For college and university presidents, the process of apologizing after high-profile missteps can seem to take as long as a tortoise walking a mile.
As a result, the actions Wednesday of University of California, Irvine, Chancellor Howard Gillman stand out as noteworthy. Days after news broke that the university revoked admission offers from 499 students, Chancellor Howard Gillman issued a public statement offering a personal apology. The university would admit all accepted students except for those who dropped below its academic standards, he said.
The relative speed and decisiveness with which Gillman acted raise the question of why more university presidents don’t step in so swiftly. Higher education’s recent history is littered with instances of leaders who seemingly hesitated to offer forceful apologies. Instead of pleasing the public by uttering two little words and a promise to fix
things, such presidents have been seen as incompetent, stonewalling or hemming and hawing.
The classroom is a non-stop hub of feedback: test grades, assignment scores, paper comments, peer review, individual conferences, nonverbal cues, and more. Feedback is essential for student learning.
Still, students’ ability to process and use feedback varies widely. We have some students who eagerly accept feedback or carefully apply rough draft comments, while many others dread or dismiss their professors’ notes or reject exam grades as “unfair.” Although feedback is integral to our classrooms and work spaces, we often forget to teach students how to manage it.
Teaching is a critical and extensive part of academic life, yet pedagogical training for academics is still rare (Britnell et al., 2010; Evers et al., 2009). Inadequate pedagogical education for academics has multiple negative effects: for the university, it can necessitate expensive remedial action; for individual academics, it negatively affects job satisfaction and, in rare cases, achievement of tenure; and for students, most importantly, it impedes their learning (Nyquist, Abbott, Wulff & Sprague, 1991). Nevertheless, although formal educational development programs for faculty members and graduate students have multiplied in the last 40 years across the English-speaking world, they are still not the norm in North America. When surveyed, more than half of faculty members report a desire for help with teaching and learning issues from their local teaching and learning centres
(Britnell et al., 2010; Evers et al., 2009). Well-planned, intensive, long-term education and training programs are most beneficial, though even a small amount of training can make a difference by improving student perceptions of teaching quality (Dimitrov et al., 2013; Dalgaard,1982; Bray & Howard, 1980).
How often have you thought, “My people always tell me what’s really going on.”
Hundreds of leaders have told us that their followers are open with them. These leaders believed that they were getting honest feedback and were being asked the tough questions. Unfortunately, this is rarely true. In fact, we’ve come to think of this
common belief as a myth—a myth consistent with the concept of seduction of the leader, which was introduced to us more than twenty-five years ago by our colleague Dr. Rod Napier.
Every day, students consume hundreds of words on their iPads, mobile phones, Chromebooks, and Kindles. Increasingly, educational publishers are delivering curriculum on these devices, including several start-ups focused on getting informational texts and news stories into students' hands. But fundamentally, is reading online different from using the old class copies of Ethan Frome or The Federalist Papers?
As it turns out, what we don't know outweighs what we do know about how people comprehend texts on a digital
screen rather than on the printed page, a new research review concludes.
The first “teaching machine” was invented nearly a century ago by Sydney Pressey, a psychologist at Ohio University, out of spare typewriter parts. The device was simple, presenting the user with a multiple-choice question and a set of answers. In “teach mode,” the machine would advance to the next question only once the user chose the correct answer. Pressey declared that his invention marked the beginning of “the industrial revolution in education”—but despite his grand claims, the teaching machine failed to gain much attention, and soon faded into obscurity.
Presidential terminations and resignations are nothing new, even in the staid world of academia. Yet, rarely have they played out in so public a manner as the abrupt departure of president Arvind Gupta at the University of British Columbia in the summer of 2015 or the messy dismissal of Ilene Busch-Vishniac as president of the University of Saskatchewan a year earlier. Quebec had its own drama in May 2015, with the resignation of Nadia Ghazzali, rector at Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières, following a critical report by Quebec’s auditor general. All three leaders left before completing their first mandates.
Amidst the turmoil, Peter Stoicheff was named the 11th president of U of S, a position he took up in late October 2015. A former English professor and a classical guitar composer with two recordings to his name, Dr. Stoicheff had served as dean of the college of arts and science at U of S for four years and knew the internal workings of the institution and its culture well. But there was a lot he didn’t know, he readily admits, and that weighed on him.
In recent years, we’ve been exposed to increasing amounts of headlines about the possibility of machines becoming more intelligent than human beings, and even wresting control over the planet from us entirely. These threatening predictions, which may or may not yet come true, are the result of significant developments in the computer science field called artificial intelligence (also known as AI).
Until a couple of years ago, Emma Thompson thought she would study theatre or music in university. She had been involved in musical theatre and decided to attend a specialized Toronto arts high school.
But in grade 11, a physics teacher sparked her interest in science. He helped her look for summer internships and choose the kind of high-school courses top engineering or science programs would require. So this fall, Ms. Thompson applied to half a dozen such university programs and is now waiting to hear which have accepted her. Already, Ryerson University has offered early admission.
