Your students have questions, but they rarely ask them—especially at the beginning of the semester. They feel awkward or embarrassed, or maybe it’s just inertia. Whatever the cause, the vast majority of student questions go unasked. For teachers, this is wildly frustrating because we can’t answer the questions they don’t ask (though some questions can be anticipated). In many cases, the unasked questions represent anxieties and uncertainties that negatively affect students’ performance in class and inhibits their learning. This is a particular problem in the sophomore composition class I teach. It has a reputation as a difficult class, so many students arrive intimidated and nervous.
Round numbers and new decades invite us to take stock of things. The last decade was a big one for career diversity and doctoral reform in academe. The organizers of the Modern Language Association and other professional organizations are clearly "woke" to the need for changes in graduate education.
But what about the membership? At this year’s MLA convention in Seattle, I decided to look more closely at the audiences that show up to listen, and have their say, at sessions about doctoral reform.
What do you call a professor? Professor. Oh, I’m so funny…
In all seriousness, the answer to this question is much more complicated than you might think, hence my humour flow chart. Let me explain. Most students who attend university grew up in homes that valued manners to one degree or another. So unless told otherwise, they referred to adults as Mr., Mrs., or, more rarely, Ms. This was standard procedure from their parents’ friends to their elementary and high school teachers. So when these students get to university, they end up with one of two problems. Either they don’t know what to do or they say the wrong thing. So in this post, I’m going to discuss what not to do, why the title you use is important, and how to avoid feeling like an ass. The easy answer is to just call your professor, “Professor.” It’s a good catch-all and you are unlikely to offend anyone. If you want to delve further into this topic, read on!
When students are unable to comply with some aspect of an academic task (e.g. due date, assignment length, quality of work), there is potential for them to communicate reasons as to why they were unable to complete the task to their instructor. At this point the students have a choice, in which case they can either provide legitimate reasons for not being able to complete or to submit their coursework, or they can communicate something which is a deliberate attempt to deceive the instructor. A student may communicate information designed to deceive or construct a fraudulent claim to an instructor in order to avoid the undesirable consequences (e.g. a bad grade that may hurt the student’s overall standing in a class) of not complying with the academic task.
Roig and Caso (2005) found that the frequency of which providing fraudulent claims occurs in an academic environment is approximately equal to, if not greater than, more commonly identified forms of academic dishonesty such as cheating and plagiarism.
Ferrari et al. (1998) indicated that fraudulent claim making was utilized by as many as 70% of American college students. However, this phenomenon has received limited empirical attention in recent time in comparison to other forms of academically
dishonest behavior.
When I first began teaching online courses, I did so with a fair amount of uncertainty and trepidation. Could I replicate in a digital environment what I believed was essential for an in-person course? What I learned, however, was that I didn’t need to replicate my face-to-face pedagogy exactly. I could find different, albeit related, techniques and practices to achieve a
similar outcome online.
Flipped and active learning truly are a better way for students to learn, but they also may be a fast track to instructor burnout.
I was reading an old issue of the Harvard Business Review when I came upon a passage that sounded awfully familiar: "Boards, once the dependably cautious voices urging management to mitigate risk, are increasingly calling for breakthrough innovation in the scramble for competitive advantage." That observation — made about the corporate world in 2017 — could just as easily be describing higher education today.
Across academe, the calls for innovative, "transformative" leadership have grown louder as the financial, political, and demographic waters have gotten choppier. In the recruiting process, trustees say they want a president with the creativity and conviction to do what it takes for the institution to survive. But once hired and on the job, are trustees really willing to support a "transformative" president?
It's never easy seeing a student experience distress, but well-meaning adults (myself included) too quickly and too often rush to the rescue. There are times to intervene, but we must be more judicious in knowing when to let students cope with failure on their own. Otherwise, we will raise a risk-averse generation whose members lack resilience and the crucial ability to rebound from failure. To prevent that outcome, teachers and educational leaders alike must be mindful of several situations where helping hurts.
That all may still be true, but the new reality is that COVID-19 is increasingly dominating not just our collective head spaces (in ways helpful and not) but also what our jobs are day to day. That's especially the case in certain realms, including for those of you responsible for helping to deliver instruction and learning at your institutions.
So today, at least -- next week seems very far away at this point -- this column will focus on a question that is generating a good bit of discussion among thoughtful observers of teaching and learning issues: What impact will this sudden, forced immersion and experimentation with technology-enabled forms of learning have on the status of online learning in higher education? Below, 11 experts share their thoughts on how the explosion of remote learning -- much of which may be primitive and of dubious quality -- could affect attitudes and impressions of a mode of learning that already struggles to gain widespread faculty and student support.
