Recent media attention has brought to light the levels of sexual harassment faced by undergraduate students, and it appears that such incidents are on the rise for graduate students, too. Most of the cases reported involve faculty members as the perpetrators, yet little attention has been given to harassment among faculty members themselves, and this is a phenomenon that also affects student learning.
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”.
The mental health and well-being of Ontarians is a shared responsibility that requires collective action.
In any given year, one in five Canadians experiences a mental health challenge or illness, and by 40 years
of age, half of Canadians will have, or will have had, a mental illness.
This prevalence means that, at some point or another, mental illness will impact us all.
Postsecondary students are particularly vulnerable. The onset of most mental illness and substance dependency typically occurs during adolescence and early adulthood, which coincides with the very age when the majority of students are first encountering the pressures associated with postsecondary education.
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 university reward structure has traditionally placed greater value on individual research excellence for tenure and promotion, influencing faculty’s allocation of time and definition of worthwhile labour. We find gender differences in Canadian natural sciences and engineering faculty’s opinions of the traditional criteria for measuring academic success that are consistent with an implicit gender bias devaluing service and teamwork. Most women recommend significant changes to the traditional model and its foundation, while a substantial minority of men support the status quo. However, this comparative qualitative analysis finds more cross-gender similarities than differences, as most men also want a more modern definition of success, perceiving the traditional model to be disproportionately supportive of one type of narrow research scholarship that does not align with the realities of most faculty’s efforts.
Thus, this study suggests a discrepancy between traditional success criteria
and faculty’s understanding of worthwhile labour.
Abstract
The number of international students seeking educational opportunities at Ontario colleges of applied arts and technology (CAATs) has grown at an unprecedented rate in the past 10 years. It appears that as the number of the international college students has increased, colleges have also been relying more heavily on educational agents to recruit such students. To
explore this assertion, the author examined institutional data provided by an Ontario college of applied arts and technology. The findings show that the proportion of international students who use an agent has indeed risen dramatically in recent years. The paper also identifies and examines various factors contributing to CAATs’ increasing use of educational agents.
Keywords: International, international students,
international recruitment, recruitment agencies
Most political discussion of higher education these days focuses on the return on investment to individuals, rather than on the contributions that colleges and universities make to society broadly. So it wouldn't be surprising to find that many Americans don't put much stock in the "public good" arguments on which much government funding of higher education was premised.
But a new survey finds that most Americans continue to support government funding of higher education and to recognize that colleges and universities play many roles beyond helping them (or their children) get a good job or other personal return on investment.
Of all students who started college in fall 2016, 73.9 percent persisted at any U.S. institution in fall 2017, while 61.6 percent were retained at their starting institution. The persistence rate is the percentage of students who return to college at any institution for their second year, while the retention rate is the percentage of students who return
to the same institution.
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.
“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).
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.
In an earlier piece, our team described a dashboard that serves as an early-warning system of indicators that can show when an academic unit is on the brink of dysfunction -- or, even worse, already mired in it. We developed that resource, the Academic Unit Diagnostic Tool (AUDiT), primarily with administrators in mind, although entire departments have come to use it over time.
Our project has worked with department-level and more senior university leaders to explore how to use this diagnostic tool to shape strategies for intervention before they become debilitating. In talking with those leaders, we have found that while every department has distinct features, the broad outlines of what constitute healthy departments and dysfunctional ones fall into identifiable patterns.
Every semester I teach a journalism course at the University of Kansas on design basics for 80 to 100 students. One day I noticed that a student who attended every class had not been turning in his weekly journal assignment.
I asked him to see me after class. As we talked in my office, he began to cry and revealed he’d been under a lot of personal stress — taking classes while trying to work 30 hours a week at IHOP to help his mother and pay his own bills. His biggest need was money, and I managed to get him some immediate financial support from the university. But he was also enormously relieved just to tell me what was going on in his life — he had no idea, he said, that professors noticed students.
This month, we’ll focus on how to prepare for existing state and national tests. I’ll focus on three things that can help your students improve their chances to score up to their potential. By the way, kids never score above their potential; they’re just not going to randomly make enough lucky right answers time after time after time (in statistics, it’s called regression to the mean).
But, they often underperform for a host of reasons, even when they should perform much better. While we could focus on dozens of variables that influence standardized testing, we’ll focus on these three: 1) brain chemistry, 2) priming, and 3) episodic memory triggers. Some of these suggestions got so many rave reviews that they are reproduced from an earlier bulletin!
Many enrollment leaders are considering offering transfer incentives to students enrolled at other colleges, according to a new report.
If you’re already feeling jittery about enrollment trends, please put down that coffee before reading any further. The rules of competition are changing.
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 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.
Rethinking Gen Ed
Amid concerns that requirements may not mean much to students or professors, Harvard and Duke Universities both look to curricular changes to improve undergraduate education.
Each new semester as I walk down the hallway to my classroom, I am a little nervous, even after 27 years of teaching experience…and I’m okay with this. I think when I get to the point where I don’t feel this anxiety, I won’t be as effective a teacher. After all, I will be walking into that classroom for the next four months and it’s important to make a good first impression.
Below are 10 tips to help you get off to a great start.