A requirement for quality assurance is becoming more prevalent in higher education today as institutions are being asked to demonstrate that they are providing robust, meaningful learning experiences for students. Many institutions are adopting curriculum review frameworks as part of their overall quality assurance strategy. Three leaders at various levels who were engaged in a year-long curriculum review process share reflections about their experiences and challenges while conducting an undergraduate program review. Their theoretical framework for an effective curriculum review process is shared in
this paper. The leaders offer institutional, faculty, and course level insights, and make five recommendations for a collaborative curriculum review process: (1) setting clear expectations; (2) maintaining open, consistent communication; (3) incorporating multiple levels of leadership; (4) engaging various groups of stakeholders; and (5) implementing through actionable items.
Ontario is taking a historic step in recognizing the unique role Indigenous Institutes have in the province's postsecondary education system with the introduction of new legislation that, if passed, would transfer key functions and oversight to Indigenous people.
Deb Matthews, Minister of Advanced Education and Skills Development, and David Zimmer, Minister of Indigenous Relations and Reconciliation, were joined by the Aboriginal Institutes Consortium, chiefs, leaders of Indigenous Institutes and students from across the province in Toronto today to mark this important step on the path to reconciliation with Indigenous peoples.
Anyone who suffers with anxiety knows that social anxiety is a terrible thing to suffer from. But according to a recent study, people with social anxiety might be more empathetic and have a higher IQ!
Social anxiety is a horrific mind inclination to suffer from. It gets in the way of overall happiness, contentedness, and even affects relationships in a majority of ways. Social anxiety is defined by the fear of social situations that involve interaction with other people. It is a pervasive disorder that causes anxiety and fear in almost every aspect of your life. Fear of work, relationships, public, school, you name it. Social anxiety is actually on a rise, statistics showing that approximately 7% of the population already suffers from it. Although social anxiety is such an awful thing to suffer from, sometimes good things come alongside bad things. For example, science has shown that people who suffer from social anxiety have a higher IQ and better empathetic skills than those who don’t.
Most mental health experts agree that keeping tabs on student suicides could help colleges and universities plan their responses and prevent future deaths.
But, as an Associated Press investigation recently found, most of the country’s largest institutions don’t track the data. And universities that do, experts said in interviews with Inside Higher Ed, gather it unevenly and need to address the topic carefully with their students and the public to avoid glorifying suicide.
Fostering Mentorship
When he was an undergraduate at Denison University in the 1980s, Fred Porcheddu would have told you that his professors were mentoring him. They saw him as a strong student who could follow in their footsteps, and they groomed him to join the professoriate.
Today, Mr. Porcheddu, who is an associate professor of English and chair of the department at his alma mater, sees mentorship differently. It’s something that should be available to all students, not just those at the top of the class. And its goal should be helping students along whatever path they choose, not nudging them into academe.
I became a professor because I wanted to teach. I really wanted to be a middle-school English teacher but — even at age 19 — I knew that salary wouldn't allow me to pay off my undergraduate loans, so I decided on a Ph.D. Twelve years later and I'm extremely happy with my decision, particularly because I landed at a small liberal-arts college where I have the freedom to teach whatever I want and the good fortune to have small classes.
But it would be dishonest not to admit that I truly had no idea what it meant to be a teacher. Specifically, I had no idea what it meant to be a professor of color at a predominately white institution.
Over the past century, the role of creativity in teaching and learning has been interpreted in many ways, leading to often
conflicting discipline-specific definitions, measurements and pedagogical applications.
Purpose/Objective: This study documents the ways in which successful, award-winning teachers function creatively in their classrooms. It investigates their beliefs about creativity in teaching—what “creativity” means, and how skilled teachers instantiate it in classroom practices. Finally, this research examined the teachers’ personal creativity (in terms of creative pursuits, hobbies, and habits of mind) and the practical ways this translates into teaching.
Regardless of our subject area, we’ve all had moments where some students appear to hang on every word,
gobbling up our messages, images, graphs, and visuals with robust engagement. Within those very same classes,
however, there will be a degree of confusion, perplexed looks, or at worst, the blank stare! In my field of anatomical
education, like many other STEMM* disciplines, the almost ubiquitous use of multimedia and other increasingly
complex computer visualizations is an important piece of our pedagogic tool kit for the classroom, small group, or
even the one-on-one graduate-level chalk talk. Although a picture indeed does say a thousand words, the words that
each person hears, or more importantly, comprehends, will vary widely.
On Monday, scientists published a study in Nature Genetics that analyzed the genes of 1.1 million people of European ancestry, including over 300,000 23andMe customers. Over 99 percent of our DNA is identical in all humans, but researchers focused on the remaining 1 percent and found thousands of DNA variants that are correlated with educational attainment. This information can be combined into a single number, called a polygenic score. – “Why Progressives Should Embrace the Genetics of Education” by Dr. Kathryn Paige Harden in the New York Times, July 24, 2018.
