It is a given in higher education that we are preparing students for the world of work and for life. It is also a given in today’s world that higher education’s product must be of quality and that higher education must be held accountable for student learning. Finally, it is a given, as well, that the expectation is to do more with less, to find efficiencies.
These principles, along with rising tuition costs, have placed higher education under the microscopes of both the legislators and the public. To emerge from this examination, college leaders must monitor student outcomes regularly to determine roadblocks to student success and to determine revisions, improvements, and optimal resource use.
If we don’t move quickly, Canada risks seeing many of these young, bright minds take their talents elsewhere.
Ambitious, skilled and often multilingual, international students are a great source of talent. They fill jobs and create
new ones through innovation and entrepreneurship — Silicon Valley is a prominent, international example. Research by the Conference Board of Canada shows immigrants help expand and diversify Canada’s global trade. International students could do the same, helping Canada trade in markets such as Asia, where economic growth is greater than in the U.S. and EU — Canada’s largest trading partners.
A widely held belief in Canada, as in many countries, is that expanding access to tertiary education is integral to improving national productivity. It also plays into the Canadian sense of
equality of opportunity and the just society.
In addition, Canada is not alone in beginning to experience a decreasing labour force participation rate as the baby boomer generation enters retirement. Even the country’s large immigration flows are not sufficient to compensate for the labour force shrinkage. This puts additional pressure on productivity; across the 20 largest members of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, this would need to increase at an average of 0.4 per cent
per year to offset the loss of gross domestic product per capita.
A number of programs are exploring options for applied scholarship within the PhD.
Research is reviewed in a rigorous manner, by expert peers. Yet teaching is often reviewed only or mostly by pedagogical non-experts: students. There’s also mounting evidence of bias in student evaluations of teaching, or SETs -- against female and minority instructors in particular. And teacher ratings aren’t necessarily correlated with learning outcomes.
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.
ackson started speech class barely audible. A thin, Latino teen, with an Abe Lincoln beard, ear gauges the size of silver dollars, and a loose, enigmatic smile, you couldn’t help liking him. If you could hear him, that is.
ut the other night, hot off winning a video game tournament, he demonstrated how to play Street Fighter Five, his assion. He leaned toward the audience, core muscles taut, arms swinging, and illustrated in ringing tones the omplex moves and strategies of an expert gamer.
t was the first time I saw video games as something akin to playing cello, rather than a brain-dead addiction. fter the speech, he mentioned that people had asked him to give them lessons, and I said he should charge oney. $25 an hour would be cheap compared to violin teachers who charge $60 an hour. I could see his eyes grow big as thoughts whirled behind them.
Not at all, according to Dave Zwieback, the Head of Engineering at music analytics company Next Big Sound (acquired by Pandora) and author of Beyond Blame: Learning From Failure and Success. Zwieback has spent decades leading engineers in companies operating in high-stakes, pressure-cooker industries, such as technology, financial services and pharma, where it’s commonplace for someone to take the fall when critical systems fails.
Transforming higher education processes starts with laying the right foundation for your organization’s workflow. Many higher education institutions have embarked on education transformation initiatives; however, there is still room for improvement to build a more stable transformation foundation.
According to a recent Center for Digital Education (CDE) survey, the top higher education workflow-related challenges include the need for more training and professional development, workflow solutions, better access to information and documentation,
and increased automation.
It’s hard to pick up a publication these days without reading something about blended course design or the flipped classroom. Even mainstream media have begun to cover these new approaches to teaching and learning that put more emphasis on active learning.
But despite their growing popularity, defining blended learning and flipped learning is more difficult than one would expect. Both models have a variety of definitions, and many consider the flipped classroom a form of blended learning. The Sloan Consortium has one of the most precise definitions, defining blended as “instruction that has between 30 and 80 percent of the course content delivered online.” For the sake of this report, we’re using a more broad definition of blended learning as a course that uses a combination of face-to-face and online learning.
Even among the business savvy, it’s not at all uncommon for these marketing terms to be thrown around almost interchangeably, when they actually mean very different things and play very different roles in business development and promotion. So we thought it was high time to clear it up and help you know and understand the difference so you can be better informed buyers and users of marketing, design and branding services.
Essential ingredients to gaining buy-in. The obstacles? Where does accountability for student retention rest?
Engineering is synonymous with design. It is a skill that is inherently understood by experienced engineers, but also one of the most difficult topics to teach. McMaster University’s first-year Design & Graphics is a required course for all engineering students. The course has taught hand-sketching, 3D solid modeling, system simulation, 3D rapid prototyping, and culminated in a project in gear train design that requires a combination of the core course topics. Students chose their own three-member teams and lab sections were randomly assigned one of three modalities for completion of the design project: Simulation (SIM), in which they produced and verified a design using a simulation tool; Prototyping (PRT), in which they used a 3D printer to create a working plastic model of a design; or Simulation and Prototyping (SIM+PRT), in which they used both tools to complete a design.
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.
It’s easier than ever for students to buy assignments. Until universities have better measures for rooting out this kind of cheating, professors are focusing on prevention.
How do you deal with cheating if you can’t be sure it’s happening? For universities across the country, it’s an important question as online services and message boards have made it increasingly easy for students to buy whole, made-to-order essays and pass them off as their own. It’s very difficult for professors to catch, and no one is sure just how big an issue it is.
The scholarly literature on “active learning” is almost shockingly positive. Over and over again, when active-learning
strategies have been studied — particularly when they have been compared to lecturing — they have been found to
increase student learning.
A 2014 meta-analysis of 225 studies measured student performance in STEM courses taught by traditional lectures against courses that used active-learning strategies. Using a cautious methodology to avoid biases, the study found a marked difference between the two categories. Average marks in the active-learning courses were a half-grade higher (i.e., a B rather than a B-) compared with those taught by lecture. Moreover, students in lecture courses were one and a half times more likely to fail than their counterparts who engaged in active learning. Considering how many studies were looked at, those were remarkably consistent results.
I had coffee a few weeks ago with another displaced administrator at my university. Like me, he had arrived within the past decade to build something new and different. To some extent, he had succeeded. But, also like me, he had been informed that his leadership services would no longer be required beyond this year.
When he invited me, he asked if I would be uncomfortable meeting in one of the more popular campus coffee spots. "It’s in the shadow of the main administration building," he warned via email.
Faculty everywhere are flipping their classes, but can we flip faculty development? That’s the question I asked myself when I flipped the pre-conference workshop at the 2016 Teaching Professor Technology Conference. What I discovered is that we can “practice what we teach” and design faculty-centered learning experiences much the same way we design studentcentered
learning experiences.
Ontario is taking a historic step in recognizing the unique role Indigenous Institutes have in the province's postsecondary education system with the introduction of new legislation that, if passed, would transfer key functions and oversight to Indigenous people.
Deb Matthews, Minister of Advanced Education and Skills Development, and David Zimmer, Minister of Indigenous Relations and Reconciliation, were joined by the Aboriginal Institutes Consortium, chiefs, leaders of Indigenous Institutes and students from across the province in Toronto today to mark this important step on the path to reconciliation with Indigenous peoples.
The provincial government is ordering colleges to pull back on proposed salary hikes that would see senior executives get raises as high as 50 per cent, following a five-year pay freeze.
Advanced Education Minister Deb Matthews said the proposed raises are based on unfair comparisons, and equate running a college to running larger, more complex organizations.