For university of British Columbia English professor Miranda Burgess, the advantages of interdisciplinary studies
might be summed up in the career path of just one of her Arts One program students. After completing a double
major degree in English literature and engineering, she said, "he went on into the startup world, helping design an
app that optimizes user experience while walking through a city. The possibilities are really wonderful."
Prospective university students not yet sure which profession, vocation, or field of study is right for them, could
consider interdisciplinary studies programs.
The concept of “disability” should be interpreted in broad terms including both present and past conditions as well as subjective components based on perceptions of disability. These subjective components determine disability in relation to individuals’ interactions with their environment: in the ways buildings are constructed, in the performance standards used to assess individuals, and in the ways individuals are expected to engage in daily activities. This interpretation of disability
is referred to as a “social model.” This model places responsibility for overcoming accessibility barriers onto entire communities. This OUSA policy paper uses a social model of disability to offer recommendations that ensure all willing and qualified students in Ontario are able to access and excel within the post-secondary education system.
Teaching and learning. For decades, we focused almost exclusively on the teaching side of things. More recently, we’ve been paying attention to learning, and that’s a good thing. However, we shouldn’t be thinking about one without the other—they’re both important and inseparably linked.
Baylor University’s newly named president, Linda A. Livingstone, has had a long career in higher education. But there’s one position that’s not on her résumé: provost.
Increasingly, that’s not an unusual step to skip, according to a report, released on Wednesday, that analyzed 840 college presidents’ CVs. While serving as provost was once a clear steppingstone on the way to the president’s office, many deans are now moving straight into the top job, according to the report, which was issued by Deloitte’s Center for Higher Education Excellence and the Georgia Institute of Technology’s Center for 21st Century Universities.
This report examines time to degree completion for a cohort of students who earned an associate degree as their first and only postsecondary degree or a bachelor’s degree as their first four-year degree between July 1, 2014, and June 30, 2015. Overall, the average time enrolled for associate and bachelor’s degree earners was 3.3 years and 5.1 years, respectively. However, as the report shows, the time required for successful degree attainment could be influenced by the pathway the student followed as well as by factors, such as stop outs and less than full-time enrollment status.
Teaching with digital and social technologies often produces stress and tension for teachers and students alike, but I suspect much of that comes from an unclear explanation of why a particular tool is being used and comfort, or lack thereof, with its use. Digital and social technologies are attractive in many ways and we can get excited about working with them, especially in this era where students are dubbed "digital natives." But these tools require we think about their purpose, method, and audience just as carefully as when we design an essay prompt, a problem set, or any other assessment exercise.
Good boards ask good questions, and great boards ask great questions. The ability to ask meaningful questions is an important skill in the boardroom and fundamental to effective governance. Said the chairman of Bain & Company, Orit Gadiesh, in a 2009 Harvard Business Review interview, “The most distinguished board is useless and does a real disservice to the organization, in my view, if the people on it don’t ask the right questions. If you’re not asking questions, you’re not doing your job.”
How many friends have you got, and how many people do you know? If you use social media such as Facebook and Twitter you can probably quantify these things quite readily, but the answers will be wildly inaccurate as we all routinely overestimate these things.
What is more, the answers will be irrelevant to your work as an academic. We are all quite naturally obsessed with what our friends and acquaintances think of us and we crave evidence of the esteem in which we are held.
Graduates themselves are often unsure of where to look for opportunities outside academe.
Valerie Walker admits it wasn’t so long ago that she was “that grad student” wondering what the heck she was going
to do if she didn’t stay in academia. After graduating in 2009 with a PhD in physiology from McGill University, she
said she was “open to options.” She just didn’t know what those options were.
Higher education enrolment rates across the world have soared in recent years, but there is little evidence of celebration.
In the UK, September’s news that nearly 50 per cent of English under-30s are now entering higher education for the first time in the £9,000 fee era was quickly overshadowed by figures obtained by the MP David Lammy revealing that 13 University of Oxford colleges made no offers at all to black students between 2010 and 2015. Days earlier, the sector’s higher education watchdog, the Office for Fair Access (Offa), had called for universities to make “fundamental changes” in pursuit of the “further, faster progress we badly need to see”.
A couple of weeks after the end of my first semester of teaching as the instructor of record, I received "the packet" in my campus mailbox — an interoffice envelope stuffed with course evaluations from my students. Those evaluations mattered a lot to me at the time, as I was still figuring out this whole teaching thing. Was I doing a good job? Did my students like the class? And, more selfishly, did they like me?
The Government of Ontario’s Reaching Higher plan was a visionary document that provided needed funding to Ontario’s postsecondary system. However, it was not sufficient to overcome the long history of university under-funding in our province. Its impact was also eroded by unanticipated increases in enrolment and the current economic downturn.
