The wave of upcoming retirements is a myth and PhD numbers have little to do with the academic job
market anyway.
In my last post I took a look at some of the history and context of Canadian universities’ hiring of contract faculty. While I was digging around for information, I couldn’t help noticing the relevance of some of the material to another ongoing debate in higher education: that of the “overproduction” of PhDs. Since “too many PhDs” is a recurring theme in media commentary about
graduate education (e.g. Nature, The Economist), I thought I’d explore the issue in more depth and connect it to some of the research I found. Are we really “producing” too many PhDs, and if so, is this a recent problem?
services and supports for students — a need that continues to grow and must be addressed, says a new report.
The report, released Tuesday, “is highlighting that we are seeing the acceleration of these challenges beyond what
we might have expected to see,” said Linda Franklin, president of Colleges Ontario, which represents the province’s
24 public institutions.
Boundary issues: should a student get a tattoo if it advances her research?
Would you consider getting a tattoo on the basis that it could help you to write your PhD? Or tolerate sexism in order to secure a strong case study for your research?
Such dilemmas faced by doctoral researchers are explored in a recent study that examines the challenges of
conducting qualitative research.
Abstract Research suggests that cultural issues can make or mar the open innovation process. In this paper, we thus aim at identifying organizational culture types that enable and retard the two types of open innovation activities: in-bound and out-bound. Data were collected using the questionnaire survey method from 339 middle and top managers working in the Malaysian high-tech sector.Organizational culture emerged as a huge predictor of open innovation. We found that highly integrative culture enables in-bound open innovation, but does not significantly affect out-bound open innovation. Besides, hierarchy culture is found to retard both in-bound and out-bound open innovation. This paper is probably the first to empirically investigate the role of culture in open innovation. The findings fill an important gap in open innovation theory while practical implications extend to managers interested in open innovation adoption in their organizations.
The news that two publicly funded Ontario colleges are operating men-only campuses in Saudi Arabia feels wrong at first glance.
At second glance, too. There’s bound to be a level of complexity in any business transaction with a repressive country that discriminates against women, among its other human rights sins. Conscious of the yawning gap between professed ideals and entrepreneurial self-interest, we often find it easier to accept the moral contradictions built into real-world relationships as unavoidable and even necessary.
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.”
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.
When approached for a letter in the bleak midwinter of recommendation-writing season, many of us wish for responsible ways to say, like Herman Melville’s Bartleby the Scrivener, “I prefer not to.” Yet in weak or guilty moments, we may accede to a student’s plea and then spend hours racking our brains for something to say.
It’s hard for a scrupulous teacher to resist the fear that, in declining to write a recommendation, you may be torpedoing someone’s professional life. Ultimately, though, a student’s application materials will speak for themselves and the professional world will make its own judgment, fairly or not. Disappointment, even heartbreak, is a reality from which even the deserving can’t always be shielded. And you aren’t obligated to make a case for a student whom you can’t, in good conscience, support.
In contemporary higher education there is a growing demand for academ-ics to increase their publication output. This requirement raises the question of how institutions can best support a sustainable academic writing culture, which is needed to challenge the assumption that all academics know how to write for publication. This case study examines two models used in a Faculty of Education to support writing groups for academic staff. From the analysis of reflective journals, interviews, and field notes, we identified four factors that influence the success of writing groups, as well as six conditions that sup-port the development of sustainable academic writing. We have learned from the study that the success of a writing group is predicated on a collaborative practice that blends relational, communal, and institutional forms of sustain-ability in a purposeful, engaged, and reflexive way.
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.
1. Public support to families with pre-school children can be in the form of cash benefits (e.g. child allowances) or of “in-kind” support (e.g. care services such as kindergartens). The mix of these support measures varies greatly across OECD countries, from a cash / in-kind composition of 10%/90% to 80%/20%. This paper imputes the value of services into an “extended” household income and compares the resulting distributive patterns and the redistributive effect of these two strands of family policies. On average, cash and in-kind transfers each constitute 7 – 8% of the incomes of families with young children. Both instruments are redistributive. Cash transfers reduce child poverty by one third, with the estimated impacts in Austria, Ireland, Sweden, Hungary and Finland performing above average. When services are accounted for, child poverty falls by one quarter and poverty among children enrolled in childcare is more than halved. This reduction is highest in Belgium, France, Hungary, Iceland and Sweden.
One-third of Ontario students in Grades 7 to 12 reported elevated levels of psychological distress, according to a new survey released by the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, a substantial spike since 2013.
The rate jumped from 24 per cent in 2013 to 34 per cent – approximately 328,000 adolescents – in 2015, an increase called very “surprising” by Robert Mann, senior scientist at CAMH and co-lead investigator of the Ontario Student Drug Use and Health Survey.
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
When colleges talk about diverse hiring, much of the focus — and the funding — goes to recruiting and retaining faculty members from underrepresented minority groups. But a program in the works at the University of California at Berkeley is looking at new ways to elevate an overlooked cohort: minority staff in nonacademic areas, like student-affairs administrators and office managers.
Training sessions will be tailored to the experiences of midcareer staff members from minorities. The sessions are aimed at helping participants understand topics like strategic networking, how the university works, and how to negotiate.
As a faculty member for almost 30 years, I have been inspired and motivated by all of the online chatter. It’s made me think about the great teachers I’ve known — and I’ve known many, from kindergarten through graduate school and beyond. Several taught in my department when I served as chair, and I had the pleasure of observing them at work.
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.”
At nearly all colleges and universities, online education is almost never mentioned in academic rules that judge faculty members and determine if they advance. If you teach online, you may do it for extra compensation -- called “overload,” pay above your basic salary -- or for the personal satisfaction of participating in what some believe is the next stage in the evolution of higher education. But teaching online may not be a wise move to further your academic career.
Teaching online can even be a dangerous career move, departing from the comfortable respectability of conventional classrooms for the exotic, suspicious digital world. In the hierarchy of status, if you teach online, do you compromise your position? Will your commitment to scholarship be questioned? Why would you go online when your future depends on publishing results of your research, not engaging in virtual instruction?
The majority of university staff feel that they are overworked and underpaid, and that their careers have a detrimental impact on their relationships with their friends, families and partners.
These are some of the conclusions that can be drawn from Times Higher Education’s first major global survey of university staff’s views on their work-life balance.
Background/Context: Based on archival material, the following paper analyzes the political strategies of the early OECD stakeholders in transforming schooling from a cultural to a technological system and how they were in need of standardizing different existing patterns of thoughts or institutional behaviors in the member countries. The European standardization process observable in the early 1960s, triggered by the OECD, affected the organization of the educational policies on a ministerial level designed to influence the national school systems according to a specific ideology.
It’s easy to think of the Millennial generation, those born roughly between 1982 and 2002, as tech-savvy digital natives ��� and in many ways they are. Immersed in consumer technology since birth, today’s youth has mastered the art of the swipe, the
selfie and social media. So it may come as a surprise that Millennials often lack essential digital skills needed to succeed in the workplace — be it a conventional office setting, an auto mechanic’s shop, or in a tractor on a farm.