More than 50 doctoral programs in the humanities and social sciences won’t be admitting new students in the fall of 2021 — a response to the pandemic and ensuing economic turmoil. It’s a sort of financial triage to help the programs devote funding to their current students, many of whom will be delayed in completing their degrees because of the disruptions. Suspending admissions for a year, some administrators say, will also allow them to reimagine their doctoral curricula to account for the flagging Ph.D. job market.
One of the core principles of the Ontario Undergraduate Student Alliance (OUSA) is that all willing and qualified students should be able to attend post-secondary regardless of their ability to pay. However, students in Ontario face the highest tuition fees in the country and the cost and perceived costs of post-secondary education are consistently identified as barriers to post-secondary education. These barriers are contributing factors to the persistently high attainment gaps for various vulnerable groups
in pursuing an undergraduate degree.
Ontario universities came under the provincial ombudsman’s oversight in 2016. The office has since received more than 500 university-related complaints.
Paul Dubé is in the “persuasion game.” Whether it’s overseeing complaints about provincial government ministries, municipalities or universities, Mr. Dubé, Ontario’s ombudsman says his modus operandi remains the same. “My approach as an ombudsman has always been to show all stakeholders what’s in it for them, why they will benefit from these recommendations,
that it’s in their interest.”
"Plan for the students you actually have, not those you wish you had, or think you used to have, or think you used to be like."
So John N. Gardner, the creator of the term "first-year experience," advised college officials charged with making sure that the experience is a good one. In other words, be realistic; don’t expect too much of students.
That mind-set contrasts with the one evoked by the New Yorker writer David Denby in his new book, Lit Up: One Reporter. Three Schools. Twenty-Four Books That Can Change Lives. The New York Times last week noted, "Lit Up is a refreshing lesson in what motivates students and why not to dumb down reading lists." Denby opens a window into the classrooms of several gifted high-school English teachers who assign Faulkner, Orwell, Frankl, Dostoevsky, Hemingway, Shakespeare, Poe, and Twain — and whose love of reading is contagious to their teen students.
Year after year, school boards receive reports echoing what many before them have concluded — that First Nations, Inuit, and Métis students don’t achieve as highly, or graduate as often as the average Alberta student.
Educators often call it the “achievement gap” — a large, measurable difference in how Indigenous students fare in school compared to students overall.
Let us begin by being clear about what a start-up is.A start-up is generally a temporary organization designed to search for a repeatable and scalable business model. It may be a service company for seniors, a technology company or a company selling
a particular product. As a start- up, it does all the work needed to get to and stay in a market and learn what it will take to go from a small business to a medium-sized, fast growing business and then to a large business. A start-up is a temporary since the way it works will not be the way the medium and larger scale versions of the business work. Think of Apple, which began with two
young men building interesting machines and selling them via friends and their social networks, and look at Apple now! Think of Costco / Price Club, which began in 1976 with a single warehouse, and look it at now – a very different kind of global business.
A start-up of this kind is not the same as a small business offering a product in a single market – a one-off business. The strategic intention of a start-up of the kind we are describing here is to move from small to large, from local to national and then global, and from a single product to a range of related products.
“We need to be having more substantive conversations about teaching and learning in our department meetings. We talk about course content, schedules, and what we’re offering next semester but rarely about our teaching and its impact on student learning. What do you think about circulating a short article or article excerpt before some of our meetings and then spending 30
minutes talking about it? Could you recommend some readings?”
If you spend any time listening to other teachers (particularly online, where complaining is almost an art form), you’ll soon hear about an epidemic of grandparents dying in the last two months of the semester , when big assignments are due and final exams start to get closer. Students will do anything to take advantage of us, the chorus sings, and the only defense is a strict adherence to the rules: Sorry, kid, but the syllabus clearly says “no extensions.”
That attitude seems even more desirable when you read some of the criticisms of so-called “permissive-indulgent” instructors. Such teachers “fear doing anything that might create stress for students, stifle their personal growth, or hurt their self-esteem,” writes psychologist Douglas Bernstein. They coddle students, being careful not to be too harsh for fear of discouraging them. Even worse, those faculty “are eager to help students succeed, even if it means lowering standards for success.”
Readers of Faculty Focus are probably already familiar with backward design. Most readily connected with such
researchers as Grant Wiggins, Jay McTighe, and Dee Fink, this approach to course construction asks faculty to initially ignore the specific content of a class. Rather, the designer begins the process by identifying desired learning goals, and then devising optimal instruments to measure and assess them. Only thereafter does course-specific content come into play—and even then, it is brought in not for the sake of “covering” it, but as a means to achieve the previously identified learning objectives. Courses designed this way put learning first, often transcend the traditional skillset boundaries of their discipline, and usually aim to achieve more ambitious cognitive development than do classes that begin—and often end—with content mastery as the primary focus. Although the advantages of backward design are manifest, it’s probably still the exception to, rather than the rule of, course planning.