Mindfulness has received significant attention in the empirical literature during the past decade, but few studies have focused on mindfulness in university students and how it may influence problematic behaviours. This study examined the relationships among mindfulness, coping, and physiological reactivity in a sample of university students. Participants completed questionnaires, and skin conductance measurements were collected during an interview where they recalled a personally stressful event. Correlation analyses tested relationships among these variables. There was a negative correlation between substance use and mindfulness. Specifically, those using substances as a coping mechanism were less likely to be mindful and displayed higher physiological reactivity. More mindful individuals were less likely to report misusing substances and were able to calm themselves more quickly than their counterparts following a stressful event. Thus, poor outcomes for distressed students may be reduced with mindfulness-based interventions
Résumé
Au cours des dernières décennies, la pleine conscience a été l’objet d’une attention importante dans la documentation empirique, mais peu d’études ont ciblé la pleine conscience chez les étudiants et sa façon d’influencer les comportements problématiques. Cette étude a étudié l’association entre la pleine conscience, les mécanismes d’adaptation et la réactivité physiologique chez un échantillon d’étudiants. En plus de répondre à des questionnaires, les participants ont dû passer une entrevue où il leur fallait raconter un souvenir personnel particulièrement stressant pendant qu’on mesurait leur conductance cutanée. Des analyses de corrélation ont évalué les liens entre ces variables. Ainsi, on a dénoté une corrélation négative entre l’utilisation de substances nocives et la pleine conscience. Plus précisément, les participants qui avaient consommé des substances nocives comme mécanisme d’adaptation avaient moins tendance à posséder des traits conscients, et ont démontré une réactivité physiologique plus élevée que les autres étudiants. Les gens plus pleinement conscients avaient moins tendance à utiliser des substances nocives, et étaient capables de se calmer plus rapidement que leurs pairs après un événement stressant. Par conséquent, des interventions basées sur la pleine conscience pourraient aider les étudiants stressés à ne pas adopter de comportements problématiques.
If we see a colleague with a fever, we say “go home and rest.” Why can’t we treat mental illness with the same understanding?
Today, I want to revisit the story David told in his last post. Someone he knew collapsed, became addicted to crystal meth and ended up homeless. We all wonder after such a story – could this have been prevented? Overall, it is difficult to provide a single answer and there is no one person to blame but I hope that after reading the list below, you will feel like you can help (even if it is only in a small way).
College and university leaders have been consumed since last summer with trying to understand public attitudes about them, as surveys and studies -- like this and this and this and this -- have delivered evidence of growing skepticism and doubts about the value of what consumers and society get from higher education.
Gallup injected yet more data into the mix Friday, with a new survey that both reinforces the idea that higher education has seriously alienated white male Americans without a degree and underscores that people think very differently about the topic depending on the words you use.
At least one university has explicitly restricted students’ use of editors for their assignments.
Over the last several years, staff members at the Centre for Academic Communication at the University of Victoria
reported to administrators some curious conversations taking place around editing. The centre offers free services
to students to assist them with reading comprehension and writing, but staff members are instructed not to correct
students’ work, only pose questions. Students, however, had different expectations and complained when centre
staff wouldn’t “fix up” their papers.
Professors, too, misunderstood the role of the centre; some sent students there because they wanted staff to
improve their students’ work. What’s more, the centre received calls from parents asking how much editing they
could do on their children’s papers without it being considered cheating.
A Q&A with Peter Cornish of Memorial University on the Stepped Care model, which he hopes will get everyone on campus to be part of the support system for those dealing with mental health issues.
In 2014, Peter Cornish helped the Student Wellness and Counselling Centre at Memorial University launch the Stepped
Care program. With this model, the level of intensity of care is matched to the complexity of the condition. When someone
says they are stressed, or they are not feeling happy, then society tends to say, “Okay, go see a psychologist,” said Dr.
Cornish, who is director of the counselling centre. However, not everyone needs to see a therapist all of the time. The Stepped
Care model brings in many other “low intensity” options for the patient that are readily available in the community, but which
we’re often not making use of. University Affairs sat down with Dr. Cornish to find out more about the Stepped Care model and
why universities should consider it.
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.
The convenience and flexibility of the online learning environment allows learners to develop new skills and further their education, regardless of where they live. However, for all of its benefits, online learning can sometimes feel isolating for students and faculty. The question is: how do you build a sense of community in your online courses? One approach involves cultivating more interaction—between you and your students and among the students themselves. Here are five practical tips for increasing the human connection in your online classrooms.
Stephen Lake, co-founder and CEO of Thalmic Labs, and Sarah Prevette, founder and CEO of Future Design School, are directors of Communitech
Ira Needles had an appointment that he wasn’t going to miss 60 years ago. Something was on his mind, something grand and disruptive. His test audience was a meeting of the Kitchener-Waterloo Rotary Club on August 27, 1956.
Needles, the president of B.F. Goodrich Canada Ltd., issued a challenge to Canadian universities and industries: if Canada was to meet its ambitions to the end of the century, it needed to find another 150,000 engineers and technicians.
He spelled out the solution – the tight integration of classroom learning with on-the-job experience – in the Waterloo Plan, which became the blueprint for co-operative education at the founding of the University of Waterloo in 1957.