On June 7, the Ontario voters elected a Progressive Conservative majority government led by Doug Ford. This election outcome has a number of important implications for professors and academic librarians in the province and will pose several challenges and opportunities for the university sector over the next four years.
A number of studies suggest that student evaluations of teaching are unreliable due to various kinds of biases against instructors. (Here’s one addressing gender.) Yet conventional wisdom remains that students learn best from highly rated instructors; tenure cases have even hinged on it.
What if the data backing up conventional wisdom were off? A new study suggests that past analyses linking student achievement to high student teaching evaluation ratings are flawed, a mere “artifact of small sample sized studies and publication bias.”
This paper presents preliminary findings from a pilot study whose purpose was to explore how we, a tenure-track faculty member and a doctoral student, understood and developed our teaching practice when engaged in a formal faculty–student relationship. Using a hybrid of collaborative inquiry and collaborative self-study—which included verbal and written dialogue, interrogation, as well as observation—we sought to understand how that formal faculty–student relationship promoted the development of strong teaching pedagogy. The motivation for this study was a commitment to fostering highquality teaching in undergraduate courses in our faculty of education. Driving this study was the research question: How are we investigating and improving upon our practices as teachers in post-secondary education?
Teens have eagerly embraced written communication with their peers as they share messages on their social network pages, in emails and instant messages online, and through fast-paced thumb choreography on their cell phones. (Lenhart, Arafeh, Smith, & Macgill, 2008)
In our over-stressed world, many health care providers, social workers and caregivers are suffering from slow yet painful burnout. Many of the rest of us, working long hours and raising families, seem to be approaching burnout, too. Sometimes we may feel that we’re too exhausted to keep giving to others, even though giving is a primary source of happiness in our lives.
“FBI Insider: Clinton Emails Linked to Political Pedophile Sex Ring,” declared a blog post just days before the U.S. presidential election.
And earlier this year [2017], an online headline blasted: “BOMBSHELL: Trump and Putin Spotted at Swiss Resort Prior to Election.”
There was only one problem. Neither was true at all. Even the sources were suspect.
The headlines, it turned out, were part of the onslaught of fake news that has proliferated. But for Texas A&M senior Ishanee Chanda, the task of discerning between fool’s gold and gold was a no brainer.
"Critical thinking has allowed me to look at the most recent election and the phenomenon of `fake news' with a careful eye," says Ishanee Chanda
I write this from my office in a department of philosophy somewhere in the northern hemisphere. Beside my computer, the unshorn mug of Harvey Weinstein stares out from the cover of the 23 October edition of Time magazine. Beside his unpleasant mien are three words: Producer, Predator, Pariah.
Academia is no Hollywood, but it is also infected by a hidden epidemic of sexual misconduct. There is at least one sexual predator in every department I’ve studied in, or taught in, over 30 years. This is increasingly being acknowledged, but responses typically focus on teaching students about consent. This is hopelessly naive and dangerous.
As a new semester approaches, the academic's to-do list can fill up pretty fast. All of that course planning you’ve been putting off all summer now seems pretty urgent. Your chair wants a copy of your syllabi by the end of the week. And there’s still the matter of those writing deadlines. I’m here to add one more item to your list. Now is the time — not later — to think about accessibility in your classroom.
For many of us, accessibility is a topic handled by a brief section toward the end of our syllabus — a paragraph detailing the steps a disabled student can take to receive accommodations. Such policies are very much figured as an exception to the norm, an appendix pinned onto the end of the syllabus, as if to say: “Oh yeah, and if you’ve got a disability, we can probably work to find some kind of solution.” For Anne-Marie Womack, assistant director of writing at Tulane University, that way of conceptualizing accessibility is all wrong.
TORONTO -- Ontario's minister of post-secondary education says he's concerned that two publicly-funded Ontario 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.
The Ontario provincial government is spending $4 million on a marketing program aiming to draw students from southern Ontario to colleges in the north.
Sault College president Ron Common says the goal of the program, called Study North, is to attract youth who wouldn't otherwise consider Ontario's six northern colleges as a primary destination.
The Northern Ontario Heritage Fund Corporation funds the program.
The decade since 2004 has brought profound reexamination of the role and results of developmental programs in community and technical colleges around the country. Pushed by the emerging student success and completion agenda, colleges have dealt with intense scrutiny and a demand for the redesign of these programs.
