Here in Ontario, we’re preparing students to make their mark on the world.
That’s not an exaggeration. Ontario’s colleges and universities produce talented, driven and innovative thinkers. These leaders go on to find success in global health, international trade, cross-border research partnerships and so much more. They then come back to Ontario, creating businesses and investing in the community that gave them their start. That’s the kind of future we want for more people in Ontario, and there’s no reason that a competitive, international edge can’t start earlier in one’s career.
As I write about my experiences in higher education, I want to make one thing clear: I don’t believe the issues we are facing have a one-size-fits-all solution. I see too many articles that pronounce the end of higher education as we know it and that the solution is [insert latest buzzword here]. But the reality is that there are many different kinds of institutions with many different kinds of issues that are complex and not easy or quick to solve.
What I hope to address in sharing my experiences is that we all need to honestly assess where we are with various issues and look for good solutions that are evidence-based and make sense for our specific type of college or university. What makes sense for a large public institution won’t necessarily make sense for a small liberal arts college.
The way kids these days dance is, quite frankly, indecent and without any modesty. It’s a reflection of the times, and
how the world and its governing morals are degrading.
The above is not about the year 2017, but rather is paraphrased from The London Times’ description of the
introduction -- and growing popularity of -- the waltz, more than 200 years ago.
“We remarked with pain that the indecent foreign dance called the ‘waltz’ was introduced (we believe for the first
time at the English Court on Friday last),” The Times wrote in its warning about the new, crass dance which involved
“the voluptuous intertwining of the limbs and close compressure of the bodies.”
Do you really believe that watching a lecturer read hundreds of PowerPoint slides is making you smarter?
I asked this of a class of 105 computer science and software engineering students last semester.
With over a decade in training and management of college teachers, I saw late policies ranging from “not one second late, period” to “any time before the last day of class, no penalties.” It is easy to do a Google search and see a plethora of comments at both ends of the spectrum, and most folks are pretty convinced their individual strategies work. What I have noticed in my administration experience, and some 19 years in the classroom, is that balance leads to a better experience for both the students and faculty.
With that in mind, I proffer several principles for accepting late work and address two concerns of the “no late work ever” folks. Additionally, I share an epiphany one of my faculty members had after changing her policy.
In this paper we utilize interview data to explore the workings of a college–community partnership program that delivers tuition-free, for-credit courses to low-income adult students in neighbourhood-based settings. Addressing the interplay of individual and structural barriers on the educational readiness of students, our findings explore how the program builds participants’
confidence and self-belief, and how the neighbourhood-based delivery model encourages their engagement with post-secondary education (PSE). We find that the value of embedding PSE capacity and resources in low-income communities lies not only in its potential to engage adult learners, but also in how it nurtures a greater sense of community integration and social inclusion. We
conclude by suggesting that our study provides a useful foundation for institutions elsewhere aiming to recalibrate and extend their community outreach strategies when seeking to promote post-secondary access and engagement for low-income populations.
The “talent economy,” consisting of highly skilled personnel from the science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields, is the linchpin of a productive society and economy. Maintaining knowledge-sharing in these fields relies on training, retaining and attracting global talent. It also requires encouraging international and inter-sectorial experiences (i.e., within academia, governments, industry and NGOs) for domestic and foreign researchers –otherwise known as “brain circulation” [PDF]. Indeed, international and intersectorial mobility should be a part of career development for scientists to become leaders in
increasingly multi- and interdisciplinary professional environments.
Behind the doors of the University of Toronto’s Simcoe Hall, the school’s governing council voted in favour of passing a controversial policy that would mandate students who are experiencing a mental health crisis to take a leave of absence. The policy drew criticism from students who said it neglects to include the voice of those who are living with a mental health issue.
There is currently increasing pressure on universities to demonstrate how they contribute to their host societies. In the 21st century knowledge society, universities are seen as providing the key raw materials for economic growth, creating knowledge through research activities.
A new ideal-type of university has emerged, the 'world-class university' bringing together the best talents, researchers and facilities to drive national economic development. A wide range of countries – from France to China, from Germany to Saudi Arabia – have embraced this model and selectively rewarded universities conforming to that ideal.
But alongside pressure to be 'world class', universities are also under pressure from increasing student numbers unmatched by resource growth. Universities have responded by increasing efficiency of student delivery, reducing drop-out rates, increasing class sizes and standardising teaching activities.
