Student attrition
Service complaints
Environmental shifts
Academic freedom is supposed to protect unpopular views. A case involving an Oberlin professor who claimed that
ISIS is really the CIA and Mossad asks whether that freedom extends to falsehoods.
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.
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.
How to create a targeted resumé for industry positions.
It is well known that a strong curriculum vitae is crucial when applying to positions within academia. The same holds true if you are applying for industry positions. However, an application for those types of roles will require you to submit a concise resumé instead of a lengthy CV. Many graduate students may be inclined to include all of their accumulated academic experience on the resumé with the hope that the hiring manager will be able to assess what is most relevant to the job posting. In this case, however, more is not always better, as employers prefer resumés that outline the skills and experiences relevant to the position, presented in a succinct and tailored format. Given the years of experience gained throughout your academic career, it can sometimes be an overwhelming task to condense the information from your CV into a resumé that is often only two pages long. The following recommendations are designed to help guide you through the process of converting your CV into a targeted resumé.
The combination of work and study has been hailed as crucial to ensure that youth develop the skills required on the labour market so that transitions from school to work are shorter and smoother. This paper fills an important gap in availability of internationally-comparable data. Using the 2012 Survey of Adult Skills (PIAAC), it draws a comprehensive picture of work and study in 23 countries/regions. Crucially, it decomposes the total share of working students by the context in which they work (VET, apprenticeships or private arrangements) and assesses the link between field of study and students’ work. The paper also assesses how the skills of students are used in the workplace compared to other workers and identifies the socio-demographic factors and the labour market institutions that increase the likelihood of work and study. Finally, while it is not possible to examine the relationship between work and study and future labour market outcomes at the individual level, some aggregate correlations are unveiled.
Project-Based Learning
This challenging time provides an opportunity for students to work on real-world problems
they see every day.
Amid a pandemic, educators are trying to figure out how to make sure that kids are socially in tune, emotionally intact, and cognitively engaged. Moreover, we’re all attempting to figure out how to do this across a plethora of mediums, including computer screens, video cameras streaming into classrooms, and engaging students face-to-face albeit across shields, masks, and plexiglass.
Still, there is an opportunity here to give students a chance to discuss the challenges of their own environment, the barrage of news they face daily, and the core content they need for long-term success. One of the best options to meet these demands is for students to engage in rigorous problem- or project-based learning (PBL)—an approach that ensures students develop high rigor and experience high relevance by solving problems or
completing tasks in a remote or face-to-face environment.
Media and policy commentary have focused lately on Canadian employers’ apparent inability to find employees with the desired labour market skills. To explore this issue further, HEQCO reviewed and summarized the current discourse surrounding a “skills gap” in The Great Skills Divide: A Review of the Literature and conducted an analysis of Canadian job advertisements geared toward recent postsecondary graduates in Bridging the Divide, Part I: What Canadian Job Ads Said. In the latter publication, 316 job advertisements for entry-level positions requiring postsecondary education were examined to ascertain the education credentials, work experience and essential skills employers were seeking. To follow-up on Bridging the Divide, Part I, the current report analyzes survey responses from 103 employers that posted job advertisements included in the preceding study.
In particular, employers were asked if they had filled the advertised position or, if not, the reasons for being unable to find someone to hire. Those employers that had filled the position were also asked about the successful candidates’ qualifications and performance on the job so far.
Three teacher education tasks are analyzed using Bateson's "levels of learning" and the distinction between reference experiences and cognitive maps (Dilts, l994). The tasks were 1) writing a risk log of classroom innovations, 2) writing articles, and 3) doing public presentations. Student feedback indicated perceived shifts in behaviors, beliefs, and identities
through both active tasking (reference experiences) and their ongoing dynamic "explanations" (cognitive mapping). The results and activities are then discussed in relation to Freeman's (1992, 1994, 1995) concept of the socialization of teachers into professional discourse and the value of communities of explanation toward continual teacher development.
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 of residence develop leadership, self-re;iance, language skills, intercultural understanding, sensitivity to local and global issues, and specialist skills when they participate in work placement and field schools.