Perhaps the best career advice I ever received came from my Reiki teacher, Marty Tribble, who cautioned, “The
absence of a strong yes is actually a no.”
This advice ran counter to decision-making practices I’d developed over the years, especially during my own
academic job search. I’d talk with colleagues and confidants, consider my goals and priorities, create spreadsheets
comparing choices and weigh the relevant information. I’d work to make a well-informed decision, taking in others’
advice and ultimately pursuing the pathway that I “should” follow. Though these were useful practices, what I found
is that I’d get into trouble whenever acting from the place of “should.” I was inadvertently shutting out my own
intuitive compass and relying on external guidance systems.
Political pollsters like to talk about the distinction between "hard support" and "soft support." Hard supporters will vote for a candidate no matter what. Soft supporters are known by another name: swing voters. They are the people who say they’ll vote for a certain candidate but often change their minds.
The idea of training Ph.D.s for diverse career tracks has hard and soft supporters, too, but some professors may not realize which group they’re in. They may believe they’re behind graduates who search for jobs beyond the professoriate. But the actions of these faculty members — or their inaction — can suggest otherwise.
Bill C-51, the federal government’s Anti-Terrorism Act, has sparked serious concerns about the potential impact on the basic civil liberties of all Canadians. The proposed legislation would establish criminal offences that infringe upon the right to free expression. Security agencies would be granted unprecedented and intrusive powers to monitor and share information about Canadians, with no commensurate increase in oversight or accountability
Work-integrated learning (WIL) has been identified as a key strategy for supporting Canada’s postsecondary education (PSE) system in responding to an increasingly dynamic, globalized, knowledge-based economy. Ontario in particular has been described as a “hot bed” of co-operative education (Ipsos Reid, 2010). However, while there is a common belief that WIL improves employment outcomes (see Gault, Redington & Schlager, 2000; Kramer & Usher, 2010), research on this topic has generally been specific to certain programs and types of WIL (Sattler, 2011).
In order to address this limited understanding of the impact of WIL on participants, employers and institutions, in 2009 the Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario (HEQCO) launched a multi-year project titled “Work-Integrated Learning in Ontario’s Postsecondary Education Sector.” This multi-stage study involved gathering qualitative and quantitative insights from faculty, employers and students on the perceived value and benefits of work and voluntary activities undertaken during a postsecondary program of study, both WIL and non-WIL, and examines the impact of these activities on learning, skills acquisition and labour market outcomes.
You’ve heard it a million times: being in school isn’t the “real world,” and the longer you’re in school, the less you know about how that “real world” functions. The laws that govern everything and everyone else, especially in the working world, haven’t been applying to you. And you -- the coddled, brainy, time-wasting human being who dares to think that intellectual pursuits are worth valuable years of your life -- you are in for a loud wake-up call. Just wait and
see.
Contrary to popular and judgmental opinion, however, your doctoral experience is some of the best working world experience you can get. The clearer you are about why that is the case, the more it can help you survive -- and sometimes thrive -- both in graduate school and in whatever jobs or careers come later.
At least one university has explicitly restricted students’ use of editors for their assignments.
Over the last several years, staff members at the Centre for Academic Communication at the University of Victoria
reported to administrators some curious conversations taking place around editing. The centre offers free services
to students to assist them with reading comprehension and writing, but staff members are instructed not to correct
students’ work, only pose questions. Students, however, had different expectations and complained when centre
staff wouldn’t “fix up” their papers.
Professors, too, misunderstood the role of the centre; some sent students there because they wanted staff to
improve their students’ work. What’s more, the centre received calls from parents asking how much editing they
could do on their children’s papers without it being considered cheating.
Well-written course outcomes and lesson objectives are the critical foundation of a successful course. Course outcomes and lesson objectives are essential from a standards alignment standpoint, as well as for an overall quality measure of the course.
A learning outcome is a formal statement of what students are expected to learn. Learning outcome statements refer to specific knowledge, practical skills, areas of professional development, attitudes, higher-order thinking skills, etc. that faculty members expect students to develop, learn, or master during a course (Suskie, 2004). Learning outcomes are also often referred to as “expected learning outcomes”, “student learning outcomes”, or “learning outcome statements”.
By the 1930's the federal government had come to the internal conclusion that iling to meet its goals. In 1936, R. A. Hoey,
ted as Indian Affairs’ an assessment of the residential schools. He noted that in 1935–36, spending on residen- tial
schools was $1,511,153.76. This amounted to 77.8% of the entire Indian Affairs edu- cation budget of $1,943,645. Enrolment was increasing at a rate of 250 pupils a year. To provide these students with residential school schooling would require an additional expenditure of $40,000 a year—a figure that did not include the cost of building new schools or paying interest on the capital outlay. However, day school education for an additional 250 students would cost only $7,000 a year. Not surprisingly, he opposed any further expansion of the residential school system, observing, “To continue to build educational institutions, particularly residential schools, while the money at our disposal is insufficient to keep the schools already erected in a proper state of repair, is, to me, very unsound and a practice difficult to justify.”
Abstract
Informal mid-term feedback processes create opportunities for students and academics to have a dialogue about their progress and to make any necessary or reasonable mid-stream corrections. This article reports on an action research project designed to see what impact mid-semester feedback might have on the classroom experience. The underlying motive for the study was to generate institution-specific “proof” which might encourage other academic staff to conduct informal mid-semester informal feedback exercises with their students.
