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.
The concept of “disability” should be interpreted in broad terms including both present and past conditions as well as subjective components based on perceptions of disability. These subjective components determine disability in relation to individuals’ interactions with their environment: in the ways buildings are constructed, in the performance standards used to assess individuals, and in the ways individuals are expected to engage in daily activities. This interpretation of disability
is referred to as a “social model.” This model places responsibility for overcoming accessibility barriers onto entire communities. This OUSA policy paper uses a social model of disability to offer recommendations that ensure all willing and qualified students in Ontario are able to access and excel within the post-secondary education system.
The evidence is clear that post-secondary education leads to improved employment opportunities and career outcomes. Over the course of their lives, graduates with credentials from across the spectrum of post-secondary programs, including apprenticeships, trade certificates, colleges diplomas, and undergraduate and graduate degrees, have enjoyed significantly higher rates of employment compared with high school graduates. Median annual and career earnings, meanwhile, rise consistently in relation to post-secondary credentials.
In showing respect for their favorite professors, today’s college students have ventured well beyond the proverbial
apple.
An Indiana University at Bloomington instructor was once given chicken livers … five pounds of them, from an adoring student whose father was a butcher. He gladly accepted and enjoyed the tasty treat. One Southern Methodist University instructor was presented with “a limited-edition Snickers bar” that said “goofball” on it. Apparently the student saw it and thought of her. For now, the candy bar remains in her office, she said, at least until she “gets hangry.”
On her first day of work, a dean got a call from the provost of her new university. He asked her to act immediately on a matter "too long put off" — firing the director of a badly run research center. The university had built a strong case — perennially low performance and financial mismanagement — but the departing dean hadn’t wanted to leave with blood on his hands. So
the new dean dutifully pulled the trigger.
It turned out that the center’s director — while abjectly unfit — was also extremely popular. And so a firestorm erupted among the college’s faculty members. By the dean’s estimation, her honeymoon lasted half a day.
Imagine you have completed a scholarly article, book or creative product that you intend as a contribution to your discipline. Who will evaluate your work, attest to its quality and determine whether it is published or exhibited? Who will review the work when you are up for tenure and promotion or contract renewal?
Now, in your mind’s eye, imagine a person who is likely to review the quality of your teaching for professional benchmarks.
A decade ago, few universities thought strategically about their brand. Now, as the market for academic talent, funding, and recognition heats up, the need has become acute. Universities recognize the necessity of building appreciation for what makes them unique. Yet while some universities may be regarded as “great” brands, most aren’t. And it may be because of the ways in which higher education approaches branding.
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.
We are often told that we live in a global era, driven in part by technology, globalisation and intensified international commerce. There is a great urgency to cultivate internationally minded and ready citizens. Higher education institutions worldwide are
situated at the epicentre of generating the world’s next legion of global citizens.
In the United States alone, institutions now commonly have study abroad centres or offices of international education and many have established international outposts.
At the core of internationalisation is an ambition for internationalised curricula. Through this, institutions aim to equip students with the tools they need to thrive in the global economy. Yet, despite the momentum surrounding the internationalised curriculum, its substance and benefits are still uncertain.
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.
Having coached academic writers for more than a decade, I've noticed a pattern that tends to stall the development
and publication of their research.
I’ve work with a diverse group of humanists, social scientists, and STEM researchers, but they all hear the same drumbeat: "Get it out there!" The tremendous pressure to complete quality research and then send manuscripts out quickly can warp the writing process. In such a frantic atmosphere, even rigorously trained academics who care deeply about their topics can find themselves working from the outside in, rather than the reverse.
Teachers can help students strengthen their brain's executive function with "workouts" in which they practice pausing, prioritizing, improving their working memory, and mapping their options.
Team research is the source of some of the great breakthroughs of all time, such as the 1947 invention of the transistor, which took the complementary skills of applied researcher Walter Brattain, quantum theory researcher John Bardeen and solid-state physicist William Shockley. And today, despite the expediency of individual work, researchers are moving strongly and clearly in favor of teamwork because of its often strong advantages.
Two trends in the evolution of quality assurance in Canadian postsecondary education have been the emergence of outcomes-
based quality standards and the demand for balancing accountability and improvement. Using a realist, process-based
approach to impact analysis, this study examined four quality assurance events at two universities and two colleges in Ontario
to identify how system-wide quality assurance policies have impacted the curriculum development process of academic programs
within postsecondary institutions. The study revealed different approaches that postsecondary institutions chose to use in response to quality assurance policies and the mechanisms that may account for different experiences. These mechanisms
include endeavours to balance accountability and continuous improvement, leadership support, and the emerging quality assurance function of teaching and learning centres. These findings will help address the challenges in quality assurance policy
implementation within Canadian postsecondary education and enrich international discussions on the accountability-improvement dichotomy in the context of quality assurance.
Keywords: internal quality assurance, external quality assurance, accountability, continuous improvement, learning outcomes
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.
Many people decide to get a Ph.D. because they feel a strong personal connection to the subject matter. Thinking, writing and talking with people who appreciate a subject or field of study as much as you feels validating. For some, the discovery of that subject may have clarified a sense of educational purpose. Perhaps it even illuminated a sense of individual purpose or a frame through which the world makes more sense.
Of course, not everyone feels that way about the material they research and teach during graduate school. But for those who do, it can be easy to tie one’s sense of identity to the academic enterprise. “I am a scholar of 19th-century German painting.” “I am an ecologist.” Rather than “I am currently teaching a course on the figure of the child in British poetry.” Or “Right now I am working on understanding the how the charter school movement impacts social mobility for low-income children.”
The current Annual Report uses visualizations developed from years of CCMH data to
explore college student mental health with an emphasis on individual counseling provided
by counseling centers. To start, it is worth briefly reviewing the findings from the last two
Annual Reports:
• 2015 Annual Report: Counseling center utilization increased at 5 to 6 times the rate of institutional enrollment, during the preceding five years. This increase is primarily characterized by students reporting a history of “threat-to-self ” characteristics, and these same students use about 20-30% more services.
• 2016 Annual Report: Counseling center resources devoted to “rapid access” services increased by 28%, over the prior six years, whereas resources devoted to “routine treatment” decreased by 7.6% on average.
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.
Faculty life can be lonely. The traditional academic model requires you to demonstrate autonomy in scholarship and teaching. Both the tenure process and the metrics for tracking faculty progress (e.g., Google Scholar, Scopus) emphasize individual success. Loneliness is especially problematic if you work at a small institution, in an uncongenial department, and/or in a discipline full of introverts. If you have ever shown up at the office and seen every door in your hallway shut, you will know what we’re talking about.
But don’t be fooled. Especially in today’s scholarship culture, which increasingly values interdisciplinary work and socially embedded research, few people make it in academe purely on their own.
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.