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.
Transnational education is now commonplace. But what is a transnational curriculum and what are its outcomes? Is
it an agenda for a universal consensus above and beyond national politics and the dissonances of race, gender and
ethnicity? Or is it something more uneasy, complex, unruly and creative?
Last month provided an opportunity to test answers to some of these questions. Each January, the Centre for Higher
Education Development at the University of Cape Town hosts an intense 10-day residential as part of the Mellon
Mays Undergraduate Fellowship Program, or MMUF.
This year, my first in a Ph.D. program, I counted how many times I said "Sorry!" in a single day and found that the tally reached upwards of 30. Each "Sorry," pronounced with bubbly inflection, was an apology for more than whatever I was ostensibly apologizing for: speaking in seminar, again, even though that’s what you’re supposed to do in seminar, or disagreeing, again, even though the discipline of philosophy trades in opposition. These local apologies were part of a global apology for existing in the male-dominated discipline of analytic philosophy: for being the wayward creature I am, 5-foot-2 and female but brash and contrarian.
I joined the University of Virginia in 1982 as an assistant professor of business and reveled in the thrill of teaching and writing. As I advanced up the tenure-promotion ladder, I assumed various responsibilities to strengthen the institution: chair of this program and that committee and executive director of an institute.
In 2005, the president of my university called to ask if I would serve as the dean of the business school for a year. He’d been conducting a search and hadn’t been able to fill the slot in time for the start of the next academic year. He just needed a placeholder for a short while until he could close the sale with one of a number of candidates.
predictable political camps. Gun-rights advocates called for expanded mental-health services, insisting that no law could have stopped an obvious madman like Paddock. Nonsense, gun-control supporters said; whatever Paddock’s mental state, the easy availability of firearms makes violence more likely.
I’ve been thinking about this debate following a recent suicide on my own campus, the University of Pennsylvania, where at least 14 students have taken their lives since February 2013. Whenever a suicide happens, the spotlight turns to mental-health services. Do students know whom to call in times of crisis? And are there enough services for
everyone who needs them?
In August, a report by Rand Europe confirmed what many had long suspected: that academics face a greater mental
health risk than the population at large. About two in five scholars have common mental health disorders, such as
depression or stress-related problems. Among the reasons behind this, the report, which was commissioned by the
Royal Society and the Wellcome Trust, identified environmental risk factors such as heavy workloads and lack of job
security and management support. But is there anything that academics themselves could do to boost their wellbeing?
Here, scholars from disciplines ranging from philosophy to neuroscience share their insights into how the
search for happiness should be conducted – if it should be conducted at all
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.
This summer’s college president departure season is off to a swift start that has largely been marked by little
forewarning from colleges before exits are announced.
Many boards of trustees would consider it best practice to have a quick parting of ways with little surrounding
drama. But it doesn’t always go so smoothly in higher education -- it didn’t last summer -- making the pace and tone
of presidential partings so far this year stand out. Also noteworthy is that many recently announced transitions have
involved leaders who are relatively young or who are early in their tenures.
The president of Washington College on Maryland’s Eastern Shore resigned just a week after word leaked that all
was not well between her and the institution’s board. That president, former Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation
chair Sheila Bair, was two years into a five-year contract. She cited her family when she departed, but the college
did not go into depth on reasons for her resignation.
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.
Some are stocking naloxone kits, while others are pushing increased public awareness.
On April 14 last year, British Columbia’s chief health officer declared a public health emergency due to the high number of opioid overdose deaths in the province – and the death toll has continued to rise since then. In December, Vancouver police reported up to nine opioid overdose deaths in a single night. At a conference on the opioid crisis held in Ottawa in November, Ontario Health Minister Eric Hoskins said that, in his province, opioid overdose is now the third leading cause of accidental deaths, accounting for about 700 deaths a year.
In Educational Leadership for a More Sustainable World, author Mike Bottery uses Rittel and Webber’s (1973) framework of tame and wicked problems across the book’s three sections. This situates and contextualizes current complex and seemingly intractable issues in education by connecting them to equally wicked issues in economics and the environment. Each of the three sections is comprised of three to four chapters.
I want you personally to know I have hated every day in your course, and if I wasn’t forced to take this, I never would have. Anytime you mention this course to anyone who has ever taken it, they automatically know that you are a horrific teacher, and that they will hate every day in your class. Be a human being show some sympathy everyone hates this class and the material
so be realistic and work with people.
∼Excerpt from a student e-mail to a female online professor
Are student evaluations of teachers (SETs) biased against women, and what are the implications of this bias? Although not unanimous in their findings, previous studies found evidence of gender bias in SETs for both face-to-face and online courses. Specifically, evidence suggests that instructors who are women are rated lower than instructors who are men on SETs because of gender. The literature examining gender bias in SETs is vast and growing (Basow and Silberg 1987; Bray and Howard 1980; Miller and Chamberlin 2000), but only more recently have scholars focused on the potential of gender bias in the SETs of online
college courses. The use of online courses to measure gender bias offers a unique opportunity: to hold constant many factors about a student’s experience in a course that would vary in a face-to-face format.
The United States is at a crossroads in its policies towards the family and gender equality. Currently America provides basic support for children, fathers, and mothers in the form of unpaid parental leave, child-related tax breaks, and limited public childcare. Alternatively, the United States’ OECD peers empower families through paid parental leave and comprehensive investments in infants and children.