Two years ago, I stepped down from a deanship at New York University, having spent 33 of the previous 37 years in leadership posts at three universities. I’d always thought the transition from professor to administrator was hard, but returning to faculty life has turned out to be no less difficult.
I have resumed teaching and doing research as a "clinical professor" — NYU’s lingo for a non-tenure-track, full-time, teaching-oriented appointment. In the process, I’ve learned a few things that might benefit other academics going through the same back-to-the-faculty transition.
Having taught college for five years now, I sometimes take for granted that teaching methods that seem obvious now were once foreign to me. So, to prevent other first-time teachers from making the same mistakes I did, I want to share four of the biggest teaching mistakes I made and how learning from them has improved my class.
A full teaching guide.
Because of the coronavirus outbreak, the University of Denver has moved spring quarter classes online. That means DU professors are quickly shifting gears to adapt their lesson plans, lectures and assignments for the virtual classroom. With faculty and students adapting to online teaching and learning, the DU Newsroom reached out to the experts at University College, where the
majority of classes offered are 100% online. Allison O’Grady, University College’s senior instructional support specialist, has helped faculty facilitate online learning for the past decade.
She shares her expertise with the DU community.
Businesses driven by data strategies are nothing new. The commercial sectors have been leveraging high volumes of information for decades. Amazon’s monumental growth is largely down to its personalised recommendations, directly complementing its novel business strategy.
Any university or college worth its salt is tracking and recording huge amounts of data per cycle. Applications, firm choices, insurance choices, acceptances, and open day figures are poised for interpretation, awaiting synthesis with other information – which schools drive the most students, how do different groups engage with communications, and why do first -year students choose that university?
Community colleges are not monolithic. Each has its own culture, its own array of personalities, and its own way of doing things. Yet my experience — more than three decades at five different two-year colleges in four states — suggests that most of them have
a great deal in common, too. With that in mind, if you’re new to full-time teaching in the community-college sector, here’s what you can probably expect as you start work this fall.
Most students cheat, or so they eventually admit in surveys of college alumni. Weighing the collective evidence, it appears that only about a quarter of undergraduates have not cheated. Much of the misconduct goes on below the radar of faculty members, and we can’t do much about something we don’t see. The real question is: Why aren’t we reporting more of the cases that we do detect?
If you’ve taught in higher education, you no doubt have discovered plagiarism on a written assignment or cheating on an exam. It’s also likely that your college or university requires you to report every one of those incidents — or maybe on your campus, that’s a request rather than a mandate.
One of the most intriguing, and perhaps intimidating, aspects of walking into a class for the first time and introducing yourself is deciding who you will be. The teaching persona you present to your students on that first day of class will set the tone for the rest of the semester.
As teachers, we get to consciously decide who we will be in the classroom. The creation of our teaching personas deserves careful consideration and is something I frequently discuss with my graduate students prior to their first teaching opportunity. In reflecting on the evolution of my teaching persona over the last two decades, and in discussing how my colleagues have developed and refined their own teaching personas, I offer an overarching recommendation for the basic elements of a teaching persona that will enhance the engagement of the teachers and students and contribute to a vibrant community of teachers and learners in the classroom. Simply, I recommend that through our teaching personas, we bring PEACE to our classrooms.
Branding is the exercise of summarizing an organization’s culture to attract a particular type of employee, collaborator or funder.
Like it or not, branding and self-promotion are an integral part of science. Our training might focus primarily on how to do science, but that isn’t enough; we also need to promote ourselves and our findings in order to persuade others to fund and collaborate on our research, and to highlight the value of our discoveries so we can broaden their reach.
It’s always been this way. The financial support of scientific discovery was historically provided by wealthy patrons who typically backed an individual or a handful of scientists who had to market themselves to get attention (The financial cost of doing science). These days, the role of individual patron has been assumed by diverse government, philanthropic, and private sources of grant funding, and it’s our peers who we have to impress, via the peer review process.
Today we are reviewing post compulsory education and training in the United States of America.
Gavin Moodie
The quick transition to remote and hybrid learning in higher ed has highlighted needs that only technology can address.
When face-to-face learning and teaching screeched to a halt back in March, educators did their best to cobble together digital tools to get them through the spring’s online teaching sprint. Now, with the pandemic’s end nowhere in sight, that educational mad dash has Custom content sponsored by Microsoft turned into a marathon. And just like endurance runners, educators are discovering they need top-notch equipment to help them stay the course.