More than 50 doctoral programs in the humanities and social sciences won’t be admitting new students in the fall of 2021 — a response to the pandemic and ensuing economic turmoil. It’s a sort of financial triage to help the programs devote funding to their current students, many of whom will be delayed in completing their degrees because of the disruptions. Suspending admissions for a year, some administrators say, will also allow them to reimagine their doctoral curricula to account for the flagging Ph.D. job market.
It’s now simply a given among student affairs professionals that parents will be involved in their children’s lives at
university.
John Hannah notes, with a laugh, that his kids are “nauseatingly close to postsecondary age.” The father of two will soon watch as his teenagers begin the exciting but often bureaucratic and stressful journey of applying to university. Mr. Hannah must make a tough call: how much, exactly, should he hand-hold, guide and support them during this pivotal step towards adulthood?
This research explores how the connections between qualifications and work can be improved to help strengthen educational pathways and occupational outcomes. This working paper is an initial examination of what is known about pathways in tertiary education as well as the loose associations between vocational qualifications and the jobs graduates do. The next stage of the research will explore these pathways in more detail through interviews with tertiary students, graduates, teaching staff and managers.
This paper is part of a wider three-year program of research, ‘Vocations: the link between post-compulsory education and the labour market’, which is investigating both the educational and occupational paths that people take and how their study relates to their work. This particular paper looks at these pathways within and between VET and higher education.
It’s been nearly three years since I was a fellow in the American Council on Education’s flagship leadership-training
program, yet I still reflect on what I learned there.
A central benefit of the program is the opportunity to spend time with a cross section of senior administrators from a broad array of institutions. During my fellowship, I made a point of meeting presidents and chancellors who were widely regarded as successful. I met more than 40 such CEOs via the program, and they were as different as the institutions they led. But from our conversations, some key similarities emerged in how they succeed at their jobs.
PowePoint presentation.
Ken Coates is a Munk Senior Fellow with the Macdonald-Laurier Institute and co-author of What to Consider If
You’re Considering University. Douglas Auld is a professor of economics at the University of Guelph.
As students at colleges and universities across the country head back to class, the nation’s media have been filled with familiar debates about tuition fees, student debt, careers and government funding. As the debate goes on, universities, colleges and polytechnical institutes will defend their work, governments will laud the contributions of postsecondary institutes to Canada’s so-called innovation agenda, and student organizations will demand lower fees. This is all predictable, producing more heat than light in the process.
The need for online and blended programs within higher education continues to grow as the student population in the United States becomes increasingly non-traditional. As administrators strategically offer and expand online and blended programs, faculty recruitment and retention will be key. This case study highlights how a public comprehensive university utilized the results of a 2012 institutional study to design faculty development initiatives, an online course development process, and an online course review process to support faculty participation and retention in online and blended programs. Recommendations based on this case study include replicable strategies on how to increase faculty participation and retention in online and blended programs using collaboration, support, and ongoing assessment. This case study is a compendium to the 2012 Armstrong institutional study highlighted in the article "Factors Influencing Faculty Participation & Retention In Online &Blended Education."
Chloe’s boyfriend hit her so hard she suffered a concussion, permanent hearing loss and, according to her psychologist, post-traumatic stress disorder. She says what Concordia University in Montreal did to her was worse.
Chloe, who asked that her real name not be used, was a first-year student at Concordia in September 2014 when her boyfriend, whom she’d been dating for a little over six months, punched her repeatedly in the head.
Her neighbours called the police; he was arrested and charged with assault. Chloe says the man, also a Concordia student, assaulted her twice more on campus: the first time choking her and the second hitting her in the buttocks so hard it left a bruise. After the second incident, he was arrested again and charged with violating court-imposed conditions restricting his ability to contact her.
Life after high school comes with a unique set of lessons in financial management. Whether studying full-time, starting an apprenticeship or renting your first place, developing smart financial habits now can lead to a more secure future.
With so many financial options available to students and young adults, it's important to learn how to manage money sensibly to build a strong credit record and limit additional debt.
Have you heard comments like this about online learning courses from faculty colleagues or students?
“I am not sure what we are supposed to do when...”
“There is no interaction, no feeling of belonging, no presence – I didn’t want to read an encyclopedia, I wanted to
learn!”
“I hated this course. PowerPoints, a disembodied voice at the end of the phone lecturing…”
Even well intentioned designs can go wrong.
Some online courses are poorly thought through and designed and do not reflect what we know about adult learning,
student engagement and learning outcomes, the importance of interaction and feedback and the need for presence. In fact, a number of courses are designed as replicas of classroom courses rather than as courses purposely designed for an online learning environment: what works in a classroom may or may not work online.
