Since its launch in 1983, the U.S. News and World Report’s annual college rankings have sought to compare institutions using a series of quantifiable metrics, including acceptance rates and alumni donations, that have increasingly come under scrutiny. In 2013, President Obama argued that the rankings actually incentivize colleges to “game the numbers and in some cases, [get rewarded] for raising costs,” encouraging schools to invest extra money in activities such as alumni outreach and in turn theoretically raise tuition. Yet, according to Obama, colleges motivated by these grading systems, largely continued to neglect one key measure: student outcomes. Since then, he’s pledged to change the way colleges are ranked by shifting the focus from institutional prestige to students’ actual academic experience.
Early in my career, I struggled to say no. I was asked to serve on committee after committee, to evaluate fistfuls of manuscripts and grants, and to perform dozens of other tasks, large and small. I said yes willy-nilly — often because of genuine interest, but other times out of a sense of guilt or obligation, and sometimes out of fear of reprisal if I refused.
But as I advanced in my career, the requests snowballed. Agreeing to do all of them — or even half of them — became mpossible. I needed to figure out when to say no, and how to do it artfully. Five principles have helped me learn what to say, and what not to say.
Volunteer someone else — strategically. Often when people ask you to do something, they don’t actually need you to do it. They just need the task done. Even more urgently, they need to complete the task of obtaining a commitment from someone to do it. At the moment of the "ask," they likely do not view you as the holder of unique talents or the only person who could possibly do this work. More likely, they see you as a potential checked box on their own to-do list.
Canada is at a crucial point: we are well-positioned to manage the opportunities and challenges of the global economy, but despite existing efforts, we are falling behind in investing in people and encouraging research and innovation.The need to improve postsecondary education and skills training in Canada is driven by global and local challenges. In the global marketplace, our key competitors are moving ahead with economic restructuring, investment in the education and skills of their people, technological change, research and innovation and aggressive competition. The rapid growth of emerging economies, especially in China and India, along with high oil prices and the strong Canadian dollar, are posing substantial challenges for Canada's industries. To remain prosperous in the face of this competition, Canada needs a workforce that is qualified, flexible, adaptable,and innovative, with employees and employers who embrace lifelong learning.Yet, in Canada, pressures are mounting on our postsecondary programs and institution
Why we need to promote socioeconomic diversity.
Sarah Green Carmichael, an editor at the Harvard Business Review, recently talked with Joan C. Williams, director of the Center for WorkLife Law at the University of California's Hastings College of the Law, about her new book, White Working Class: Overcoming Class Cluelessness in America, which examines how class divisions affected the recent election. Ms. Williams contends that liberals have long been hung up on identity and cultural issues at the expense of socioeconomic ones. While she believes that eliminating racial and gender inequality is a good thing — she’s a progressive and a feminist, after all — she suggests that there’s been a blindness to class inequality, which is alive and growing in America. As one example, she points to a recent study of fictitious résumés, which found that male law students from privileged backgrounds were far more likely to get callbacks for coveted internships at top law firms than their working-class counterparts were. Socioeconomic bias is all too real, she argues, yet many corporate and college diversity efforts tend to overlook it. It’s time to expand diversity programs to include class, she tells Ms. Carmichael.
For two decades I have taught 150- to 200-student sections of introductory financial management to majors in all business programs, plus business minors from diverse fields. Although the course has its fans—some even change their majors to finance each semester— many students find the material daunting, become distracted, and behave in ways that impede the learning of others along with their own. Distractions always have lurked in college classrooms; texters and Web surfers are merely the note passers and campus newspaper readers of the digital age.
Colleges are feeling heat to prove that their students are learning. As a result, a growing number of colleges are
measuring intended “learning outcomes” as well as issuing grades. But fewer are using standardized tests than was the case a few years ago.
Those are findings of a new survey from the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U). The liberal education organization received responses from chief academic officers at 325 of its member institutions, including community colleges and four-year institutions (public and private as well as a couple of for-profits).
Have you ever wondered if your students are as concerned about their learning as you are? If you prioritize student learning, you may be the only person in your classroom with that goal. Learning-centered teachers seek to coauthor classroom experiences with their students, whereas students may seek only to be taught passively. How might you inspire your students to share accountability for their learning? These five considerations can help you teach your students to be learning centered, too.
Abstract: This article considers the evolution of e-learning and some of the factors that have shaped its implementation. It draws on research conducted in the UK from 2001 to 2008 by the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development
(CIPD) focusing on training and learning in corporate organisations rather than courses offered to students enrolled in educational institutions. The article argues that throughout this period there has been insufficient attention given to the way
learning takes place in organisations. It considers the emerging wave of enthusiasm for Web 2.0, concluding that successful current applications of e-learning simply use a more diverse range of tools and approaches.
Keywords: corporate e-learning; learning technology; Web 2.0; social networking; virtual worlds; Webinars; online support; ‘stuff’ and ‘stir’
Love him or hate him, there’s lots to say about Donald Trump. But how should instructors handle class discussions about the new president, if they allow them at all? An assistant professor of public and strategic communication at American University established with his students a set of ground rules for talking about Trump, which he says may be useful to colleagues elsewhere as they engage with policy and other issues.
When I was 19 and decided I wanted to become a psychology professor, I did so from the comfort of my dorm room, on the window seat across from a decommissioned fireplace. I’d always loved reading, writing, and talking, so what better career for me than academe? I could not have known that my vision of faculty life would become anachronistic by the time I was out
of graduate school.
