Overview of the Special Report
This Special Report’s prime objective is to help policy decision-makers and educational leaders understand what
today’s classroom technologies are evolving toward, and, more importantly, why. It is hoped that examining current
classroom technologies will spur conversation as to how the practice of teaching is evolving and why that evolution
makes sense.
The most difficult challenge in putting this report together was to adequately address all of the key technologies
deployed in classrooms today. Technologies range from tactile objects in Pre-K to hyper-dense 3D modeling programs in
graduate-level science classes at research universities. They involve devices, interactive software and assessment tools.
Ultimately we chose to group technologies by function as they would be used in the classroom, regardless of curriculum
subject or grade level.
Across the country, many students still lack access to a college option that fits their needs.
It’s a problem that two very different states are looking to solve.
Despite having 114 campuses in California, Governor Jerry Brown wants the state’s community college system to explore expanding its programs through a new online-only college. Meanwhile, Pennsylvania’s education department has given its approval for the creation of a new alternative type of community college to serve the northwestern part of the state.
“Community colleges across the country are suffering from decreasing enrollments, so they’re out there trying to figure out what are the options to reach students who they haven’t reached in the past and retain the ones they have,” said Elisabeth Barnett, senior research scientist at the Community College Research Center at Columbia University.
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. This policy sets out students’ priorities in increasing the visibility of mature students on campus as well as optimizing their educational experience.
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
OUSA’s policy on system growth is a broad based look at the future structure and function of Ontario’s post-secondary system. Throughout the past decade, Ontario has seen unprecedented growth in undergraduate enrolment across universities and colleges, successfully achieving the highest provincial post-secondary attainment in Canada. OUSA is supportive of the
Ontario government’s work towards the goal of a more prosperous society and workforce.
However, these commitments have come at a price to students within the postsecondary system. While per-student operating grants have kept pace with increasing enrolment, provincial funding into postsecondary still falls dramatically behind all other provinces, both in terms of real dollars and percentage of GDP. Meanwhile, universities are experiencing unsustainable rising costs, particularly salaries and pensions, which threaten universities’ and students’ collective futures.
I have been teaching for 20 years, and after a range of adjunct and visiting gigs and two tenure-track jobs (one of which ended because the institution was on the verge of financially collapsing after the economic crash in 2008), I am up for tenure and promotion this year. As virtually every tenure-track professor experiences, I, too, have had to make choices about when, where, how and why to speak out and about what, and have had to weigh issues of silence and voice against the hope and need for job security, health insurance, retirement benefits and the like.
I have had to decide what is worth it and what is not when I have been on the brink of making my viewpoints clear to the campus community and the larger community.
Being untenured is the ultimate manifestation of “You just have to know how and when to pick your battles.” If President Trump could have been an adjunct or tenure-track professor first, perhaps he would be less impulsive and reactive, thinking before tweeting, speaking, banning and dictating.
Our students live in an online world. They’re emotionally and physically attached to their devices and many of their relationships exist within technology. As educators, there are many ways that we have had to adapt to this changing landscape of communication within our teaching, and when I look around my institution, I think we’re doing a remarkable job at keeping up with the rapid pace of change.
Students cheat. Educators struggle to respond, sometimes blaming themselves for not making courses sufficiently interesting or relevant and sometimes engaging in a battle of wits or technologies with their students to prevent cheating. Sometimes we in higher education try to address cheating as a moral problem and sometimes as a pedagogical one. Another way to understand cheating, however, is to borrow an insight from Bill Clinton's 1992 presidential campaign, namely, “It’s the economy, stupid.”
Student financial stability is a critically important facet of the improvement work in which so many community colleges around
the country are engaging. The financial stability data that the Center explores here go hand-in-hand with the guided pathways
reform that is sweeping the country and with Beyond Financial Aid,1 which I developed with Lumina Foundation. Taken together they give colleges a powerful opportunity to ensure that significantly more students complete their journeys with us and move directly into the workforce or transfer to a four-year institution.
In the two months since I chronicled my grief over abandoning my tenure-track dreams, I have been the recipient of all sorts of career advice — solicited and unsolicited. Lots of well-meaning people who’ve never worked outside of academe seem to have thoughts on my transition to nonacademic life.
The ever-unfolding crisis of the academic job market means The Chronicle has offered plenty of advice for Ph.D.s like me on life beyond the ivory tower. There are columns on how to transform a CV into a résumé; how to write a cover letter that doesn’t spend two single-spaced pages discussing our dissertation research; and how to show potential employers the value of
all those skills we’ve been honing in doctoral programs.