In his 1903 essay, “The Ph.D. Octopus,” William James lamented the rapid expansion of American graduate education, which had become a “tyrannical Machine with unforeseen powers of exclusion and corruption.” It produced neither intelligent scholarship nor good teachers but instead fostered a culture of fear among young scholars, who were taught to see failure of the doctoral exam as “a sentence of doom that they are not fit, and are broken-spirited men thereafter.” James found fault with administrators’ quest for prestige and hypercredentialed faculty, but he also assigned the professoriate a share of the blame. “We of the university faculties,” he wrote, “are responsible for creating this new class of American failures, and heavy is the responsibility.”
In an earlier piece, our team described a dashboard that serves as an early-warning system of indicators that can show when an academic unit is on the brink of dysfunction -- or, even worse, already mired in it. We developed that resource, the Academic Unit Diagnostic Tool (AUDiT), primarily with administrators in mind, although entire departments have come to use it over time.
Our project has worked with department-level and more senior university leaders to explore how to use this diagnostic tool to shape strategies for intervention before they become debilitating. In talking with those leaders, we have found that while every department has distinct features, the broad outlines of what constitute healthy departments and dysfunctional ones fall into identifiable patterns.
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).
In response to sweeping curriculum re-design prompted by the Common Core State Standards (CCSSO, 2010), today’s high school English teachers are in search of texts to help them shift from programs dominated by literary analysis to ones well-versed in rhetorical analysis, in which teachers instruct students to read and write arguments using a rhetorical approach. Jennifer Fletcher’s new book, Teaching Arguments: Rhetorical Comprehension, Critique, and Response, gives English teachers unfamiliar with the classical tradition of rhetorical strategies a manageable yet thorough introduction to teaching and learning for argumentation.
Think back to your first few years of teaching. If you’re like most educators, you probably made your share of mistakes. To be sure, we all do things differently now than we did when we were first starting out. Thank goodness for that!
When Faculty Focus put out a call for articles for this special report on teaching mistakes, we really didn’t know what to expect. Would faculty be willing to share their earlier missteps for all to see? Would the articles all talk about the same common mistakes, or would the range of mistakes discussed truly reflect the complexities of teaching today?
There hasn’t been a lot written recently about test anxiety, but that doesn’t mean it’s no longer an issue for a significant number of students. Those of us who don’t suffer from test anxiety—and I’m betting that’s most faculty— can find it hard to be sympathetic. Life is full of tests, and students need to get over it. Besides, if students have studied and prepared, there’s no reason for them to feel excessively anxious about a test.
School-level conditions nnd school leadership, in particular, arc key issue, in effort.'> LO change instruction. While new organizational structures and new leadership roles maner to instructional innovation, what seems mot critical is how leadership practice is undcrrnken. Yet, the practice of cbool leadership bas received limited attention in the research literature. Building on activity theory and theories of d1srribun:d cognition, this paper develops a disrrihute<l perspective on school leadership as a fromc for studying leadership practice, arguing that leadership practice i; constituted m the mteracuon of school leaders, followers, and the situation.
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.
On the surface, learning objectives don’t seem all that complicated. You begin with an objective or you can work backwards from the desired outcome. Then you select an activity or assignment that accomplishes the objective or outcome. After completion of the activity or assignment, you assess to discover if students did in fact learn what was proposed. All that’s very appropriate. Teachers should be clear about what students need to know and be able to do when a course ends. But too often that’s where it stops. We don’t go any further in our thinking about our learning objectives. There’s another, more challenging, set of questions that also merit our attention.
Women who start college in one of the natural or physical sciences leave in greater proportions
than their male peers. The reasons for this difference are complex, and one possible contributing factor is the
social environment women experience in the classroom. Using social network analysis, we explore how gender influences the confidence that college-level biology students have in each other’s mastery of biology. Results reveal that males are more likely than females to be named by peers as being knowledgeable about the course content. This effect increases as the term progresses, and persists even after controlling for class performance and outspokenness. The bias in nominations is specifically due to males over-nominating their male peers relative to
their performance. The over-nomination of male peers is commensurate with an overestimation of male grades by 0.57 points on a 4 point grade scale, indicating a strong male bias among males when assessing their classmates. Females, in contrast, nominated equitably based on student performance rather than gender, suggesting they lacked gender biases in filling out these surveys. These trends persist across eleven surveys taken in three different iterations of the same Biology course. In every class, the most renowned students are always male. This favoring of males by peers could influence student self-confidence, and thus persistence in this STEM discipline.