It’s that word “score” that made my heart sink a little. We love us some scores in education. SAT scores, NAEP scores, AP scores, GPA, IQ, and now here we have our “polygenic score for educational attainment.”
Throughout the nearly three years of career advice from “Carpe Careers,” we’ve advised you on myriad topics --
including pursuing professional development opportunities and networking, writing application documents,
interviewing and the existential crisis of leaving academia, to name just a few. You name it, we’ve discussed it.
Put simply, the culmination of our advice should be to tell you that you need a plan. You need a map of the steps to
take toward your career goals -- from soft- and technical-skill development, to the people you should meet and
speak to in order to help you land that next job. But with all the focus on your next steps, there has been little
discussion of what you leave behind. In other words, as you embark on your next career steps, how do you manage
a graceful and less stressful departure from your current job? A new job offer may tempt you to go out in a blaze of
glory (advice: don’t), but the manner in which you leave your current job has professional implications. In addition,
you must consider personal matters, especially regarding finances and your health care.
Over the years, academic freedom has been both recognized and constrained, based on the particular historical context.
Academic freedom, like freedom itself, is not absolute. There are conditions and qualifications around both the theory and exercise of this pivotal university concept. Some of these constraints pertain to particular historical circumstances and are no longer germane or legitimate. Other limitations are understandable and defensible. How do we know which is which? History, I think, can be our guide.
At age 18, Kimberly could no longer come up with a reason to live.
The Toronto university student locked the door to her parents’ garage, stepped onto a stool in the middle of the room and looped an electrical cord around her neck.
“It’s something I couldn’t explain,” recalls Kimberly, who asked that her last name not be published. “I didn’t understand what was going on in my head . . . You want to give up.”
Within seconds, she heard a faint scratching on the garage door. It was her cat.
“He knew something was wrong,” she says. “I took the cord that I wrapped around my neck off and I went inside.”
Two years later, the now third-year student at Ryerson University has been diagnosed with anxiety disorder and depression.
She’s part of what some experts are calling an emerging phenomenon.
Higher education officials intend to invest in both audiovisual (AV) and unified communications (UC) technologies in the classroom to better meet student needs, but their plans don’t end there, according to a survey commissioned by AVI-SPL and conducted by the Center for Digital Education (CDE).
A few weeks ago, I had a good experience using a new educational-technology tool. I also had a bad experience using a new educational-technology tool. Actually, they were the same experience and the same tool.
Anybody who has spent any time experimenting with educational-technology knows exactly why that is not a
contradiction in terms.
The tool in question was the online annotating program Hypothes.is. Most historians I’ve heard talk about Hypothes.is seem to use it only as a way for students to annotate primary sources, but I had my students use it as a means to critique each other’s papers. First I asked students to post their research paper prospectus on a blog or on Scalar (another really interesting educational technology that I’ve been using). I set up a common Scalar page to serve as the class syllabus, and put links on it to all the students’ papers. They each had five prospectuses to read and comment on over the course of a single class period.
Starting in the fall of 2018, most international PhD students at the University of Toronto will pay tuition fees equivalent to those of domestic students.
“This is very positive news for the University,” said Joshua Barker, dean of the School of Graduate Studies (SGS) and vice-provost of graduate research and education. “We strive to remove any barriers, financial or otherwise, that graduate students might face as they look to attend our university.”
Faculty everywhere are flipping their classes, but can we flip faculty development? That’s the question I asked myself when I flipped the pre-conference workshop at the 2016 Teaching Professor Technology Conference. What I discovered is that we can “practice what we teach” and design faculty-centered learning experiences much the same way we design studentcentered
learning experiences.
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!
With the usual mixture of eagerness and trepidation, I waited for student evaluations. As I ended my second semester as an assistant professor last spring, I was acutely aware of the role these evaluations might play in my third-year review and, around the corner, my application for tenure.
My anxiety was tempered, however, by the fact that I had been hearing from my students throughout the semester and had a pretty good sense of how the course worked for them. And because I had my own goals for the course (integrating more student reflection and guiding a research paper with a new process), I was already able to start assessing how successful the course was and what I might try next time.
A widely held belief in Canada, as in many countries, is that expanding access to tertiary education is integral to improving national productivity. It also plays into the Canadian sense of
equality of opportunity and the just society.
In addition, Canada is not alone in beginning to experience a decreasing labour force participation rate as the baby boomer generation enters retirement. Even the country’s large immigration flows are not sufficient to compensate for the labour force shrinkage. This puts additional pressure on productivity; across the 20 largest members of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, this would need to increase at an average of 0.4 per cent
per year to offset the loss of gross domestic product per capita.