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.
This pilot study examines alternative entrance pathways into York University undergraduate degree programs for students who apply from outside the formal education system. These alternative pathways are designed to facilitate university access for students from under-represented populations (for example, low-income, first-generation, Aboriginal, racialized minorities, differently abled, newcomers to Canada, sole-support caregivers, students with incomplete high school education, or some combination of the preceding).
It is naïve to think that a finished teaching product can be created in four semesters of any teacher preparation program. These programs instead provide the knowledge and skills for preservice teachers to begin their journey toward being and becoming skillful professionals and eventually, expert teachers. Toward this end, there are two necessary elements: developing knowledge and engaging in reflective analyses.
In higher education, the concept of good is elusive. Do we know good when we see it? For example, while there is general agreement that community college graduation rates are too low, there is not yet consensus about what would constitute a good, or an outstanding, graduation rate.
At community colleges, benchmarking and benchmarks are about understanding the facts and using them to assess performance, make appropriate comparisons, establish baselines, set goals, and monitor progress — all in the service of improving practice so more students succeed.
As part of this practice, the Center for Community College Student Engagement encourages colleges to use data that can support reasonable comparisons both within and across institutions and to have broad, campuswide conversations to address key follow-up questions: What are our priorities here, in this college? In what areas do we need and wish to excel? And how good is good enough — for our students, our college, our community?
We all know raising children is different from teaching undergraduates. Yet as a father of four children — now all grown — I have learned much from parenting that I have been able to apply to the college classroom.
In particular, raising four teenagers taught me a lot about how to reach, engage, and motivate teenage students. The trick to effective parenting, I’m convinced, is to allow children to exercise their agency — encouraging them to make good choices through a clear system of rewards and punishments, with the emphasis on the former. I believe that’s true in teaching, as
well.
As we approach the midpoint of the academic year, surges of campus activism will continue to unfold. Some of the issues that will pique students' interest will be obvious, while others will surprise us. No matter the issue or side of the political or philosophical spectrum, it is the commonly understood role of administrators to work with students to support activism in a way that students get their message heard and also optimizes safety and civility.
Notwithstanding the current emphasis on utilitarian concerns and issues of the bottom line, I would maintain that creativity is still a topic of great interest in contemporary society. The fact that we are participating in a symposium and contributing to a book entitled Creativity, Imagination, and Innovation in Education attest to this concern. In this context, Barzun has noted that in a reference book of contemporary quotations, “there are fifteen entries for Creativity and only three for Conversation, two for Wisdom, one for Contemplation, and none for Serenity or Repose.” I would agree with Barzun’s contention that “Creativity has become what divine grace and salvation were to former times. It is incessantly invoked, praised, urged, demanded, hoped for, declared achieved, or found lacking” (Barzun, 1990, p. 22). One may wonder why this is the case. And I think that here Barzun’s analogy to divine grace believe that creativity will save us.
This document describes the development of analytic rubrics for competency assessment project. The purpose of this report is to describe the process of developing a set of general analytic rubrics to assess competencies in design, communication and teamwork, and a set of outcomes and indicators to assess problem analysis and investigation.
The work to develop the rubrics was structured into three main phases. In the first or planning phase, a review of the literature was carried out to create a comprehensive list of learning outcomes in the five competency areas under investigation. A list of more specific, measureable learning outcomes, called indicators, was also compiled. The resulting comprehensive list of learning outcomes and indicators was distilled by removing redundancy between the systems, filling content gaps, and grouping indicators into common learning outcome categories.
Are you on a first-name basis with your university president, provost, and deans?
Do they know your name?
This question may seem odd to those college and university employees who already enjoy a high degree of status
and security. Norms of faculty culture and shared governance have, in my understanding, have usually encouraged
a first-name familiarity among (tenure-track) faculty and institutional academic leaders. Faculty culture is one of flat
hierarchies. (Please share if you have experienced something different ).
Among staff, however (and maybe contingent faculty), being on a first-name basis with the president or provost is
not a given. (How students refer to campus leaders - and their professors - is a whole different question).
I work at a small and intimate liberal arts college where staff are on a first-name basis with all of the academic
leaders.
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.
The study of leadership has been an important and central part of the literature on management and organization behavior for several decades. Leadership is a topic of interest, study and debate in almost every professional community worldwide. Organizations are constantly trying to understand how to effectively develop leaders for long term success within their organizations. The systemic problem with this endeavor is that there are many different leadership theories and styles. These options make it virtually impossible for professionals to agree concerning which one theory and or style can best help organizations to develop great leaders. Indeed, “no other role in organizations has received more interest than that of the leader” (Schwandt & Marquardt, 2000,p. 177).
A partnership between the Mastercard Foundation, Rideau Hall Foundation, Vancouver Island University and Yukon College has ambitious aims.