Imagine that a student enters an English class to find that it's that most dreaded of days -- graded paper pass-back day. As he receives his paper, his teacher begins to criticize him for his mistakes saying, "You should have known better than to write your thesis that way." What if the teacher went on to add, "That's the third time this month. What am I going to do with you?" before sending him to the office for his mistake?
One day this past March, a middle school student placed a new Air Jordan on his desk at school in Montgomery County, Maryland. The boy, who is Latino, became fixated on the shoe, rubbing the leather and fingering the laces. His teacher, who is white, asked him to put it away, but the boy refused. He became “combative,” according to the teacher, and a tug-of-war ensued. Security was called to remove the shoe.
In schools, a tussle over a shoe or a phone can quickly escalate—sometimes to a suspension or worse—leaving educators, parents, and students wondering what went wrong. As research is finding, these pervasive misunderstandings can be rooted in assumptions and biases about race and culture, and have the potential to alter
the course of students’ lives.
The Ontario Undergraduate Student Alliance (OUSA) is proud to release the 2018 edition of Habitats: Students in Their Municipalities. This annual publication is comprised of a series of case studies on municipal-level topics and issues affecting undergraduate students. Written by students from OUSA’s member institutions, these submissions aim to highlight both successes and challenges in municipalities across Ontario, providing insight into how students feel about issues within their communities.
“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
Interleaving is not a well-known term among those who teach, and it’s not a moniker whose meaning can be surmised, but it’s a well-researched study strategy with positive effects on learning. Interleaving involves incorporating material from multiple class
presentations, assigned readings, or problems in a single study session. It’s related to distributed practice—studying more often for shorter intervals (i.e., not cramming). But it is not the same thing. Typically, when students study and when teachers review, they go over what was most recently covered, or they deal with one kind of problem at a time.
Halfway through this past semester, I sent an email to a student asking him, among other things, about his poor attendance and participation in my course. In response, after some earnest apologies and promises to do better, the student wrote: “My expectation for this class was to learn how to write and read at a college level. But so often, I feel like I am taking a gender issues class and not a writing and reading course — which frustrates me.”
The class in question is called “Writing and Reading,” and is indeed focused on helping students become “college level” writers and readers. But of course, to practice reading skills you actually need to read something. So I designed a course that focuses on feminism and related issues. About half of our readings have something to do with feminism, gender, or sexuality (the other half are readings about the writing process).
Instruction of team skills is quickly emerging as an important and missing dimension of engineering education. This project evaluated a new framework for guiding students in providing self- and peer assessments of their effectiveness in teamwork. This framework is the foundation for a new web-based tool that offers students structured feedback from teammates, along with personalized exercises and actionable strategies that guide targeted learning in the areas thereby identified. Specifically, the study documented in this report investigated whether the feedback framework, when used for intra-team self and peer feedback, increased students’ abilities to learn about and improve their team-effectiveness in executing design projects.
Those of us who work in higher education cannot depend on the small group that we traditionally refer to as the leaders on each campus to serve our students and our wider communities. It is important to develop the capacity to exercise leadership from any position in a college or university. Improving our institutions requires that everyone, whether in senior posts or supporting roles, uses whatever assignments we have to expand the possibilities for innovation, inclusion and excellence.
aculty dread the grade appeal; anxiety prevails until the whole process is complete. Much has been written about ow to avoid such instances, but the potentially subjective assessments of written essays or clinical skills can be specially troublesome. One common cause of grade appeals is grading ambiguity in which the student and faculty ember disagree on the interpretation of required content. Another cause is inequity, whereby the student feels thers may have gotten more credit for very similar work or content (Hummel 2010). In the health-care field specially, these disagreements over clinical-skills assessments can actually result in student dismissal from the program and may lead to lawsuits.
Background/Context: The increasing number of districts implementing mentoring and induction programs suggests that policymakers are aware of the need to increase the support available to new teachers. The argument underlying many of these programs is based, at least partly, on assumptions about beginning teachers’ emotional responses to their work. Yet while considerable research has studied the effects of induction programs, few researchers have rigorously collected data on how beginning teachers’ affective experiences seem to impact their career plans.
New analysis offers more evidence against the reliability of student evaluations of teaching, at least for
their use in personnel decisions.