Disciplinary experts have a responsibility to engage in nuanced thinking about teaching and learning.
Recently, i had a conversation with a colleague that stopped me dead in my tracks. I was in the middle of extolling the virtues of SoTL (the scholarship of teaching and learning) as a research field that is multidisciplinary, accessible and increasingly relevant as we shape what higher education looks like in the 21st century.
Feeling the wonderful effects of a mid-afternoon caffeine rush, I was exclaiming that SoTL has wide appeal for many members of our learning community and provides: 1) support to inform teaching practices; 2) fresh solutions andnew ideas, such as how to jump-start a sluggish class or reach the latest generation of students or harness a new technology; 3) opportunities for cross-fertilization between research and teaching; and 4) the option to develop a secondary research field without costly infrastructure.
TORONTO — Two Ontario colleges have opened campuses in Saudi Arabia that don’t accept female
students in their classes.
Niagara College offers tourism, hospitality and business courses at its campus in Taif, while Algonquin
College offers 10 programs, including business, accounting and electrical engineering technician, at a
campus in the city of Jazan.
“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.
This document contains the appendices to CAAT baccalaureates{ What has been their impact on students and colleges?
• One of the best ways to improve the quality of care for Northern and Aboriginal communities is to strengthen the number of Northern and Aboriginal health professionals, and in particular nurses who form the largest category of health care providers in these regions.
• Although improvements in the number of Aboriginal nurses have been made in the past 15 years, additional efforts and strategies are needed to reach proportional representation in Saskatchewan and Canadian health workforces.
• Distributed, off-campus educational opportunities are an important way of educating residents of Northern and Aboriginal communities and establishing a local skilled workforce.
• New technologies are also making the delivery of high-quality nursing programs in rural and remote locations feasible.
This qualitative case study investigated how adult graduates of online Bachelor's degree programs describe the online aspect of their degree. Online education is promoted as a method for adult students to access the benefits of a college degree. Therefore, it is important for prospective online students, higher education institutions and policy makers to understand how online degrees are valued in society and by online graduates.The primary method of data collection was interviews of 24 graduates. The setting of this study, a well-regarded research university primarily known for its traditional campus-based programs, helped to isolate perceptions of the online delivery modality. All participants in the study held a high opinion of their online degree and of the university. However, the participants also recognized that some people have a negative opinion of online degrees. The participants described two strategies for dealing with encounters with people with negative perceptions of online degrees. Slightly more than half of the participants were forthcoming and open about earning a degree online. However, a large minority of participants were concerned about negative perceptions of online degrees. These participants often did not volunteer information about the online aspect of their degree to other people unless specifically questioned. Additional research is recommended to further explain the extent to which perceptions of online degrees are associated with the online delivery mode rather than other factors and to investigate the effect of delivery mode and institution type on the economic impact of an earning a Bachelor's degree later in life.
Two major developments in the financial management of higher education have occurred more or less contemporaneously: incentive or performance funding on the part of government and incentive-based budgeting on the part of institutions. Both are based on fiscal incentives. Despite their several inherent and interconnected similarities, incentive funding and incentive-based budgeting have been viewed and appraised on parallel tracks. This study investigates their convergence. In doing so, it sharpens the definitions of both, identifies their respective track records, and discusses problems that are chronic to both. The study concludes that although incentive funding and incentive-based budgeting are sometimes at cross-purposes, they are func-tionally interconnected. The study uses Canada as an example because it is the jurisdiction that so far has seen the most extensive mutual deployment of performance funding and incentive-based budgeting.
As academics who’ve made it to the tenure track, what can we do to help the adjuncts and underemployed Ph.D.s who haven’t? I mean, instead of just gaslighting them and insisting that the dismal faculty job market "was ever thus."
I received my Ph.D. from the University of Southern California’s English department in spring 2011. This past fall, I started work as an assistant professor of interdisciplinary studies at California State University-Dominguez Hills. It’s my dream job, teaching a student population I love in my home city of Los Angeles. Between 2011 and 2017 I was an adjunct at multiple colleges and universities in the Los Angeles area.
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.
Landing a postdoc, particularly for the social sciences and humanities, is increasingly difficult as Keisha N. Blainrecently noted in Inside Higher Ed. Many postdocs are as competitive as tenure-track jobs.
But if you are one of the lucky few to receive a postdoc, what’s next?
I’m finishing my one-year National Center for Institutional Diversitypostdoc at the University of Michigan. I’m fortunate enough to have a postdoc that requires no teaching or service, and provides a generous research budget. I’m also a sociologist, so my perspective reflects that of a scholar in the social sciences and humanities. Still, no matter if your postdoc is for one year or three, or whether you are teaching, in a lab or on your own, I’ve developed some tips that
I think can help you make the most of your postdoc.
The Ontario Confederation of University Faculty Associations (OCUFA) represents over 17,000 professors and academic librarians at 28 faculty associations at every university in Ontario. OCUFA represents full-time tenure-stream faculty, and at many universities also represents contract faculty members who work either on a limited-term contract or on a per- course basis.
OCUFA estimates that the number of courses taught by contract faculty at Ontario universities has doubled since 2000.
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.
