As dean, I traveled to San Francisco a few years ago with most of my college’s faculty members and doctoral students for a national conference in our field. I didn’t rent a car, because everything on the agenda — leadership meetings and donor visits — was within
walking distance of our hotel. Then a major donor from a faraway suburb called and wanted to meet near his home.
Whenever I teach “Introduction to University Life” to freshmen, I ask them at the end of the term to think about what advice they would give their rookie selves, now that they have weathered their first semester in college. It’s a revealing exercise and I share the results with the next class to demonstrate that everyone struggles with this transition. The same goes for a very different transition — from faculty member to administrator.
With a new academic year fast approaching, I’d like to provide a similar reflection based on my experiences both as a department chair and a dean (though I’m a few years past my first year in administration!). This advice is both for those finishing their first year in an administrative position and for those preparing to make the transition.
The more than one million undergraduate students heading to Canadian universities this fall will benefit from innovative approaches to teaching and learning, including more opportunities for experiential learning. After graduation, they’ll enjoy
higher earnings and better employment outcomes than those without degrees.
There is nothing new in the role popular culture plays in issues of young people and identity. Few people reading this chapter did not, at some point, present their identities or claim their affiliations through displays of popular culture content or preferences. Beatles or Rolling Stones? Tupac or Biggie? Star Wars or Star Trek? Halo or World of Warcraft? Sex in the City or Grey’s Anatomy? We have all argued, shared, reminisced, disdained, or delighted in performing our identities through popular culture and using it to gauge potential friends or possible adversaries.
When this semester started, I spent the first two weeks tracking down students — via email and other methods — so that I could invite them to use the digital tools I’ve assigned for my online survey course on U.S. history. I could have just sent emails to their university accounts but, in my experience, most students hardly ever check their campus email. Getting the address that they do check was the first step in trying to bring my course to where students live their already-busy digital lives.
Introducing education into their digital lives sometimes requires teaching students how to use new web tools. For example, I’ve found a messaging app called Slack to be much more effective than any existing learningmanagement system discussion board. A key reason why: It has a cell phone app that notifies users of messages at the very top of their screens. I certainly don’t expect students to respond to class messages instantly, but those notifications serve as a constant reminder: You are part of an online class, and that class requires your eventual participation.
We have all been there.
Midnight before an exam in the university library trying to memorize the key concepts of a semester’s worth of work. We write the exam. We leave the room. The concepts leave our mind. The cycle continues: record, memorize, forget. In doing so, we lose something essential to education: critical thought. What happened to challenging assumptions and questioning concepts? What about open-ended questions? What about no-answer scenarios? These notions serve as the core of the Liberal Arts and, yet, most existing courses fail to develop these skills.
Consider this scenario: as an editor of a scholarly journal, you are informed that an anonymous blogger has publicly accused your journal of publishing an article with allegedly numerous ethical violations and acts of misconduct from 20 years before you became editor. Your journal has no archives or records from that long ago, but you are being contacted by current authors and the media to respond. Who ya gonna call? If you are one of the approximately 11,500 members of a voluntary organization called COPE (the Committee on Publication Ethics), that’s probably who you’ll call.
In their own self-interest, departments and faculty should strongly advocate to pay their adjunct faculty as high a per class wage as possible.
I say this after finding out that for teaching one section of introductory fiction writing at College of Charleston, this semester, I will be paid $2650.
I learned this after I taught my first day of class, which should evidence that money is not my personal motive for continuing to teach. I am in the fortunate position of not relying on this work to make my living, and continuing to teach is a way for me to stay connected to work I find meaningful.[
How international university students think about home significantly influences their migration plans upon graduation, according to a new study from the University of British Columbia.
“A lot of research focuses on where international students go to study, but few focus on where they go after graduation,” said study author Cary Wu, a PhD candidate in UBC’s department of sociology and an international student from China. “Our study shows that migration plans for international students are far more complex than this binary of stay or return.”
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.
When a campus crisis occurs, it’s critical that the president and the board are in close communication and have built a sense of trust.
I'll be the first to admit that I haven't been teaching at my best this semester. Oh, there have been some good classes. And I think I'm finally getting a handle on the one group of students who don't want to speak up in class. But in general it feels like I'm going through the motions a little bit, not fully reaching as many students as I have in the past, talking too much from the front of the room. I have a theory as to why this is happening.
This is my fourth semester at the University of Iowa teaching rhetoric to mostly first-year students. After years of adjuncting, it's great to be able to teach the same course again and again. I'm able to learn from my mistakes and improve semester to semester. Even better, prepping for class takes less and less time each semester. I keep an archive of class activities from previous semesters in Scrivener, and I can quickly arrange a few of them to make up a whole class period. It's great.