PowerPoint Presentation
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.
All willing and qualified students in Ontario must be able to access and excel within Ontario’s post-secondary education system. This is a foundational principle of OUSA’s policy and advocacy work. We believe universities are currently underserving students with disabilities and that this needs to change.
In support of this change, we conducted an exploratory primary research study during September and November 2015. We intended to learn about the lived experiences of attending university in Ontario for students who identify as having one or more disabilities. Specifically, we wanted to investigate the challenges associated with persistance and graduation. This report will start by presenting the external research on which this project is based, move on to describe the methodology, and end by presenting and discussing the findings.
Educational research shows that close student-faculty interaction is a key factor in college student learning and success. Most literature on undergraduate mentoring, however, focuses on planned programs of mentoring for targeted groups of students by non-faculty professionals or student peers. Based on the research literature and student and faculty testimony from a residential liberal arts college, this article shows that unplanned “natural” mentoring can be crucial to student learning and development and illustrates some best practices. It advances understanding of faculty mentoring by differentiating it from teaching, characterizing several functional types of mentoring, and identifying the phases through which a mentoring relationship develops. Arguing that benefits to students, faculty, and institutions outweigh the risks and costs of mentoring, it is written for faculty who want to be better mentors and provides evidence that administrators should value and reward mentoring.
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.
Question (from "Luanne"): I’m in a bullpen office with half a dozen adjuncts, some of us sharing desks, all of us crowded, overworked, and demoralized. But that’s not what I’m writing about.
"Dana" manages to make it so much worse with his chronic complaining. Every day there’s a new crisis — noisy plumbing, bad drivers, barking dogs. He hates the weather in our part of the country, and despises the local politics. His students, he rails, are all morons. And we, his colleagues, will never measure up to the world-class professors he knew at his Ivy League grad school.
He’s known as "Dana the Complainer" and making fun of him behind his back is a common pastime. I’m not happy with that. (I’m probably called "Luanne the Pollyanna.") I can’t get any work done, with his fuming and stomping around.
Holidays are the worst, when he scolds the staff members about Christmas stuff on their desks. (They’re mostly single moms from the small Appalachian towns near us, and they have to be polite, no matter the provocation). I agree that religion doesn’t belong in the university. But I also believe in tact, which is a foreign concept to Dana. He loathes "mindless politeness" and values "people who speak their mind, no matter what."
How can I deal with him? Our college pays so little that I can’t even hope he’ll be fired. There’s no line of people wanting his job.
The not-for-profit (NFP) and charitable sector in Canada represents an average of 8.1 percent Gross Domestic Product (GDP), employs over 2,000,000 people and boasts over 170,000 NFP organizations, of which 85,000 are registered charities (Imagine Canada, 2012-2013). While from a donor perspective, Canadians gave approximately $10.6 billion in 2010 (Turcotte, 2012). In Ontario, there are over 46,000 NFPs, contributing over $50 billion to the GDP and engages over 5 million volunteers annually (The Partnership Project: Strengthening Ontario’s Not-For-Profit Sector, 2011). From a post-secondary education perspective, Canadians donated $117 million to “Universities and Colleges” and $309 million to “Education and Research” in 2010, totaling $426 million dollars. This represents 4 percent of the $10.6 billion donated (Turcotte, 2012). These two categories were combined in order to account for higher education institutions that teach, research and provide other educational services such as continuing education and vocational training. While the distribution of these funds between all individual institutions is not readily available, the author’s analysis of tax return information between universities and colleges in the Greater Toronto
Area (GTA) reveals the universities dwarf the colleges in acquiring these private dollars. The author has compiled a chart, based on 2010 CRA returns for universities and colleges in the GTA which further illustrates the disparity between these institutions. The following chart compares university and college fundraising results (Appendix A).
Study explores faculty members' views on scholarly communication, the use of information and the state of academic libraries and their concerns about students' research skills.
Survey of counseling center directors finds continued high demand from students for various conditions. Data show centers are diversifying clinical staffs, a demand of many minority student protests.
“Are you keeping us for the whole time today? Because I need to leave in 20 minutes,” asked a student with a baffled expression on his face. As I looked at him, I wanted so badly to explain: Of all the ways you could have chosen to introduce yourself on the first day of class, that was not the optimal one.
As industries evolve and demographics change, the need for education continues to grow.
We, as a global society, spend quite a bit of money on higher education – BMO Capital Markets estimates that the United States alone spends approximately US$1.7 trillion on educational services – including about US$600 million on post-secondary education – and GSV Advisors estimates that worldwide spending is quickly approaching US$5 trillion.
That’s a lot of cash. And yet, as we spend more money on education, and as universities create new degree and certificate programmes, employers are asking for graduates with different skills than the ones we teach and some students struggle to get jobs, leaving many unemployed or underemployed.