During a speech on Thursday, President Trump revealed a striking ignorance of one of the pillars of his country’s educational system. In the course of promoting his infrastructure plan, he, a bit perplexingly, dismissed the country’s community colleges, suggesting he doesn’t know what purpose they serve. “We do not know what a ‘community college’ means,” he told the crowd in an Ohio training facility for construction apprentices, moments after expressing nostalgia for the vocational schools that flourished when he was growing up—schools that offered hands-on training in fields such as welding and cosmetology.
We are often warned against being judgemental. “Judge not, lest ye be judged”, for example, reminds us how vulnerable we are to others’ estimations of us, and how likely those estimations are to be biased.
Nevertheless, we continue to make judgements, both positive and negative, because we have evolved to do so. Human brains have been “domesticated” by our need to live in groups to survive. We assess others carefully, and monitor their views of us; if those views are negative, we may be cast out of the group.
Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are online courses that cater to a huge population. MOOCs have been around for quite some time; however, they have begun to gain importance only in recent years. With technologyinfused classroom instructions on the rise, techno-savvy students with little patience for hour-long (or even longer) lectures and the necessity to earn has led to the popularity of online courses among the student population. The obvious benefits of taking up online courses include, among others, self-paced learning, and learning while earning, and learning from absolutely anywhere. An upcoming form of online learning is the massive open online courses (MOOCs). This paper discusses the concept of MOOCs, their history, and their need in the present scenario. This paper also focuses on the benefits and the possible challenges that MOOCs face.
Happy Thursday, and welcome to Teaching. This week the newsletter is curated by Beckie. First up, Beth shares a scene that stayed with her from a recent reporting trip — and what it means for colleges’ efforts to innovate. Then I’ll fill you in on an effort to improve introductory math, share a list of new books compiled by two of our colleagues at The Chronicle of Higher Education, and run through the highlights of a report on assessing student learning.
I spend most of my days in meetings with graduate students and postdocs, talking about where their careers might go. I jokingly say, “Nobody leaves my office without a networking tutorial.” And it’s true: for Ph.D.s engaged in a nonacademic job search, the concept of networking is omnipresent and unavoidable. Countless resources and articles are available to help novice networkers learn the basics of networking, and everyone knows the best way to become a better networker is to just get out there and network.
After years of taking orders, you finally get to issue them in your first administrative role. You will have the freedom to make your own plans, set your own direction, and surround yourself with people who share your work ethic and point of view. Life is good!
Professors have long been political targets. But a spate of recent threats against scholars -- including two that have led to campus closures -- is raising fresh concerns about safety and academic freedom.
The American Associations of University Professors “is definitely concerned about this trend, which I think is a fair description of what is happening,” said Hans-Joerg Tiede, senior program officer for academic freedom and tenure at AAUP . “We will continue to monitor it and consider what other actions we can take.”
This story begins late last school year, when I was standing in front of my Introduction to Film class, getting set up for the day’s session. The technology in the classroom was often glitchy, so I’d given myself plenty of time. I chatted with my teaching assistant about the new Twin Peaks while logging in to my email to retrieve the PowerPoint I’d sent myself.
That’s when I saw the message from my department with the subject header “2017-2018 Budget Cuts.” “Well, that can’t be good,” I thought and clicked to open it. It began, “Dear Sara, As you might know, the university is in the midst of a significant budget cut across all units for Financial Year 2018, which starts July 1.” And it ended, “Within this context, we unfortunately will not be able to offer the courses that we projected for you in 2017-2018. I am sorry to let you know about this development …”
Raciolinguistics: How Language Shapes Our Ideas About Race brings together work from across several subfields of linguistics and offers a complex, global examination of the connections between race and language. As a whole, this anthology seeks to make sense of our historical moment, a unique time in which “we are constantly orienting to race while at the same time denying the evidence that shows the myriad ways that American society is fundamentally structured by it” (p. 3). This historical moment was concretized in the national consciousness with the election and presidency of Barack Obama. For Smitheran and Alim, Obama’s linguistic choices as he developed a social and racial public identity served as a starting point for their theorizing of race and language, which they began in their first book, Articulate While Being Black: Barack Obama, Language, and Race in the US (2012). In Raciolinguistics, an expanded line of inquiry goes beyond the case of Obama to ask, “what does it mean to speak as a racialized subject?” This question became a topic for several conferences and scholarly movements at UCLA and Stanford, incorporating theoretical threads from race and ethnic studies as well as anthropology. In this text, however, the authors embrace a unique analytical approach, studying race as a sociolinguistic construction on an international scale.