This paper explores the concept of accountability as it relates to the University of British Columbia. It examines the discourse surround- ing social accountability laid out in the university’s Trek 2010 vision and then juxtaposes this with the private accountability to commercial and government interests as evidenced in other documents and recent university decisions. The paper, thus, concludes that both private and public attempts at accountability are present yet the call to account to a wider social public gets muffled by the vagueness of the goals and, in particular, the appeals to excellence.
When I was 19 and decided I wanted to become a psychology professor, I did so from the comfort of my dorm room, on the window seat across from a decommissioned fireplace. I’d always loved reading, writing, and talking, so what better career for me than academe? I could not have known that my vision of faculty life would become anachronistic by the time I was out
of graduate school.
I am one of an increasingly small group of Ph.D.s whose faculty dreams have been realized. I have a tenure-track job with paid sabbaticals and institutional support for my research. I’ve written a book. But with each passing year, my experiences as a faculty member are less and less the norm. What it means to be a professor has changed for many other Ph.D.s — largely
because academic life and culture is nothing like it used to be.
I got a job offer. Yay! But I only got one offer, and I’m a brand new Ph.D., so I assume I don’t really have the standing to negotiate anything. That’s only for people who have competing offers or amazing records, right?
This is one of the most common misunderstandings about negotiating. Every candidate has the potential to negotiate elements of a job offer. That’s true even if you have no competing offer, and are a brand new Ph.D. The only reason ever to hesitate on this front is if you’ve picked up red flags about the institution being one that possibly rescinds offers.
All post-secondary teachers and students use educational technology– whether for classroom-based, blended or fully online learning and teaching.
This three-part series, Three Pillars of Educational Technology: Learning Management Systems, Social Media, and Personal Learning Environments, explores the Learning Management System (LMS), social media, and personal learning environments – and how they might best be used for enhanced teaching and learning.
This work explores and addresses the programmatic support of doctoral student socialization via
social media.
The Commission for the Future of Graduate Education, the Council of Graduate Schools, and the Educational Testing Service have deemed the study of historically marginalized students as being critical to address vulnerabilities with our approach to supporting these learners and strengthening our national capacity for innovation (Council of Graduate Schools and Educational
Testing Service 2010; Sowell, Allum, & Okahana, 2015). There are many milestones to celebrate regarding the experiences of marginalized students including the increase of racial and cultural diversity among doctoral students and degree completers, and the various programmatic efforts supporting them. Remarkably, the Survey of Earned Doctorates reports that African American doctoral degree attainment has increased 70% between 1993 and 2013 (National Science Foundation, 2015).
However, there is a paucity of literature qualitatively evaluating these students’ experiences as well as ways to engage
programmatic efforts to critically manage the doctoral process. Empirical evidence-based strategies are needed to examine marginalized doctoral student perceptions of their engagement with these programs as well as their usefulness in supporting degree attainment nationally. This commentary aims to identify and explore programmatic efforts supporting the socialization of historically marginalized students with an s the marginalized doctoral fluenced by social movements and the issues being addressed within the context of social media. s the marginalized doctor fluenced by social movements and the issues being addressed within the context of social media.
No one wants their writing to be the subject of ridicule and disdain, but that’s the lot of many academics, whose turgid, clumsy, lumpy prose is deemed unapproachable by readers outside the halls of academe. What’s the harm in writing for the few? Many good ideas that might be of public benefit are cloistered away. The articles in this collection describe what’s wrong with academic prose and how it could be improved.
A generation ago, college administrators eager to enhance their institution’s international profile might have set up a handful of study abroad programs and sought to host a few overseas students each year. These limited initiatives were often delegated to international programs offices that were understaffed and under-resourced. Those days are long since past. On campuses large and small, urban and suburban, public and private, university leaders increasingly understand the importance
of raising the international profile of their institutions and preparing all students with the attitudes, skills, and knowledge that will serve them well in a rapidly shrinking world.
This press release from the Council of Ontario Universities shows that students NOT coming direct from high school now constitute 24% of all new admissions, and enrollments from this sector are increasing faster than those from students coming direct from high schools.
This trend is likely to continue and grow, given the demographics of Canada. Birth rates are low (the City of Vancouver has 60,000 less k12 students than it did 10 years ago, although some of this is due to families migrating to Surrey and other cities/suburbs, where house prices are more affordable), whereas the demands of the workplace and in particular the growth of knowledge-based industries is requiring continuous and lifelong learning.