Don’t overlook the benefits of working in a non-faculty role at a university.
It was a chilly December morning at work. I was sipping on my first coffee of the day, reading my emails and making my plans for the day, when an email notified me that one of my publications had been referenced. No way! It had been almost eight years to the day since I defended my PhD thesis and I had long stopped adding research publications to my resumé.
Still, it was exciting to find out someone referenced my research.
I’ve been receiving an unprecedented number of calls from presidents across the country asking me to “talk [them] off the ledge.” Most of those conversations have been with presidents whom I judge to be effective and emotionally grounded. Yet each person has been distressed in ways that I didn’t find common during my earlier years in higher education.
What will you be expected to publish from your dissertation?
If there’s a downside to another academic year coming to a successful close, it’s reading course evaluations. This post explores how we respond to those one or two low evaluations and the occasional negative comments found in answers to the open-ended questions. Do we have a tendency to over-react? I know I did.
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.
The student pulled her test tube out of the ice bucket for the 10th time, and then slumped in despair at the sight of the clear liquid.
She shoved the sample back into the ice and put her head in her hands. Nestled in the ice next to her own, her classmates’ test tubes were full of fluffy white crystals, the result of a four-hour lab on recrystallization. Clearly, at some point in the afternoon, this student had done something different from her peers, and now not a speck was visible in her test tube.
The recrystallization lab is like most of the experiments we do in my "Chemistry 3A" section: There is a single desired outcome, intended to teach a chemical concept or a laboratory technique. But of course experiments can go awry in myriad ways, as anyone who has spent any time in a laboratory knows.
While we want to instil discipline and responsibility in our students, there is also pedagogical
value in compassion.
It’s that time of year again, when panicked students start asking for extensions. They will send
desperate emails and come knocking with trepidation on our office doors. They will arrive with
excuses and cite extenuating circumstances, and faculty far and wide will have to make tough
decisions about whether or not to accept late work.
It’s no breaking news that technology is here to stay. Among other things, this means that all schoolkids today, including your child, grandchild, niece and nephew, rely on their tech skills to excel at school. By the time they finish school, they will be required to implement a variety of tech skills on a daily basis at work.
As a parent, grandparent, aunt or uncle you now have to teach your child a new skill: tech intelligence. And the worst part is that by their teens, your kids are likely to surpass your tech-savviness, so you have to do it as early as you can
The rapid turnover of technology and ever expanding network of data and information which underpin the knowledge economy have led to a reevaluation of the importance of knowledge to the economic process. Economists now conclude that human capital - the ideas, skills, and expertise of people - is a fundamental driver of economic growth. Demand for employees that possess a mix of both “hard” and “soft” skills is rising as companies respond to intensified global economic competition.
If you had to pick a cliché that best describes completing a dissertation, "it ain’t over till it’s over" would work well. So far in this series we have discussed finishing a submittable draft and successfully defending the dissertation. But as every doctoral candidate knows, no matter how well the defense goes you are very likely not quite free and clear yet.
I’ve been especially appreciative of my colleagues this week and there are lots of reasons why.
My colleagues teach me.
My colleagues let me teach them.
My colleagues disagree with me.
A 2015 survey of Faculty Focus readers found that the number one barrier preventing faculty from implementing the flipped classroom model and other active learning experiences into their courses is TIME. Faculty reported they don’t have time to plan extra learner-centered activities, due to increasing responsibilities, and they don’t have time to implement the activities in class
because there’s too much content to cover.
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.
At this year’s freshman orientation at Morehouse College, David Thomas, president of the historically black men’s
institution, was one of the new arrivals in Graves Hall. “I had a pretty rough night the first night,” he says. Students later
told him: “None of us sleep on the mattress. Didn’t your mother come and make your bed?”
As a new faculty member, late work was the cause of many headaches.
I wanted a policy that would recognize there may be valid reasons why a student might not submit an assignment on time, but I did not like the idea of then having to judge the merit of excuses that might be provided or attempt to decide if they were truthful.
I wanted a policy that would acknowledge the merit of a completed assignment, so I did not want to deduct a letter grade or certain percentage of points just because it did not meet a deadline; a value I took to heart after reading O’Connor (2011).
I wanted a policy that would put the responsibility for completing late work entirely on the student, so I did not want to use class time or send reminders out of what was missing and when it was due.
I wanted a policy that would offer the opportunity for a student to submit work after it was due, but I did not want the hassle of keeping track of any new, individual deadlines and individual point deductions (Vatterott, 2009) for assignments that would
occur if I allowed late assignments.
In 2018, Nova Scotian taxpayers will spend more than $400 million in support of universities, and another $26 million in student scholarships and bursaries.
The students themselves spend more than that amount on their share of tuition and fees. In addition, most of them study away from home and pay for food and accommodations in the city or town where they study.
This guide provides a brief introduction to the Canadian higher education system and its application process, as well as information specifically relevant to IB students applying to Canadian institutions from outside of Canada.
Montréal, le 2 février 2018 — Dans le cadre des consultations prébudgétaires 2018-2019 tenues par le ministre des Finances du Québec, M. Carlos Leitão, auxquelles elle a participé ce matin, la Fédération des cégeps a rappelé le rôle stratégique du réseau collégial public dans la société québécoise depuis 50 ans et souligné que, face aux défis actuels et futurs en matière de qualification de la main-d’oeuvre et de réponse aux changements technologiques
notamment, le gouvernement doit financer les cégeps de manière suffisante et prévisible. Ce financement à la hausse devrait être accordé dans le but de mieux servir les étudiants, d’accroître la diplomation au collégial, de former des citoyens responsables, de dynamiser la vitalité régionale et de stimuler l’innovation et la productivité.
I’m so lost! Your course is so confusing. Like, I really have no idea what to do and, like, I’m ready to simply cry and, like, drop this crazy course.”
Susie, a major in education, blinked, but no tears came; she just kept glaring at me with her elaborately made-up brown eyes. She had texted me the previous day about how stressed she was about my course, and I had invited her to come to my office at her leisure. But this wasn’t a great start to our heart-to-heart.
Seventy-one is the new 65 for a growing number of professors at Ontario's universities who are staying in the classroom past the traditional retirement age, a demographic shift that is putting pressure on their institutions' budgets, and that could be limiting the hiring of younger professors, a new report being released on Tuesday has found.