Abstract
“Teaching vs. research” as a global false dichotomy will be the focus of this study. A modest but very universal evidence is revealing itself in world university rankings in every year. It is not deniable that university rankings are not well taken by intellectuals. They contempt the ranking criteria for being inappropriate and irrelevant for the social, moral, and academic values prevalent at universities. They severely criticize the exploitation of competitive, market-driven potentials of universities. So many eminent scholars display their sense of humour by labelling these ranking ritual as “University Olympics” or as “horse race”. It is obvious that such a contest propagates the profitable positions of high-rank universities. Fortunately, egalitarian values still reign supreme in higher education. However, equality does not necessitate justice. Justice requires discrimination when needed. It is impossible to ignore the existence of collegial hierarchy. The diversity is a reality among the universities in every country. Neither the students nor the researchers are all alike. Their uneven aptitudes and proficiencies result with ordered categories. These and many other facts compel the ranking culture to endure despite the opposing criticisms mentioned before. As a matter of fact, it is impossible to omit the inter-institutional differences. Instead of resisting the comparative information one can exploit it for the common concern or at least to reinforce the curiosity. Times Higher Education (THE) World University Ranking summarizes annual performances of prominent universities all around the world
since 2012. Ranking criteria involves Teaching, Research, Citations International Outlook, and Industrial Income with differential weights. The purpose of this study is to display the correlations between the variables used as criteria to rank the world universities for 2018. It has been hypothesized that Pearson product-moment correlations would have been significantly high and positive. Moreover, the correlation between Teaching and Research will be the highest one among all
the other paired criteria in every different context.
Keywords: Higher education, teaching and research, university ranking.
By now, most final-year undergraduates across the northern hemisphere have found out what their years of toil (or Xbox playing) have amounted to in terms of the degree scores that will forever adorn their CVs.
In the UK, this was historically all about the relief or despair of finding out which side of the magic boundary you fell on between upper and lower second-class honours degrees; only the former are typically regarded by employers as a “good” degree. In a few cases, it was also the moment when extra dedication was justly rewarded with a first-class degree.
The most famous dictum of the science fiction writer and futurist Arthur C. Clarke may be his Third Law: “Any technology sufficiently advanced is indistinguishable from magic.” And for most of us, the efficiency of 21st-century search engines — Google, Bing, Yahoo and others — can be uncannily accurate. But when it comes to learning, instant gratification can be as much a bug as a feature.
Take high school students today. They have grown up using search engines and other web resources; they don’t need to understand how these tools work in order to use them. In fact, thanks to what’s called machine learning, search engines and other software can become more accurate — and even those who write the code for them may not be able to explain why.
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.
From growing the perfect crop to marketing within restrictive rules, Canadian colleges and universities are cultivating courses for those wanting to work in the booming marijuana industry.
Kwantlen Polytechnic University started offering online courses in cannabis production, marketing and financing about three years ago after officials at the British Columbia school realized there was a need for training and education around medicinal marijuana, said David Purcell, the university's director of emerging business.
Universities must monitor the impact on student stress and staff workload as they shift away from “high-stakes” exams and towards using technology to conduct “continuous” assessment, a report says.
A paper published by Jisc, UK higher education’s main technology body, says digital tools offer “a host of opportunities for students to capture and reflect on evidence of their learning, to use and share formative feedback and to record progress”, adding that it “may be more effective to assess learners continually throughout their course instead of through a final exam”.
It is 2018 and we still have a crisis with the faculty. For 30 years critics have proclaimed the tenure-track and adjunct models of faculty broken.
Tenure-track models overemphasize a very narrow definition of research and do not encourage or provide accountability for quality teaching or improvement of teaching. For example, studies demonstrate that only 25 percent of faculty are excellent at both research and teaching. Furthermore, the tenure track can commit institutions to wages beyond retirement and to fields of study where enrollments may no longer exist.
New research has revealed students’ preferences for their lecturers’ personalities, and if you are neurotic,
disagreeable, closed off and unreliable, you may want to look away now.
We have heard recently of lecturers rating students; now students have got their own back. Looking at five
personality traits -- openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness and neuroticism -- a survey of more
than 260 students, from three London universities, found that conscientiousness was the most desired trait in
lecturers.
Want your students to think more creatively? The trick, a new study suggests, is all in the timing.
In an experiment, groups of students were found to generate twice as many ideas when they were quizzed around midday, compared with at the start or the end of the working day.
No time for lunch again? You’re the typical modern academic.
Montréal, le 2 février 2018 — Dans le cadre des consultations prébudgétaires 2018-2019 tenues par le ministre des Finances du Québec, M. Carlos Leitão, auxquelles elle a participé ce matin, la Fédération des cégeps a rappelé le rôle stratégique du réseau collégial public dans la société québécoise depuis 50 ans et souligné que, face aux défis actuels et futurs en matière de qualification de la main-d’oeuvre et de réponse aux changements technologiques
notamment, le gouvernement doit financer les cégeps de manière suffisante et prévisible. Ce financement à la hausse devrait être accordé dans le but de mieux servir les étudiants, d’accroître la diplomation au collégial, de former des citoyens responsables, de dynamiser la vitalité régionale et de stimuler l’innovation et la productivité.