Internationalization processes are at the fore of university strategic plans on a global scale. However, the work of internationalization is being performed through the connections between many actors at different policy levels. Our purpose here is to ask, what is happening with internationalization of higher education at the Canadian national policy level? To do so, we suggest that we must look at policies at the national level not as individual entities but rather as these policies exist in relation to each other. We examine three recent policy statements from different organizations at the national level in Canada: a federal governmental agency, a pan-Canadian provincial organization and a national educational association. Our approach involved mapping the actors, knowledges and spaces that are discursively produced through these texts and engaging a relational approach to policy analysis that questions what comes to be assembled as these policies co-exist in the national landscape.
Internationally, a growing number of interprofessional education (IPE) offices are being established within academic institutions. However, few are applying educational improvement methodologies to evaluate and improve the inter- professional (IP) learning opportunities offered.
The University of Manitoba IPE Initiative was established in 2008 to facilitate the development of IP learn- ing opportunities for pre-licensure learners. The research question for this sec- ondary analysis was: what, if any, changes in the number and attributes of IP learning opportunities occurred in the academic year 2008–2009 compared to 2011–2012? The Points for Interprofessional Scoring (PIPES) tool was used to quantify the attributes of each IP learning opportunity. Most notably in 2012, eight (73%) of 11 IP learning opportunities achieved the highest PIPES score (> 55), compared to only four (36%) in 2009. The concept of the PIPES score is introduced as an educational improvement strategy and a potential predictor of achieving the desired educational outcome: collaborative competence.
As we move forward into a new millennium and the landscape of higher education continues to change rapidly, there is a growing interest in using technology to improve the student learning experience. With the developing awareness of the science behind learning, an increasing number of higher education faculty and course instructors are looking for means to use their time with students more effectively, and see technology as a potential part of the solution.
The inverted (or flipped) classroom is a teaching approach in which students are introduced to the fundamental ideas of a course through pre-class activities that often involve the viewing of a short video. This enables the in-class time to be used for learning activities that go beyond traditional lecturing. In many ways, this is akin to the practice of requiring readings before
class and using class time for debate and discussion that is common in many humanities and social science courses and seminars. In some sense, the inverted classroom approach is an adaptation of this long-standing instructional method to courses, in such fields as engineering and science, for which readings before class are not typically required or completed. This approach has great potential to create a more student-centred environment that is more conducive to effective
learning. It can be used to support a number of fundamental principles of the science of learning that have been well established over the past 100 years. It enables students to engage in more active learning experiences, process the new material in meaningful ways and incorporate these new ideas into their own existing knowledge framework. It allows for enhanced student-faculty interactions and opportunities for prompt formative feedback throughout the learning process. As
well, it supports the instructor to scaffold the material appropriately, as there is a greater awareness of how much the students understand prior to and during the in-class experiences. Despite the strong theoretical reasons for use of the inverted classroom approach and growing interest in the approach, empirical studies that systematically investigate the effects of the approach on students’ behaviours, perceptions and learning outcomes are not often seen. Therefore, more empirical evidence is needed to support effective implementation of the approach.
In the minds of students and the general public, the primary activity of a university is the pursuit of learning: a place where teachers teach, and students learn. It seems obvious that the core mission of the university is the transmission of knowledge, and in the popular imagination, simply placing bright eager minds in close proximity to leading professors will enable this alchemical process to happen. However, the reality of the practice and place of learning in today’s university is much more complicated.
The history of rankings stretches back to the late 19th century, but it is the intensification of globalisation that has been the most powerful force and explanation for their emergence and success since the turn of the millennium.
Today, as the distribution of economic activity and scientific collaboration has become increasingly international, higher education has been transformed from a local institution into a global actor. It sits at the fulcrum of the geopolitical struggle for a greater share of the global market and the new world-order, facilitating increasing concentrations of wealth and resources and greater hierarchical differentiation and social stratification
In 2012, Mohawk College solicited the support of the Education Policy Research Initiative (EPRI) to collect and use administrative and other data on students held by Mohawk as part of a broad initiative to improve student success based on the principle of evidence‐based decision making.
The first project involved analyses to better understand student retention at Mohawk using both descriptive and statistical modelling approaches. This work led to the development of a predictive model to identify students at risk of leaving college early.
In 2015, Mohawk and EPRI applied to and became part of the Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario’s (HEQCO) Access and Retention Consortium (ARC) to undertake a project that would build on this earlier work. The purpose was to update, refine and extensively test the predictive model, which would then be used to inform and assess a set of alternative advising interventions put in place for students entering Mohawk College in Fall 2015.
In this paper we use co-constructed autoethnographic methods to explore the tensions that animate the meaning of “disclosure” in university and college environments. Drawing insight from our embodied experiences as graduate students and university/college course instructors, our collaborative counter-narratives examine the ordinary ways that disclosure is made meaningful and material as a relationship and a form of embodied labour. Our dialogue illustrates the layered nature of disclosure—for example, self-disclosing as a disabled student in order to access academic spaces but not self-disclosing to teach as an instructor. Katie uses phenomenological disability studies to analyze disclosure at the intersection of disability
and pregnancy as body-mediated moments (Draper, 2002). Nancy uses Hochschild’s (1983) notion of “emotional labour” to explore how socio-spatial processes of disclosure can be an embodied form of “extra work” (e.g., managing perceptions of stigmatized identities).