Tasha Brooks likes to have an open-door policy. As one of Vancouver Island University’s four new “education navigators,” her job is to help First Nations students to transition into university and complete their education. “I’m very open about my own struggles through university,” says Ms. Brooks, who earned two degrees in business administration at VIU. “They can look at my past and say, she was also like me, very close to dropping out at some point. … I’m there to not only support them but I can empathize with them.”
In 2008, University of Manitoba professors Stephen Downes and George Siemens taught a course on learning theory that was attended by about 25 paying students in class and by another 2,300 students online for free. Colleague Dave Cormier at the University of Prince Edward Island dubbed the experiment a “massive open online course,” or MOOC.
Statistics Canada recently released its comprehensive reports on education, covering a wide range of topics, including overall education attainment and the skills mismatches and earnings potential of those with bachelor’s degrees. There was good news and bad news.
StatsCan reported that in 2016, 54 per cent of Canadians aged 25 to 64 had either college or university qualifications. Canada continued to rank first among the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development in the proportion of college and university graduates. That’s good news.
Writing and teaching are the two great common denominators of academic life (OK, the departmental meeting is a third). With few exceptions, no matter your discipline, you have to teach, and you have to write.
I co-teach a writing course for graduate students at the University of Iowa, and I’ve been surprised at how often discussions of writing evolve into discussions of teaching. It makes sense: Both involve translating ideas so they can be understood by other people. As we ease out of one semester and start planning for the next, I’ve been thinking about how we might apply writing strategies to our course planning.
Particularly now, when you have several weeks until the next semester starts, it’s worth thinking of your courses like you think about your writing — as the result of a series of drafts. You don’t expect to sit down and write a journal article in one go. Why would creating a course be any different? Acknowledge that drafting and revision are essential to any creative project and give yourself plenty of time.
his research project was conducted upon the unceded and un-surrendered territories of the Coast Salish people, including the Musqueam, Skxwú7mesh, Tsleil-Waututh, Kwikwetlem, Kwantlen, Katzie, and Semiahmoo—what is now known as the Greater Vancouver area of British Columbia (BC).1 If we are to work towards communities of care, to truly dismantle rape culture on university campuses and within our wider communities, we must recognize the broader structure of settler colonialism within which sexualized and gender-based violence occurs. Sexualized and gender-based violence are inherently embedded within settler colonialism, and function as an exertion of power that disproportionally affects people of color, Indigenous women, trans, non-gender conforming, and Two-spirit folks, and people with disabilities. As Sarah Hunt elucidates, “rape culture and racism are indeed deeply intertwined, shaping [campuses] in ways that decrease safety for Indigenous students, faculty and staff, particularly women, Two-spirit, trans and queer people.”2 Recognizing who s most affected by violence is essential in creating robust and inclusive policy and initiatives that support survivors and prevent violence.
This paper draws upon research surrounding sexualized violence and prevention work, relevant provincial legislation, as well as information gathered from a collaboration with the Anti-Violence Project (AVP) at the University of Victoria. We would like to sincerely thank AVP for sharing their knowledge with us and for the critical prevention and support work that they conduct. From this research, we recommend that the provincial government mandate and fund a comprehensive survivor centred Action Plan to improve and embolden existing policy.
Engaging with students – both inside and outside the classroom – who are continually linked in to social media and online devices presents a range of opportunities, challenges and pitfalls.
To some of my students’ displeasure, I have my office hours on Friday afternoons. I prepare for this ancient tradition of face-to-face, pen-and-paper pedagogy by tidying my office, purging unwanted scraps of paper, removing half empty coffee cups, and sometimes even plugging in an air freshener. Then I sit in my swivel chair, arms crossed, and wait for the barrage of undergraduate students to arrive with their genetics questions.
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.
That was the theme of third annual reconciliation forum, held at University of Manitoba.
More than 350 leaders from universities, colleges and Indigenous communities gathered at the University of
Manitoba for the third annual Building Reconciliation Forum. The theme for this year’s event, held on November 8
and 9, was “The Journey Toward a Reconciled Education System.”
In response to the 94 calls to action issued by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada in 2015,
educational leaders, academics, students and Indigenous people from across the country came together to share
what is currently being done at postsecondary institutions to make reconciliation a reality, and to discuss what still
needs to happen at the institutional level.
The deliberations of university boards seem to have become more rancorous and controversial of late. What’s going on?
What’s the latest at your university board? There was a time when that question may have been a signal to cue the crickets. While faculty and students busied themselves with the exciting highs and lows of intellectual and scientific pursuits, university boards were the steady hand that quietly and capably guided the ship – so steadily that they were (and still are, at many campuses) easy to ignore.