The coronavirus has colleges and universities swinging into action to move courses online. In the coming weeks, we’ll find out just how prepared (or not) academe is to do this on a large scale. Those of us in online teaching and educational technology have moved quickly to help, too, and it’s astonishing how many helpful resources have already been pulled together.
Even just a few weeks into the crisis, and really only a few days since class cancellations started to become a reality, there are top-quality guides free for the taking, created by people who really know their stuff. I will make no claim to have read all or even a fraction of them, but there are several that are clearly share-worthy:
“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.
Cheerful and helpful workers are beloved by their bosses, and just about everyone else, really. Enthusiastic optimists make for great colleagues, rarely cause problems, and can always be counted on.
But they may not necessarily make the best employees, says Adam Grant, the organizational psychologist and Wharton professor.
Speaking in Chicago at the annual conference of the Society for Human Resource Management, Grant said he separates workers along two axes: givers and takers, and agreeable and disagreeable. Givers share of themselves and make their colleagues better, while takers are selfish and focused only on their own interests. The agreeable/disagreeable spectrum is what it sounds like: some workers are friendly, some are grouchy.
It had happened before, sitting at the computer, working on a syllabus, again, fluctuating between excitement about a new course and a vague sense that life itself was being sucked out of me one sterile byte at a time. I was fighting boredom. And this was supposed to interest students? I tried to imagine it igniting their curiosity, but instead I saw them staring at it with the
enthusiasm saved for the fine print on a life insurance policy. But they must read it. It is their life insurance policy for a future full of knowledge and wisdom! It defines how we’re going to relate! As I sat there writing my syllabus I had a vision of the Ferris Bueller video of the professor droning on and on while asking for input: “Anyone? Anyone?” That was not where I wanted to go. I had to stop and rethink what I was doing.
Some thoughts about change—not so much what to change, as the process of change, offered in light of its slow
occurrence.
Yes, lecture is a good example. In a recent survey, 275 econ faculty who teach principles courses reported they lectured 70 percent of the class time, led discussion 20 percent of the time, and had students doing activities for 10 percent of the time. The article cites studies in that field from the mid-’90s reporting similar percentages. Maybe some other fields have changed more, but evidence supports a continuing reliance on lecture in many fields.
However, lecture isn’t the only example of where we’re slow to change. Many aspects of teaching—course design, approaches to testing, assignments, and grading—have also changed little. Granted, some faculty do change, a lot and regularly, but not the majority. The question is, “Why?” Here are some possibilities I’ve been considering.
For 25 years, I have diligently, thoughtfully, and fastidiously written comments on my students’ essays. In my neatest hand, I’ve inscribed a running commentary down the margin of page after page, and at an essay’s conclusion I’ve summarized my thoughts in a paragraph or more. I’ve pointed out problems in the argument and explained basic mistakes of grammar and style. I’ve demonstrated my enthusiasm for a sharp idea and a well-hewn sentence. I’ve carefully moderated my tone, combining praise with correction. I’ve read papers that moved me to tears, literally, and others that left me frustrated — and tried to be sensitive in letting my students know that in either case.
One of the reasons I love teaching is that each semester provides a fresh start: empty grade books, eager students. I also cherished this time when I was a student myself: poring over course syllabi, purchasing new textbooks, meeting my professors. Although I reside on eastern South Dakota’s frigid plains, the first day of class consistently brings me a warm feeling.
But once the newness of the semester fades, it’s not long before I casually share with a colleague something a student did or (more commonly) failed to do. This habit started in graduate school. Years ago, student shaming provided a humorous means of connecting with my fellow TAs: in my early 20s, commiserating over student issues felt normal, even cool. Perhaps, too, a case can be made that swapping stories of students’ shortcomings had little effect on our students themselves. They didn’t hear us laugh at their misspelled words or poorly constructed sentences. Yet, 10 years later, I’m haunted by the thought that I might
have spent more time complaining about my students than championing their success.
“How am I supposed to mentor colleagues whose roles in the future may not look at all like what I have done?”
The question came from a HERS Institute alumna who had been asked to be part of a mentoring program on her campus. The goals were to encourage strong performance and to foster more satisfaction about working at the university among younger members of her department. She didn’t want to seem unhelpful, but she was feeling unprepared.
When we were told in March that we would be teaching from home, most of the discussion between us, our institutional colleagues, and our larger network of academic peers on social media became focused on how to keep students engaged as we all moved to a remote, alternate-delivery style of teaching. Over the end of the winter term and through the summer, we tried many of the suggestions that emerged from these discussions, including breakout rooms, flipped classes, synchronous and asynchronous delivery methods, and collaborative tools such as Jamboard, Discord, and more. Our hope was that these new
strategies, combined with the handful of our face-to-face strategies that could translate over synchronous remote delivery, would be enough to keep students engaged. Sometimes they have worked (very active text-based chat, active and varied questions during class, consistent attendance rates), sometimes not so much (students not using discussion platforms, silent breakout rooms, so many procedural questions during Aaron’s first online test).
Asked to offer advice to new hires in his department, a senior professor replied, "There is no way not to have a first year." Her remark seemed odd, and a bit ominous, but it turned out to be an accurate indicator of the harried life of a first-year faculty member.