Technology’s potential to transform education has become a mantra of the 21st century. Much has been said about the tools and solutions that can provide opportunities for enhanced student learning. Frequent discussions have focused on the need for schools to have a robust infrastructure that supports continually evolving educational models. However, not as much has been written about the teacher’s role in this dynamic environment and the fundamentally new and different functions teachers
may have.
The days of teachers covering a defined number of pages in a textbook and assigning work at the end of a chapter are quickly disappearing. Instructors are leveraging technologies that give students access to interactive content from myriad sources. In this digital classroom, the teacher is more than a static oracle of information who delivers lectures. Instead, he or she is an active participant and facilitator in each student’s path of discovery and exploration.
Many proponents of online education have speculated that the digital learning environment might be a meritocracy, where students are judged not on their race or gender, but on the comments they post.
A study being released today by the Center for Education Policy Analysis at Stanford University, however, finds that bias appears to be strong in online course discussions.
The study found that instructors are 94 percent more likely to respond to discussion forum posts by white male students than by other students. The authors write that they believe their work is the first to demonstrate with a large pool that the sort of bias that concerns many educators in face-to-face instruction is also present in online education.
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?”
If you or someone you know is suffering from depression, it can be difficult to know where to turn. There are many excellent resources online that you can use to find out more about depression, including treatments, where to get help, and support for family and friends.
Below is a selection of some of the best websites, organizations and other helpful resources available to anyone who has been diagnosed with or suspects they are suffering from depression.
Introductory courses can open doors for students, helping them not only discover a love for a subject area that can blossom into their major but also feel more connected to their campus. But on many campuses, teaching introductory courses typically falls to less-experienced instructors. Sometimes the task is assigned to instructors whose very connection to the college is tenuous. A growing body of evidence suggests that this tension could have negative consequences for students.
Last week, a student named Mary visited me during my office hours and presented me with an interesting dilemma. In one of her classes, a professor had distributed a study guide with a series of questions to help the students prepare for an upcoming exam. Mary, being the millennial student that she is, decided to upload the study guide into Google Docs and invite the rest of the class to contribute to the document. Students answered the study guide questions from each of their individual notes and then refined the answers from their peers.
More than six months after the Harvey Weinstein scandal catapulted sexual harassment to the top of the cultural agenda, academia is among the industries still grappling with the extent of the problem that it faces, and what to do about it.
While an academic goes about her public online activities, someone calls her a stupid c*nt, tells her they hope she is raped and wishes her a gruesome death. Or maybe they just tell her she is dumb and should get back in the kitchen. Or that she should smile or exercise more. Perhaps they do this in response to an opinion she expressed, or a research paper she published, or perhaps it is simply because of her gender, race or sexuality.
Whether it’s talking to colleagues, reading the latest research or visiting a teaching and learning center, professors have places to turn to learn about best pedagogical practices. Yet faculty members in general still aren’t known for their instructional acumen. Subject matter expertise? Yes. Teaching? Not so much.
In my world language and social studies classes, I have a long-standing policy that some might find harsh: I don’t allow students to retake quizzes and tests. I believe in preparing students to be ready the first time. I believe in teaching them skills and rigor.
For two decades I have taught 150- to 200-student sections of introductory financial management to majors in all business programs, plus business minors from diverse fields. Although the course has its fans—some even change their majors to finance each semester— many students find the material daunting, become distracted, and behave in ways that impede the learning of others along with their own. Distractions always have lurked in college classrooms; texters and Web surfers are merely the note passers and campus newspaper readers of the digital age.
Over the past 15 years, the provincial government has placed a greater importance on attracting international students to college and university campuses. Between 2005 and 2015, the number of international students at Ontario colleges increased by 27 per cent, while the number of international students at Ontario universities has increased by 92 per cent.1 The 2014 Federal government set a goal of doubling international student enrolment in Canada to approximately 450,000 students. Also, in 2014, the Government of Ontario prioritized international students as a key group of potential immigrants to meet the goals of building an educated, prosperous and skilled society. Just one year later international students constituted 82 per cent of the Ontario provincial nominees immigration program.2 Despite this increase, international students only account for five per cent of skilled immigrants coming to Ontario. Immigrants in Ontario make up 30 per cent of the labour force, the push to attract more international students and increase the amount of people admitted into the provincial nominees immigration program does reflect the province’s desire to attract a highly skilled and educated labour force.3
In the early 2000s, anyone learning about pedagogy might have encountered “learning styles,” a collection of theories that assert people learn differently, coupled with the advice to teach in ways that include visual, auditory, and/or kinesthetic learning.
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.
A couple of weeks after the end of my first semester of teaching as the instructor of record, I received "the packet" in my campus mailbox — an interoffice envelope stuffed with course evaluations from my students. Those evaluations mattered a lot to me at the time, as I was still figuring out this whole teaching thing. Was I doing a good job? Did my students like the class?
And, more selfishly, did they like me?
Well, in this particular batch, one student certainly did not like either the course or me. In the comments section, the student flatly declared: "He was a real ashole."
The spelling in that quote is sic. In that moment — as I wrestled with both the shame of being
deemed an "ashole" and the urge to laugh at the absurdity of that being the sum total of this
student’s assessment — I had my first experience with a question that faculty members
regularly confront:
Abstract
Researchers are under increasing pressure to disseminate research more widely with non-academic audiences (efforts we call knowledge mobilization, KMb) and to articulate the value of their research beyond academia to broader society. This study surveyed SSHRC-funded education researchers to explore how universities are supporting researchers with these new demands. Overall, the study found that there are few supports available to researchers to assist them in KMb efforts. Even where supports do exist, they are not heavily accessed by researchers. Researchers spend less than 10% of their time on
non-academic outreach. Researchers who do the highest levels of academic publishing also report the highest levels of non-academic dissemination. These findings suggest many opportunities to make improvements at individual and institutional levels. We recommend (a) leveraging intermediaries to improve KMb, (b) creating institutionally embedded KMb capacity, and (c) having funders take a leadership role in training and capacity-building.
PHILADELPHIA -- Professors identify limited English proficiency and different academic preparation or expectations as the two biggest academic challenges international students face, according to results of a survey of DePaul University faculty presented Tuesday at the NAFSA: Association of International Educators conference.
Numerous articles and op-eds encourage academics to be more active online. They generally argue that being on social media offers many benefits, including enabling scholars to network with colleagues, share their research and conduct public scholarship.
Often such advice is good. But such hypothetical opportunities stand in stark contrast to experiences of harassment that some academics report when they go online. One public scholar for example, recently told us that she received a Facebook message following a TV appearance.
Over time, the labour market has shifted from one characterized by stable or permanent employment to a “gig economy” of temporary or contracted employment, where an on-demand, freelance or contingent workforce is becoming the norm. A gig can be defined as “any job, especially one of short or uncertain duration.”
This type of staffing model allows an organization to fill skills gaps by hiring on a temporary, on-demand basis. These are not the “temps” of the past; instead, they are short- or long-term contracts for personnel ranging from blue-collar light-industrial
workers to highly skilled IT, engineering, accounting and HR professionals.
Last week, in my final rhetoric class of the semester, we did an end-of-term exercise that I’ve assigned for the past few years. I use notecards to write a series of prompts meant to encourage students to reflect on the semester and what they’ve learned. Each student comes to the front of the classroom, takes a notecard, and responds to the prompt in front of the class. There are also doughnuts.
Among the prompts is this one: "Before this class, I thought rhetoric was [fill-in-the-blank]. Now I think rhetoric is [fill-in-the-blank]." I got the format from Kimberley Tanner, who calls such prompts "retrospective post-assessments."