“Parents felt very isolated. They didn’t fit in with the other students or feel welcomed.”
Five years ago, Kayla Madder unexpectedly became pregnant while finishing up a second undergraduate degree at the University of Saskatchewan. After taking eight months off following the birth of her son Amari, she started a master’s degree in animal and poultry science. Still nursing, she and another graduate student friend, also a parent, asked around campus for suggestions on where to breastfeed. “We called around to all of the places that we thought might be able to help us with finding a space and no one really knew. Some suggested using a bathroom, which isn’t safe to breastfeed in, and some suggested using our cars,” she says.
UBC’s “Moments that Matter” course mines departmental expertise to transform a second-year history course into a team performance.
The dull roar of plastic computer keys clicking in the lecture hall at the University of British Columbia stills for a moment as Canadian history professor Bradley Miller flashes a picture onto the screen behind him.
It’s former prime minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau, flamboyantly decked out in a cape, white jacket with a rose pinned to the lapel and a 19th-century dandy’s hat – an incongruous sight at that most high-testosterone of events, the Canadian Football League’s Grey Cup championship of 1970.
Last spring semester, I began experimenting with polling as a way to improve student participation in my classroom. Persuaded by the work of Eric Mazur and others, I started polling my students — using multiple-choice or short-
answer questions — to collect a quick overview of their opinions on whatever we were discussing.
With a mandate to prepare students for the labour market, ‘communication’ figures prominently among the essential employability skills that Ontario’s colleges are expected to develop in students prior to graduation. As a result, many colleges have instituted measures to help shore up the skills of students who are admitted to college yet who do not possess the expected ‘college-level English’ proficiency. Several have addressed this challenge by admitting these students into developmental communication classes, which are designed to build their skills to the expected college level.
Suggestions that universities are hotbeds of radicalism, leading to stifling "political correctness" or "leftist authoritarianism" have been notable in recent media commentaries.
This view is a misleading caricature.
Universities work hard to provide a welcoming environment for students in an increasingly diverse and multicultural Canada. The push for inclusiveness is clearly "liberal" (in the way today's conservatives use the term) insofar as it attempts to respect cultural differences and overcome inequalities and oppressions of the past.
“Watching a (nearly) finished student receive that coveted job offer, whether it’s a faculty position she’s worked so hard for, a position at that top research lab, or a lucrative offer from that hot startup everyone wants to join.”
“Watching one of you students deliver a fantastic talk at a premier conference in front of a packed room of attendees from all over the world.”
“Getting an unexpected thank you note in the mail or an email from a former student, thanking you for that class you taught her six years ago and detailing how it’s changed the trajectory of her life and career.”
“Meeting up with a former student at an academic conference and being introduced to his or her current students getting ready to present their work.”
As a new academic year approaches, universities across Canada are struggling to develop policies in response to the legalization of recreational cannabis. Many uncertainties remain, and while universities differ in how they plan to deal with cannabis on campus, they tend to agree on one thing: it’s complicated.
Improving student outcomes is a primary goal of all postsecondary institutions. This report includes the first set of results for a research project that aims to understand the effectiveness of an intervention designed to improve postsecondary student success.
Student orientation and transition programs constitute an important part of Mohawk College’s Student Success Plan. The college endeavours to facilitate the development of an individualized “Future Ready Plan” for students to ensure they are prepared for their college experience by organizing goal-setting workshops during orientation and initial transition activities. Recent evidence suggests that an online, guided, writing-intensive approach to goal setting and self-authorship may have significant effects on student outcomes, such as retention and academic performance (Morisan et al., 2010; Schippers, Scheepers & Peterson, 2015).
Where once a college degree was considered the ticket to a good job, the pathway from campus to career is no longer as straightforward or as certain as it was for previous generations. The world and the job market are changing dramatically, and parents, students, institutions, and employers are all deeply concerned with the question of whether college is preparing graduates for careers—a question that is itself intertwined with the larger question of the ultimate purpose of a college degree. Tuition is an investment—of time as well as money, often a lot of money—and informed consumers want to know that they’re going to see a return on that investment, usually in the form of a good-paying job that leads to a satisfying and lucrative career. Hiring and training new employees is also an investment, and companies want assurances that they are bringing on competent, capable staff with the smarts to succeed and become an asset.
If all required learning materials, including textbooks, were provided to all students on or before the first day of class, the average price per student of learning materials would drop and students would be more successful.
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.