Many factors come into play in determining whether students pursue a postsecondary education. At a broad level, costs, parental and peer influences, and academic achievement all play important roles (Frenette 2007). From a policy perspective, however, family income is generally a key target in the student financial aid system. Many programs are in fact designed to make postsecondary education more affordable for youth from lower-income families.
After years of collecting literally millions of documents and hearing the stories of thousands of aboriginal people who
experienced abuse at residential schools, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission is ready to archive this material, much of it brutal and heartbreaking, in the new National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation at the University of Manitoba. Scheduled to open to the public this fall, it will serve as a rich repository and essential historical record of a haunting and tragic chapter of First Nations and Canadian history.
In recent years, Ontario universities have increasingly targeted Indigenous and international students for recruitment. Focusing on three southern Ontario universities, I examine how service delivery for these student groups is organized in space. In light of Henri Lefebvre’s work, I argue that the spatiality of the information hubs created to support them differs significantly, each
being defined in the interactions between institutional assumptions about the student group, the social presence and activities hosted, and the lived experiences of the students utilizing these services. Whereas Indigenous student services are organized as a resource centre to create a separate space for Indigeneity on campuses, international student services take the form of an
experience desk to emphasize rapid integration into the mainstream. Based on interviews with students and staff, I reflect on the differences between the two models to discuss the spatial politics of information hubs within the context of Ontario universities.
Not long ago, a colleague and I were talking about Mount Royal’s plan to become a new, undergraduate, instructionally-focused university. While supportive, he wondered if students would be better served by, and get more value, from a university with an
established reputation, rather than from the new Mount Royal University. He suggested without malice that university reputation was important to students, and thus a degree from a larger research-intensive university would hold more value.
Last week’s release of the annual Maclean’s magazine university rankings (June 19, 2006) suggests that he may have missed the mark. While Canada’s research focused universities are indeed outstanding institutions from which anyone would be proud to have a degree, Canadian universities are experiencing what could be called a reputation-quality paradox: the widening gap between a university’s reputation — based primarily on research-related measures — and the quality of students’ undergraduate experience.
Chrarismatic leadership has been largely overlooked by organizational theorists. In part, the problem can be attributed to the lack of a systematic conceptual framework. Drawing from political science, sociology, and social psychology, this paper addresses the problem by proposing a model linking organizational contexts to charismatic leadership. A series of research hypotheses is offered.
Is your latest career success testimony to your no doubt commendable talents? Connecting career achievements to ability seems obvious – and crucial in today’s competitive academic environment.
Yet we would argue that we are often blind to the connections between ourselves and our work, and seriously underestimate the influence that our mindset has over career success and happiness. This can be demonstrated by looking at two psychological approaches: the “fixed” mindset and the “growth” mindset.
According to the World Health Organization, depression is the leading cause of disability worldwide.
If you haven’t experienced this common mental disorder, it’s likely that someone you know has, though they may not have told you. An estimated 350 million people of all ages suffer from depression, causing them to function poorly at work, at school and in the family.
Today, significant headway has been made in understanding depression and its causes, how depression can be recognized and how to treat it.
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.
In 2008, University of Manitoba professors Stephen Downes and George Siemens taught a course on learning theory that was attended by about 25 paying students in class and by another 2,300 students online for free. Colleague Dave Cormier at the University of Prince Edward Island dubbed the experiment a “massive open online course,” or MOOC.
In last week’s post, we looked at a sample of the discipline-based evidence in support of quizzes with the goal of gaining a better understanding of what it means to say that an instructional practice is evidence-based. We are using quizzes as the example, but this type of exploration could and should be done with any number of instructional practices.
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.
Most of them won’t be celebrating.
Confederation has been described as a turning point for the worse in the lives of First Nations, Inuit and Métis peoples in Canada. Britain’s Royal Proclamation of 1763 recognized certain Indigenous rights. In 1982, Canada’s repatriated constitution “recognized and affirmed” the “aboriginal and treaty rights of the aboriginal peoples of Canada.” However the extent and content of those rights and what they mean to Canada continue to be disputed. Even rights recognized under treaty have not been respected in the post-Confederation era, it’s been well-argued.* There was a steep decline in the vitality of Indigenous cultures and languages, and in people’s well-being, particularly after the Indian Act of 1876. The country’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, looking into the legacy and abuses of the residential school system for Indigenous children, wrote in its 2015 report that “national reconciliation is the most suitable framework to guide commemoration” of Canada’s 150th anniversary, calling it “an opportunity for Canadians to take stock of the past, celebrating the country’s accomplishments without shirking responsibility for its failures.” The following are reflections from six Indigenous scholars at Canadian universities on their vision for a “reconciled Canada.”
With a shift towards performance-based funding for public institutions and growing competition across all of higher education, demonstrating on-time completion and positive student outcomes is a major challenge facing today’s colleges and universities. Modern students and their families are expecting institutions to provide the tools and support to ensure students secure the necessary skills and competencies to prepare them for a successful life.
Institutions across the country are seeing students arrive on campus not academically prepared for college-level coursework. In fact, nearly 60% of students need remediation1. Students often take courses that not related to their degree program. Or, they are unsure about which degree program is even best for their interests and skills. Consequently, over 40% of students who begin college never graduate.
Six Strategic Features that Foster Student Engagement and Persistence
A meta-analysis of 45 studies of transformational, transactional, and laissez-faire leadership styles found that female leaders were more transformational than male leaders and also engaged in more of the contingent reward behaviors that are a component of transactional leadership. Male leaders were generally more likely to manifest the other aspects of transactional leadership (active and passive management by exception) and laissez-faire leadership. Although these differences between male and female leaders were small, the implications of these findings are encouraging for female leadership because other research has established that all of the aspects of leadership style on which women exceeded men relate positively to leaders’ effectiveness whereas all of the aspects on
which men exceeded women have negative or null relations to effectiveness.
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.”
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.[
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.
Abstract
Our qualitative study explored transition in seven Canadian universities—early providers of distance education that transitioned to online learning between 2002 and 2017. We interviewed 16 individuals who were involved in the design, planning, r implementation of online learning. Participants reported their universities experienced significant impacts on organizational structure and roles. Many saw an increased focus on learning and teaching. Access, revenue generation, and technology were identified as drivers of online learning; traditional learning and teaching practices were shifting; challenges experienced included resistance to change and lack of dedicated resources; and effective, visionary leadership was seen to be critically important. We propose that the roots of today’s challenges and opportunities in online learning may be found in the experiences of distance educators who were early adopters.
Keywords: organizational change, distance education, online learning, Canadian universities
THE question of educational priorities becomes increasingly important as contemporary culture becomes more complex and more tasks are thrust upon the school. The identification of priorities is difficult, however, and, in an age of ideological conflict, almost inevitably controversial. Decisions concerning priorities in the school program need to be based on the characteristics of contemporary culture, some conception of ideals and values, and the best available knowledge regarding the dual growth and development and the learning process.