In the past few years, the business world has increasingly embraced failure. Entrepreneurs, once coy about past losses and missteps, now flaunt their failures like badges of honour. The idea of “failing upward” has become a recurring motif in blog posts, TED Talks, business conferences and self-help books – and this fetishization of failure has started to infiltrate the world of higher education.
“Are students getting it? How do I know?” Instructors answer these questions through a variety of assessments, from small, informal methods such as asking students if they have questions, to formal, graded methods such as multiple-choice exams and research papers. These assessments provide cognitive feedback, whether in the form of a score, a correction, lack of
an answer, or an abundance of questions. But is that the whole picture? While these assessments can help us gauge how well students are “getting it,” it often fails to explain why or why not.
Professors always believe their own fields are central and vital to education — and to life. So I can be forgiven for pointing out that a great deal of evidence supports the idea that superior communicators succeed disproportionately in every profession. For example, when Google identified the "eight habits" of its best managers, the first seven were communications skills. Only the eighth was technical knowledge.
Research shows that women perform better than men on four out of five traits of effective leaders, says Øyvind Martinsen
For me, as for many others at Cardiff University, the recent news coverage of Malcolm Anderson’s suicide has been a real blow. I did not know the accounting lecturer personally. The thing that was so shocking about reading the articles was just how familiar many of the details felt. I have heard numerous stories from colleagues who feel like they are barely holding on. People are struggling with unmanageable workloads and feel as though they are constantly failing.
Few academics will be surprised to hear that more evidence has come out showing that student evaluations of teaching are often biased.
The latest study, released this year by the American Political Science Association, found that the "language students use in evaluations regarding male professors is significantly different than language used in evaluating female professors." The study also showed that "a male instructor administering an identical online course as a female instructor receives higher ordinal scores in teaching evaluations, even when questions are not instructor-specific."
The robots are coming. Future-gazers have been making that prediction at least since Alan Turing speculated in 1950 about the possibility of a machine that could fool an interlocutor into believing that they were talking to another person.
But the imminent arrival on our roads of self-driving cars (see the article “How do we decide what is right? The ethicist’s view”, below) has brought home to many people that the kinds of artificially intelligent machines long imagined by science fiction writers and visionary scientists
are finally being realised.
With PhD in hand, I joined the academy without any real teaching training. As I sought to establish my teaching routine and define my teaching philosophy, I found an author who provided useful guidance: James M. Lang in his first book Life on the Tenure Track:
Lessons from the First Year (Lang 2005). Lang captured my attention immediately with his suggestion that one day per semester you should cancel classes spontaneously to recharge yourself. Beyond this provocative statement, Lang’s practical tone was appealing, and he challenged me to think creatively about how to get the most out of my students. Lang has gone on to author several more books on teaching and learning (Lang 2008, Lang 2016) and a series of highly useful shorter blog posts, many of which are cited in this article. My aim is to build on Lang’s approach by collecting in one place a number of teaching tips. These are practically oriented suggestions in the spirit of Faculty Focus’s interest in publishing pieces on “how it works.” Many of these suggestions are applicable to online learning.
The prevailing statistics on cheating are disheartening. Some put the rate at 75%. That means three out of every four students admit to some kind of academic dishonesty at some point during their higher education.
We all know that this is not a new phenomenon. Cheating is as old as higher education itself. Older, really, if you look outside the classroom. Classicists tell us that cheating scandals occurred even during the ancient Olympic Games.
So is there really a way to solve a problem with such ancient roots?
As dean, I travelled to San Francisco a few years ago with most of my college’s faculty members and doctoral students for a national conference in our field. I didn’t rent a car, because everything on the agenda — leadership meetings and donor visits — was within walking distance of our hotel. Then a major donor from a faraway suburb called and wanted to meet near his home.
Unfortunately, the local rental dealerships were sold out of standard vehicles, but — "good news" — a luxury convertible was available for the same price. I pondered for a moment and declined. Why? I was worried about the optics. That is: how it would look if people from my campus saw me driving away from the hotel like some movie star, thereby confirming prejudices about rich, privileged deans.
Was I being silly, even paranoid?
How much instructional advice have you heard over the years? How often when you talk about an instructional issue are you given advice, whether you ask for it or not? Let’s say you’re a new teacher or you’re teaching a class you haven’t taught before or something unexpected happens in your class; if you’d like some advice, all you need to do is ask. Anybody who’s spent any time in the classroom seemingly has the right to offer advice. And if you’d rather read advice, there’s still plenty offered in the pedagogical literature, to say nothing of blogs and other social media sources.