I am one of an increasingly small group of Ph.D.s whose faculty dreams have been realized. I have a tenure-track job with paid sabbaticals and institutional support for my research. I’ve written a book. But with each passing year, my experiences as a faculty member are less and less the norm. What it means to be a professor has changed for many other Ph.D.s — largely
because academic life and culture is nothing like it used to be.
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.
I recently overheard a faculty member talking about students, and it wasn’t good. She sounded very much like a conference presenter whom Melanie Cooper describes in a Journal of Chemical Education editorial. The presenter’s talk had a strong “students these days” undercurrent.
Sometimes we do need to vent. It isn’t easy teaching students who don’t come to class prepared, seem to always want the easiest way, are prepared to cheat if necessary, don’t have good study skills, and aren’t interested in learning what we love to teach. Venting, especially to a trusted colleague, helps us put things in perspective. At some point, though, venting morphs into
complaining, and what we say about students becomes what we think about them. And that’s when it starts getting
dangerous, because it affects how we teach.
"Administration" is a cold word. Yet — whether our many campus critics believe it or not — most full-time administrators have very deep feelings about the work they do. I was no exception. I got into the racket as an advocate for doctoral students in English, and I approached all my administrative work as a calling.
Like most professors who teach composition, I require my students to write multiple drafts — three, in fact — of each essay. That’s not because three is a magic number. It’s just a number that fits well with the amount of time we have in the semester, and it reinforces the idea of working through multiple drafts. If there is a "secret" to good writing, I’m convinced, multiple drafts is it.
And, like most of my colleagues, I regularly have students work in "peer editing" or "workshopping" sessions where they read and offer comments on one another’s work.
None of this is groundbreaking pedagogy. In fact, it’s pretty standard fare for a college-level writing course.
A study presented Friday at the American Educational Research Association's annual meeting shines some light on the way women are hired for top higher education leadership positions in searches involving third-party executive search firms.
For the study, Harvard Ph.D. student Jeraul C. Mackey obtained access to proprietary data from a search firm that remained anonymous. The data covered almost 500 searches over an eight-year period starting in 2009. Mackey ultimately analyzed a subset of the data covering 250 searches for two- and four-year public and private nonprofit institutions.
He was able to look at how women candidates fared at each stage of the recruitment process for upper-level positions, finding that women fared better as searches progressed. He was also able to examine recruiters’ preferences about women candidates, finding that the gender makeup of a recruitment team had no discernible effect on whether a search ultimately resulted in a woman being hired.
What if traditional high school transcripts -- lists of courses taken, grades earned and so forth -- didn't exist? That's the ambition of a new education reform movement, which wants to rebuild how high schools record the abilities of students -- and in turn to change the way colleges evaluate applicants. Sounds like quite a task. But the idea is from a group with considerable clout and money: more than 100 private schools around the country, including such elite institutions as the Dalton School and the Spence School in New York City, plus such big guns as the Cranbrook Schools in Michigan, the Phillips Academy in Massachusetts and Miss Porter's School in Connecticut.
The organizers of the effort believe all kinds of high schools and colleges are ready for change, but they argue that it will take the establishment to lead this particular revolution. Organizers believe that if more than 100 such elite private schools embrace a new transcript, they will attract supporters in higher ed who will embrace the approach for fear of losing top applicants (both in terms of their academics and ability to pay). And then the plan could spread -- over perhaps a decade -- to public high schools as well. Along the way, the group hopes to use the ideas of competency-based education -- in which demonstration of mastery matters and seat time does not -- to change the way high schoolers are taught.
As Director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, Dr. Vannevar Bush has coordinated the activities of some six thousand leading American scientists in the application of science to warfare. In this significant article he holds up an incentive for scientists when the fighting has ceased. He urges that men of science should then turn to the massive task of making more accessible our bewildering store of knowledge. For years inventions have extended man's physical powers rather than the powers of his mind. Trip hammers that multiply the fists, microscopes that sharpen the eye, and engines of destruction and detection are new results, but not the end results, of modern science. Now, says Dr. Bush, instruments are at hand which, if properly developed, will give man access to and command over the inherited knowledge of the ages. The perfection of these pacific instruments should be the first objective of our scientists as they emerge from their war work. Like Emerson's famous address of 1837 on "The American Scholar," this paper by Dr. Bush calls for a new relationship between thinking man and
the sum of our knowledge. — THE EDITOR
Until recently, the meaning and origin of the Canadian university degree was well understood by Canadians and around the world. Degrees were only offered by universities and the use of the label university was controlled by legislation in each of the ten provinces and three territories. Institutional membership in the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada signified that an institution was a university-level institution. However, the increased demand in the last two decades of the 20th century for access to university level degrees has resulted in the provincial-level approval of degrees that are offered in non-university settings. As a result of the increased proliferation of these non-university delivered degrees, the provincial level degree
accreditation processes and the university-level degree granting standards, as represented in the membership criteria for AUCC, are no longer aligned. In this paper, the author traces the changes in degree granting in Canada over the past 15 years or so. Current provincial policies and recent decisions regarding degree granting are outlined.
Pendant que presque tous les pays du monde s’occupent, de façon tout à fait justifiée, de la récession actuelle, une crise démographiquetouchant le marché du travail menace d’ébranler les fondements mêmes de notre société et denotre économie.
Context: Educational reform in the United States has had a growing dependence on accountability achieved through largescale
assessment. Despite discussion and advocacy for assessment purposes that would assist learning, provide help to
teachers instructional plans and execution, and give a broader perspective of the depth and breadth of learning, the general
focus still remains on accountability, now elaborated with sanctions for schools and personnel.