In 2012 Sebastian Thrun, founder of Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) provider Udacity told Wired magazine
that in 50 years, there would be only 10 higher education institutions in the world and Udacity had a “shot” at being
one of them.
In 2012, Thrun was honored with a Smithsonian magazine American Ingenuity Award for Education.
https://blog.udacity.com/2012/11/sebastian-thrun-wins-smithsonian.html
By 2013 Thrun, concerned that fewer than 10% of original enrollees were completing their Udacity courses, declared
that Udacity offered a “lousy product.”
Harvard, MIT and Stanford are key players in a global rush to facilitate the education of millions through distance education. The goal is noble, particularly when courses are free. Anyone with a computer will welcome lectures from professors who are gifted speakers as well as experts in their field.
Students may access electronic textbooks and even have opportunities for classroom discussion — although one wonders how lively the discussion was when MIT’s first online course had more students than all of its living graduates combined.
Commencement was over, and we had awarded diplomas to the more than 800 graduates in a timely way. I had made remarks, as I always do, connecting the education they had received with events in the world at large, especially the combination of corruption and inertia in Washington. While marching across the stage, a few dozen graduates managed to express their disappointment that the administration in general and the president (me) in particular weren’t as progressive as they would like on issues such as sexual assault, divestment from fossil fuel and support for underrepresented groups.
National and international statistics show that across disciplines there are many more PhD graduates than academic positions. In fact, more than half of graduates find their careers outside the academy—though the kinds of positions they accept, their work satisfaction, and the relevance of their PhDs is much less clear. As regards scholarly studies on post-PhD careers, most
have examined social scientists and scientists with little attention to humanities doctoral graduates. This study addresses this gap by exploring the career experiences of Canadian PhD humanities graduates through descriptive statistics and narrative analysis. Specifically, it highlights the PhD experiences and post-graduation career trajectories of 212 Canadian humanists from 24 universities who graduated between 2004 and 2014. The study offers insight into humanities career challenges, including during the PhD, the range of non-academic careers that humanists find, as well as their work satisfaction and the perceived relevance of the PhD.
Canada needs to take an integrated and innovative approach to enhancing student mobility, according to participants at a workshop held December 2014 by Universities Canada. The workshop – held in Calgary and attracting university and private sector leaders – called for Canada to step up its efforts to get university students moving beyond their province
and beyond our borders.
Abstract
This article presents the results of the first Canada-wide survey on how university admissions personnel view the International Baccalaureate Diploma Program (IBDP) in relation to other curricula. The purpose of this study was twofold: (i) to move beyond anecdote and discover how Canada compares with universities in the UK and Australia/NZ, and (ii) to determine whether a dominant or hegemonic discourse surrounding the IBDP exists. Building on a smallscale pilot of perceptions in Ontario universities, the present study replicates two International
Baccalaureate Organization studies (in the UK, 2003, and in Australia/NZ, in 2007) in the Canadian context. Results reveal a pattern of responses consistent with the previous studies —i.e., a confident positive general view, combined with uncertainty regarding specific aspects of the IBDP. Such widespread and consistent views suggest the existence of a dominant or hegemonic discourse surrounding the IBDP, constructing it as the standard of excellence in pre-tertiary education, which has important implications for publicly funded education in Canada.
Every day, students consume hundreds of words on their iPads, mobile phones, Chromebooks, and Kindles. Increasingly, educational publishers are delivering curriculum on these devices, including several start-ups focused on getting informational texts and news stories into students' hands. But fundamentally, is reading online different from using the old class copies of Ethan Frome or The Federalist Papers?
As it turns out, what we don't know outweighs what we do know about how people comprehend texts on a digital
screen rather than on the printed page, a new research review concludes.
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.
Religion. Faith. Spirituality. Some faculty may view these phenomena as significant influences on the human experience, others as challenges to intellectualism and the scientific method. There are also academics who struggle with their position, perceiving the power embedded in these ideologies and practices as potentially beneficial as well as restrictive. Most would agree that theology elicits a range of strong and often-personal reactions. Why, then, would faculty teaching secular studies courses want to raise the topic of religion in their classes when they could play it safe and leave the subject entirely to the specialists, their colleagues in religious studies?
This policy paper showcases partnerships between universities, students, and the private sector, which is most commonly referred to as public-private partnerships. Partnerships between the public education sphere and the private business sphere have existed in the past but in recent years it has garnered more attention.
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.