PowePoint presentation.
Question: I’m preparing my job documents for the fall and looking for ways to economize. Can I just write a really short cover letter since all the information I would put in a letter is already on my CV? The cover letter feels redundant.
NO.
And the reason for that is — they are two different documents. They have different functions and are designed to help the search committee ascertain distinctly different things. Summer is a good time to go over the basics of both documents as candidates prepare for a new academic hiring season.
At age 18, Kimberly could no longer come up with a reason to live.
The Toronto university student locked the door to her parents’ garage, stepped onto a stool in the middle of the room and looped an electrical cord around her neck.
“It’s something I couldn’t explain,” recalls Kimberly, who asked that her last name not be published. “I didn’t understand what was going on in my head . . . You want to give up.”
Within seconds, she heard a faint scratching on the garage door. It was her cat.
“He knew something was wrong,” she says. “I took the cord that I wrapped around my neck off and I went inside.”
Two years later, the now third-year student at Ryerson University has been diagnosed with anxiety disorder and depression.
She’s part of what some experts are calling an emerging phenomenon.
The goal of attracting more international students is an increasingly common theme in discussions on the future of post-secondary education in Canada. The goal of making Canada a premiere destination for post-secondary students from around the world has been repeated throughout the past decade by provincial and federal levels of government and leaders in the post-secondary sector from coast-to-coast. “International students in Canada,” the Advisory Panel on Canada’s International Education Strategy noted, “provide immediate and significant economic benefits to Canadians in every region of the country.”1 The panel advocates for a doubling of the number of international students studying in Canada over the span of a decade, from just under 240,000 in 2011 to over 450,000 in 2022.
“Wanted: former academic. Must have PhD in the humanities and at least two years of must be conversant in Chicago Manual ofStyle. Familiarity with plagiarism policies and competence in Blackboard a plus.”
Many higher education institutions use student satisfaction surveys given at the end of a course to measure course and instructor quality. But is that really a true measure of quality? All things being equal, an instructor who teaches a rigorous course will likely score much lower than an instructor whose course is a little less demanding.
Then there’s the whole timing of the satisfaction surveys. For the most part, students are simply glad the course is over (even if they liked it) and put little thought or time into completing the survey. Unless of course they know they failed, in which case you will get a detailed assessment of how you are boring, inflexible, out of touch, or otherwise unfit to teach.
One of the most frequent questions faculty ask about the flipped classroom model is: “How do you encourage students to actually do the pre-class work and come to class prepared?”
This is not really a new question for educators. We’ve always assigned some type of homework, and there have always been students who do not come to class ready to learn. However, the flipped classroom conversation has launched this question straight to the top of the list of challenges faculty face when implementing this model in their classrooms. By design, the flipped model places more emphasis on the importance of homework or pre-class work to ensure that in-person class time is effective, allowing the instructor and the students to explore higher levels of application and analysis together. If students are unprepared, it leads to frustration, stress, and anxiety for everyone.
Graduate school, the job market, the tenure track, and every other stage in an academic career are so fraught with challenge that you cannot afford to dawdle too long on foolish ventures or waste time holding out for perfection when "pretty darn good" will do.
The first supreme hurdle — the one that scares off many potential academics and cripples the progress of others — is, of course, the dissertation. What counts as a dissertation and how long you should take to complete it vary across disciplines, institutions, and committees. But that you must complete it — and that others must approve it before you can move on — is essential.
This paper analyzes the incentives induced by a formula to fund universities based primarily on enrolment. Using a simple
game theoretical framework, we argue that the strategic behaviour induced by those formulas is to favour enrollment. We
further argue that if the funding value differs by enrolment type, it introduces incentives to substitute enrolment where most
profitable. If the public appropriations do not follow the outcomes induced by the formula, the incentives introduce a dynamic
inconsistency, and funding per student can decline. We use these results to discuss the 2018 funding formula changes in Québec.
We argue that Québec’s latest reform should reduce substitution effects and increase graduate enrolment. We provide
simulations of the reform’s redistributive effects and show that some universities gain structural advantages over others. Whilst
the reform, on a short-term basis, deploys a mechanism to mitigate these advantages, on a long-term basis the effect introduces
a larger gap between Québec higher-education institutions.
Keywords: university funding, reforms, simulation, induced effects, post-secondary education, game theory