We know students are afraid of making mistakes, often dreadfully so. And so we talk a good line about the learning potential inherent in mistakes.
But are we afraid to let students make mistakes? Is it just a problem with students not wanting to be wrong, or does our need to control learning experiences keep students from making mistakes?
In 2005, a study found that 10 percent of graduate and professional students at the University of California at Berkeley had contemplated suicide. More than half reported feeling depressed a lot of the time. While concerns about undergraduates' mental health were already growing then and have only increased since, the finding about graduate students surprised and alarmed many experts. And because of Berkeley's prominence in educating future Ph.D.s and professors, the study was widely circulated.
Ten years later, the graduate student government at Berkeley is releasing a new study. It too finds a high percentage of graduate students showing signs of depression.
California State University at Sacramento, like more than a thousand other institutions in the U.S., uses the learning
management system Blackboard Learn, but likely not for much longer.
Sacramento State is getting ready to upgrade. And like many institutions in its situation, the university is looking at systems that are hosted in the cloud and delivered as software as a service (SaaS).
Moving to the cloud normally means paying more, but it does come with some benefits. Virtually no downtime is a big one. Software providers can push new features and critical patches to all its customers in the cloud, instead of colleges having to take their systems offline for maintenance. Colleges also don’t need to worry about servers if their systems are hosted in the cloud.
A new study out of Yale University confirms a notion college and university administrators have held for years -- that substance abuse is linked to a decline in student grades -- but this study also reveals a number of trends among college students that surprised its authors.
Researchers at Yale University and the Institute of Living in Hartford, Conn., found that students who drank a moderate to heavy amount of alcohol actually had similar grade point averages to those who consumed little or no alcohol. However, students who used moderate to heavy alcohol as well as marijuana saw their grades plummeting.
W e’ve all read the startling stories about lax standards in higher education. As faculty members, we’ve struggled with the growing expectation among undergraduates that a minor amount of work should be the norm for collegelevel courses. In their 2011 book, Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses, Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa found that half of the students in the study’s sample "had not taken a single course during the prior semester that required more than 20 pages of writing, and one-third hadn’t taken one that required even 40 pages of reading per week."
A message in bold and italics emblazons the home page of the Lakehead University Student Union food bank’s
website. “We are in desperate need of food!!!” it reads. “Any amount that you can give would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks to everyone who helps out!!!” The page urges students at the Thunder Bay, Ont., school to get in touch if they
have “an emergency need for food.” The urgency of the post reflects a troubling new trend on university campuses. As
post-secondary education costs continue to rise, students are finding it increasingly difficult to afford food. Across the
country, food-bank visits are up, and a new study shows almost half of 450 students surveyed at Lakehead lack food
security.
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.
Whether they led a company or a country, history's best leaders understood the importance of providing the motivation and direction to achieve larger goals. Poor leaders lose the faith and trust of the people they lead, while great leaders seem to
lead without effort. The character, actions and thoughts of a leader, good or bad, permeate an organization. Your goal should be to demonstrate the best qualities of a leader while encouraging the same from those who follow you. These 35 quotes about leadership will help you think about and guide your actions.
Study finds gender of instructors influences evaluations they receive, even if they have fooled students (in an online course) about whether they are men or women.
A number of programs are exploring options for applied scholarship within the PhD.
This article reviews the developments in significant pedagogical and research domains in TESOL during the 50-year history of TESOL Quarterly. It situates these developments in the shift from a modernist to postmodern orientation in disciplinary discourses. The article also considers the changes in modes of knowledge dissemination in the journal by examining the changes in locations of research, author- ship, article genres, and research methods. While there is an evolving diversity in the disciplinary discourses of TESOL that can appear to be a threat to the field’s coherence, the article argues that this diver- sity can contribute to a more plural knowledge base and constructive disciplinary growth for TESOL.