Women in the sciences who earn PhDs are less likely than their male counterparts to pursue tenure-track positions at research universities. Moreover, among those who become STEM researchers, men have been found to publish more than women. These patterns raise questions about when sex differences in publication begin. Using data from a survey of doctoral students at one large institution, this study finds that men submitted and published more scholarly works than women across many fields, with differences largest in natural/biological sciences and engineering. Potential contributing factors are considered, including sex differences in faculty support, assistantships, family responsibilities, and career goals.
Keywords: career development; doctoral students; equity; faculty development; gender studies; graduate education; higher education; publications; regression analyses; research; secondary data analysis; sex; STEM; survey research; women’s issues
The ways in which university quality assessments are developed reveal a great deal about value constructs surrounding higher education. Measures devel- oped and consumed by external stakeholders, in particular, indicate which elements of academia are broadly perceived to be most reflective of quality. This paper examines the historical context of library quality assessment and
reviews the literature related to how library value is framed in three forms of external evaluation: accreditation, university rankings, and student surveys. The review finds that the library’s contribution to university quality, when it is considered at all, continues to be measured in terms of collections, spaces, and expenditures, despite significant expansion of library services into non- traditional arenas, including teaching and research, scholarly communica- tions, and data management and visualization. These findings are contrasted with the frequently invoked notion of the library as the heart of the university.
What is your learning style? Identifying your learning style serves you and helps you use it to your advantage to learn new skills efficiently. Your learning style is your approach to learning based on your preferences, as well as your strengths and weaknesses. Learners can be grouped into main categories:
Those who learn through reading and writing prefer to read and write rather than listen. In fact, they enjoy reading books and can follow written directions with ease. Visual learners learn best through maps and diagrams as opposed to verbal directions. While auditory learners prefer verbal directions and enjoy working in groups and discussing information. They remember best
through listening and may find it difficult to work quietly. These type of learners often read with whispering lip movements.
Colleges and Institutes Canada’s (CICan) priorities for the Federal Election and Budget 2016 on behalf of publicly-funded
colleges and institutes are as follows:
Increase funding for college and institute applied research
Key to improving productivity and innovation for companies and communities
Invest in college and institute infrastructure and equipment
Strategic investments to meet the needs of employers and communities
Increase access to post-secondary education and upskilling for Aboriginal peoples
Essential to support reconciliation and improve education and employment outcomes
Invest in improved labour market information, apprenticeship completion and employability of youth
Key to expanding employment opportunities for Canadians
One of the most consequential lessons I learned last semester actually happened after it was over. Five days after
the semester ended — to be precise, about 15 minutes after I updated the final grades for my courses — the emails
started coming in, like clockwork. I’m sure you get them too: the earnest and pleading requests (sometimes polite,
sometimes not) for better grades. I responded with my general policy (I only change grades if I’ve made a mistake; I
round to the nearest whole number), and that seemed to satisfy most students. But one student was a tougher nut to
crack.
Email after email arrived with detailed (and specious) arguments as to why he was shortchanged on the grades he
earned for specific assignments. He requested documentation that explained why he received 12.15 points for an
assignment instead of 12.16. He earnestly explained what it would mean if I could find an extra 1.05 points
somewhere to bump him from a B to a B+. Each of my responses provoked an even longer email in reply. It went on
for some time.
PANEL MANDATE, SCOPE
OF REVIEW, AND PRINCIPLES
ABSTRACT
Canadian accomplishments in science and scholarly inquiry have long been a source of national pride. However, by various measures, Canada’s research competitiveness has eroded in recent years when compared with international peers. The change coincided with a period of flat-lining of federal spending through the four core funding agencies that support researchers in universities, colleges, institutes, and research hospitals. In those years funds were also directed preferentially to priority-driven and partnership oriented research, reducing available support for independent, investigator-led research by frontline scientists and scholars.
The proportion of federally derived funding for research has also declined. Canada ranks well globally n higher education expenditures on research and development as a percentage of GDP, but is an outlier in that funding from federal government sources accounts for less than 25 per cent of that total, while institutions now underwrite 50 per cent of these costs with adverse effects on both research and education.
I wrote about how usually, when it’s argued there is an “overproduction” of PhDs, “demand” for doctoral graduates is being implicitly defined by the number of tenure-stream jobs available while “overproduction” usually points to “not enough academic jobs for doctoral graduates.” So how do you define the demand for doctorates when we’re not just talking about faculty jobs anymore? I’d been thinking about this when I saw two recent articles from Brenda Brouwer, President of the Canadian Association for Graduate Studies (CAGS): one in University Affairs titled, “Canada needs more PhDs”—and a similar piece in the Globe and Mail, “Let’s end the myth that PhDs are only suited for the ivory tower”.
Raise your hand if your salary increased by more than 50 per cent in the past five years. Nope? Didn’t think so.
But it could go up that much by September if you’re the president of a college in Ontario. Or maybe it will rise by a mere 39 per cent.
Whichever, you get the picture. As the end of a five-year wage freeze on non-unionized public sector workers approaches, the province’s 24 colleges are setting the stage for massive pay increases for their presidents.
Deb Matthews, the minister responsible for post-secondary education, needs to rein them in. Not only to stop a salary race at the college level, but to manage pay expectations for other public sector workers, including those at universities, hospitals, school boards and government agencies.
The extent of the college presidents’ pay ambitions are made clear in documents released by the Ontario Public Service Employees Union, which opposes the proposed new salary levels.