End-of-semester data shows that both students and lecturers found the exercise to be a positive
experience. Students appreciated being able to voice their problems and opinions at a time when
mid-course corrections were possible. Lecturers felt there was an improvement in
the lines of communication, resulting in a friendlier teaching and learning environment.
Much of our work as educators consists of designing and delivering experiences in which students can develop their understanding and application of concepts and skills in our disciplines. Given that we have only 16 weeks with our students, we need various ways for deepening and expanding these formative experiences in our field. Visiting experts can be a wonderful way of developing expertise, and leveraging online tools like Skype and Zoom can open up powerful possibilities for new collaboration and conversation.
Inside Higher Ed’s fourth annual survey of college and university faculty members and campus leaders in educational technology aims to understand how these groups perceive and pursue online learning and other issues related to technology-enabled education.
I didn’t always want to be a professor, but when I learned what a professor did (or what I thought they did), I decided
it was exactly the profession from which to do the things I wanted to do. My early career dreams primarily revolved
around three things: I wanted to be an actress, an activist and a writer.
Reality got the best of me, and I decided none of those things were viable career paths. Or at least not financially
lucrative career paths, which was a necessity for someone who grew up working-class with a single mom. By the
end of college (which I attended by the grace of loans and persistence), I was enamored with the professors who
taught me theories to make sense of my positionality as a woman, a poor person, a queer femme, a white person,
etc. I also witnessed professors publishing books as well as doing activist work on their days away from the campus.
And they got to perform, in a way, in front of the students they taught. I felt like it was a legitimate dream career, and
I was nothing short of elated when I was accepted tuition-free into a master’s and then a Ph.D. program.
Putting Students In Charge of Their Learning
Through inquiry, Wildwood works to ignite passion, inspire relevance, and develop ownership in their students. Using student inquiries and questions as guidance, teachers develop lessons that engage and excite, teaching their students to be active thinkers rather than passive learners.
Over the last quarter century, as public education has made a hard shift towards “accountability” and increased standardized testing, the trend towards the use of research-based instruction in classrooms has become nearly as ubiquitous as the Scantron sheets students are asked to bubble in multiple times each semester. For those of us in the field of educational psychology, this would seem like a golden opportunity to capitalize on empirical evidence to improve the educational outcomes for millions of school children. Yet there are legitimate questions about whether empirical research findings have made their way into classrooms during this time or if the term “research-based instruction” has simply become a catch phrase for the latest anecdotal trends in education. Is there a disconnect between “research-based” practices employed in schools and the actual research compiled on human learning?
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.
Young Ontarians are more concerned than older people about the impact of teaching by parttime university professors, according to a poll released Wednesday by the province’s faculty association.
Seventy-one per cent of people between 15 and 17 said they want to see a permanent instructor at the front of the class, compared with 64 per cent of all Ontarians, a result that the group that commissioned the survey says shows support for measures that would improve the working conditions of part-time faculty.
The question of how to hold Ontario’s universities accountable to the needs of students is a relatively complex one. One must be careful to balance the need for academic freedom with the public’s (and especially students’) right to be assured that its considerable investments into postsecondary institutions are being used effectively and appropriately. OUSA’s Accountability paper offers recommendations to improve quality assurance and strategic goal-setting in Ontario’s universities. In essence, it describes students’ vision of to whom, for what, and how universities should be held accountable.
In Quebec, a new law calls for universities to adopt a code of conduct covering faculty-student relationships.
On December 8, the Quebec government passed Bill 151, an act aimed at preventing and combatting sexual violence on the province’s university and college campuses. Among other things, the new law mandates that universities and CEGEPs (Quebec’s colleges) develop standalone sexual violence policies. British Columbia, Manitoba and Ontario all passed similar legislation that came into effect during the past year.
However, Quebec’s new law has generated much discussion because it has a provision requiring postsecondary institutions to adopt policies governing intimate relationships between students and university personnel, including professors and lecturers. Quebec’s minister responsible for higher education and the status of women, Hélène David, said during public hearings on the bill that the government can’t ban such relationships. But, she said universities and CEGEPs would have the authority to do so.
Lessons learned from the presidential transition committee at the University of Saskatchewan.
In 2015, the University of Saskatchewan undertook an extensive presidential transition process to welcome Peter Stoicheff to the role. As two individuals closely linked to this process, here are some lessons we learned that may be of value to colleagues undertaking a similar presidential transition.
The title of this piece notwithstanding, there are really only two main keys to a successful presidential transition: choose the right individual for the office and provide them with the right supports to be successful. Put another way, if you don’t have the right person and supports, the challenges you will face are likely insurmountable and the process will be unpleasant for all involved. If your incoming president tells you that no transition or mentorship is required, that is a signal that they are the wrong choice. Getting the right person is a necessary condition for success. It isn’t, however, sufficient.
We live in challenging times. Ours is an era in which evidence, intellectual inquiry and expertise are under sustained attack. The phrases ‘post truth’ and ‘alternative facts’ have slipped into common use. Agendas have displaced analysis in much of our public debate. And we are all the poorer for it.
In Australia and around the world, we’ve seen the emergence of a creeping cynicism – even outright hostility – towards evidence and expertise. We saw this sentiment in the post-Brexit declaration by British Conservative MP Michael Gove that “the people of this country have had enough of experts”.