Our campus teaching center recently invited a brave group of student tutors to share their views on effective teaching with our faculty. The four tutors reported what they had heard from students about course designs and teaching practices that seemed to help, and ones that seemed to interfere with learning. Three recurrent themes in the tutors’ remarks caught my attention.
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?
Education is consistently one of the least covered topics in the Canadian news media. According to Influence Communication, a Canadian research firm, only 0.16% of 10.9 million stories published or broadcast in Canadian media in 2014 concerned education, both the K-12 and postsecondary education sectors (Influence Communication, 2014).
However, research has found that news coverage of more specific policy areas, such as the environment or health, has stronger effects on public perception than coverage of broad policy issues such as the economy and jobs (Brown, 2010; Kingdon, 2003; Soroka, 2002). An evaluation of the frequency and tone of media coverage of postsecondary education (PSE) in Canada can thus yield valuable insights about public awareness and opinions of this sector.
Research Question
How has coverage of Canadian postsecondary education in the Canadian media changed over the last 15 years?
You know, I'm a numbers guy. Yes, I'm a math guy, but no, that doesn't automatically make me a numbers guy. In fact, being a pure mathematician at the University of Waterloo, the running joke was none of us could do mental math because we hadn't seen numbers since high school.
But that never really applied to me, because I also love numbers. The Pythagoreans said that "all is number"; Plato believed that numbers were the "gateway to the divine"; Erdos and Ramanujan found "extraordinary beauty" in numbers; and a colleague recently said in a talk that "numbers transcend us, yet bind us together."
I've always found that numbers told stories.
New school. New city. New structure.
It can all feel so daunting. Especially if you're 18 years old, not really sure what program you should be in and unprepared for the demands of what your new post-secondary education reality truly is.
Many students lack the right knowledge, tools and resources to make an informed decision when choosing their higher ed path. Universities see about 14% of first year students drop out, in comparison to an even higher 20% at college, simply because it's just not the right fit.
Despite efforts to decrease attrition in North America, a PSE attrition rate of 30-40% has persisted for over 30 years. That means post-secondary institutions are suffering financial losses as first year students continue to drop out. But why aren't students finding the right fit?
The career search is a mysterious process, and as the seeker it is easy to feel as if you have no control. And the longer the search goes on without a positive outcome, the more you can feel like the system is rigged against you.
But having been on both sides of the hiring equation myself, and through my work coaching others through the process, I know that sometimes job candidates sabotage their own success. My point is not to cast blame, but to provide you with some insight into the perspective of the hiring manager so you can evaluate and reassess your approach. Following are some areas to consider when analyzing your process.
Students are the innovators of the future, and to succeed they need access to modern, high-quality programs at Canadian educational institutions. Universities and colleges are built to educate students, develop global citizens, support research, and foster a sense ofcreativity that will benefit Canadian society both socially and economically.
In fall 2015, Ontario appointed five members to The Premier’s Highly Skilled Workforce Expert Panel (Panel) – Chair, Sean Conway, and members Dr. Carol Campbell, Robert Hardt, Alison Loat, and Pradeep Sood (see Appendix E:
Expert Panel Member Biographies). Panel members were selected based on their professional experience, knowledge of the business climate, and relationships with a cross-section of stakeholder groups, and on their understanding of employers, the education and public sectors, and issues related to the labour market.
Recently, I received an email from a student asking me the name of a writer -- a writer whose book we’d been reading for two weeks. (And discussing in class. And writing about in class.) It was not a textbook, anthology or unusual digital source. It was an old-fashioned printed book containing one play by one writer.
I knew that the student owned the book, because I had seen her with it in class, and in fact, she had told me she was enjoying the reading. However, when it was time for her to do an assignment on the playwright … well, she was stumped. She just didn’t know his name.
I had to explain to her, carefully, and with what I hope was compassion, that if she hadn’t picked up his name in the class discussions so far (or, I was thinking, in the course syllabus and calendar), then she could always try looking on the front cover of the book.