To make the comparison that one should never properly make, Higher Degree Research (HDR hereafter) supervision shares with parenting its status as that topic about which every person has an opinion. Watching other people supervise can be as exacerbating as observing a nonchalant parent whose child is throwing food in a café. When a postgraduate student takes directions that one could never possibly recommend, it is easy to imagine that better training was possible, that bad choices were made at crucial junctures, and that somewhere sits a parent reading the newspaper while the floor gets covered in spaghetti. The neglectful supervisor, like the neglectful parent, is easily viewed as a person of a certain type, such that quotidian discussions of supervision practices easily deteriorate into a moral commentary on personal virtues and vices. Although providing short-lived pious pleasures, the urge to judgment can be damaging to higher degree research cultures. Supervision practices need to be understood not as expressions of a moral disposition (friendly, mean, forgiving) or achievements of profound intelligence (the cult of the inept genius), but as institutionally responsive practices within a
broader tertiary system that remains unclear about what higher degree research should achieve, and apprehensive about what its graduates should aspire to afterwards.
While nearly every day brings news of someone banished from the entertainment industry — Harvey Weinstein, Garrison Keillor, Louis C.K. — the situation in the academy is very different. Only a small number of tenured faculty members have lost their jobs in the wake of allegations of sexual harassment and assault. Of course, this isn’t a result of any lack of allegations. A crowdsourced survey on instances of sexual harassment organized by Karen L. Kelsky is at 1,900 responses and counting.
Campaign co-chair describes ideas being prepared for fall campaign. Among them: getting government out of student lending, requiring colleges to share in risk of loans, discouraging borrowing by liberal arts majors and moving OCR to Justice Department.
While an academic goes about her public online activities, someone calls her a stupid c*nt, tells her they hope she is raped and wishes her a gruesome death. Or maybe they just tell her she is dumb and should get back in the kitchen. Or that she should smile or exercise more. Perhaps they do this in response to an opinion she expressed, or a research paper she published, or perhaps it is simply because of her gender, race or sexuality.
In Canada, the term “visible minority” is used to define one of four designated groups under the Employment Equity Act. The purpose of the act is to achieve workplace equality and to correct employment disadvantages affecting women, Aboriginal peoples, people with disabilities, and visible minorities. Within this context, visible minorities are defined as “persons, other than Aboriginal peoples, who are non-Caucasian in race or non-white in colour.”
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.
Since the mid-1980’s, student unions across Canada and within the United States have been advocating to governments and Universities-alike for increased safety measures for those affected by sexual violence and harassment. Student unions have played a crucial role in creating campus culture and social expectations. We have also been at the forefront of programming and processes around staff training to combat sexual violence, gendered-violence, and sex-based harassment, bystander intervention, and health and protective services. We offer important peer-to-peer and survivor services as well, recognizing that survivors prefer to seek peer support. Therefore we offer much to be listened to on this topic and have been given great opportunities over the past year to speak to some of these issues.
reconceptualizing Cohens politics of deviance, this paper leans on post-structuralist thinkers to develop a conceptualization of the cultural repertoires of marginalized communities, hereafter referred to as deviantly marked cultural repertoires, that places at the center labeled practices of deviance. It is posited that in these labeled deviant cultural practiceswhich are often overlooked, shunned, and ignoredare valuable and me experiences of learning and development.
With the rise in online and hybrid courses at the post-secondary level, many institutions are offering various online learning readiness assessments to students who are considering these instructional formats. Following a discussion of the characteristics often attributed to successful online learners, as well as a review of a sample of the publicly available online readiness surveys, an application of one representative tool is described. Specifically, the Distance Education Aptitude and Readiness Scale was administered in both hybrid and face-to-face sections of beginning post-secondary French across a two-year span. Differences in scores between groups, as well as the relationship between scores and grades are examined.
University campuses across Canada are struggling with a mental health tsunami that is reordering priorities in every
community and educational institution. Dealing with crises and the potential for suicide has altered the lives and agendas of people working in schools, hospitals, municipalities and service agencies, as well as parents and students. If mental health is the problem, suicide and suicide attempts are the outcome that tells us that we have to do better.
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.
Introductory courses can open doors for students, helping them not only discover a love for a subject area that can blossom into their major but also feel more connected to their campus. But on many campuses, teaching introductory courses typically falls to less-experienced instructors. Sometimes the task is assigned to instructors whose very connection to the college is tenuous. A growing body of evidence suggests that this tension could have negative consequences for students.
The practice of shared governance is contested terrain in American higher education. Despite consensus that shared governance is a collaborative approach to decision-making characterized by the distribution of authority across various institutional actors (e.g., faculty, senior administrators, trustees), models and norms of effective shared governance remain elusive. Indeed higher education critics within and beyond the academy often identify the practice of shared decision-making as a major barrier to innovation and fiscal efficiency, two organizational qualities deemed essential for survival in today’s rapidly changing global knowledge economy.
An analysis of more than 2,000 college classes in science, technology, engineering and math has imparted a lesson that might resonate with many students who sat through them: Enough with the lectures, already.
Published March 29 in the journal Science, the largest-ever observational study of undergraduate STEM education monitored nearly 550 faculty as they taught more than 700 courses at 25 institutions across the United States and Canada.
National training packages have become the mandated framework for course delivery in Australia’s vocational education and training sector. Each training package contains: qualifications that can be issued, industry-derive d competencies , and assessment guidelines but do not contain an endorsed curriculum component or learning outcomes. All public and private vocational education and training providers must use training packages, or industryendorsed competencies in cases where they do not exist, if they are to receive public funding for their programs. This article describes the operation of Australia’s national training packages and considers some of their strengths and weaknesses, many of which may be shared by similar
systems elsewhere. Argues that training packages may result in poorer student learning outcomes, and that they may threaten the end of effective credit transfer between the vocational education and training and higher education sectors. Suggests that national training packages are not a good model for other countries and that Australia’s current vocational education and training policy needs to be reviewed.
Losing a faculty member always hurts, but many administrators believe they have little control over whether professors move on. A new effort seeks to provide meaningful data.
The Liberal government is moving to make it easier for international students to become permanent residents once
they have graduated from Canadian postsecondary institutions.
Immigration Minister John McCallum said he intends to launch federal-provincial talks to reform the current Express Entry program, a computerized system that serves as a matchmaking service between employers and foreign skilled workers. Thousands of international students have been rejected for permanent residency because the program favours prospective skilled workers from abroad.
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.
As a minority group on university campuses, the unique needs of mature students can be easily overlooked. It is important that the term “mature students” does not disguise the heterogeneity of this group: “…it is erroneous to speak of ‘the adult learner’ as if there is a generic adult that can represent all adults.” 1 However, amongst this varied group of students, there are common concerns that they share. Mature students need more recognition of the different hurdles they face in achieving success. These can include situational barriers like a lack of time, lack of money, health issues, or dependant care,2 as well as attitudinal or dispositional barriers, including the fear of failure or alienation. Lastly, they also face systemic barriers such as restrictive course offerings and availability of instructors or support services outside of regular business hours. 3 Our Mature Student Policy sets out students’ priorities in increasing the visibility of mature students on campus as well as optimizing their educational experience.
colleges have opened campuses in Saudi Arabia that don’t allow women.
On Wednesday, Colleges and Universities Minister Reza Moridi said decisions on the operation of a
campus, including student composition, are up to each college’s board of governors.
But late Thursday, after a lot of criticism on social media about the male-only campuses, the minister had a
change of heart about Ontario colleges teaching courses that deliberately exclude women.