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.
She sat in the front row of my classroom, quiet but engaged. She didn’t raise her hand, but when I invited her into the conversation or asked students to speak to one another, she showed she had done the reading and had thought about it. I learned from an informal writing exercise that she was a first-generation college student, paving the way to higher education for her family.
Abstract
Most Canadian universities participate in the US-based National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) that measures various aspects of “student engagement.” The higher the level of engagement, the greater the probability of positive outcomes and the better the quality of the school. Maclean’s magazine publishes some of the results of these surveys. Institutions are ranked in terms of their scores on 10 engagement categories and four outcomes. The outcomes considered are how students in the first and senior years evaluate their overall experiences (satisfaction) and whether or not students would return to their campuses. Universities frequently use their scores on measures reported by Maclean’s in a self-congratulatory way. In this article, I deal with levels of satisfaction provided by Maclean’s. Based on multiple regression, I show that of the 10 engagement variables regarded as important by NSSE, at the institutional level, only one explains most of the variance in first-year student satisfaction. The others are of limited consequence. I also demonstrate, via a cluster analysis, that, rather than there
being a hierarchy of Canadian institutions as suggested by the way in which Maclean’s presents NSSE findings, Canadian universities can most adequately be divided into a limited number of different satisfaction clusters. Findings such as these might serve as a caution to parents and students who consider Maclean’s satisfaction rankings when assessing the merits of different universities. Overall, in terms of first-year satisfaction, the findings suggest more similarities than differences between and among Canadian universities.
Keywords: NSSE, Maclean’s, Canadian university rankings, student engagement, student satisfaction
Résumé
La plupart des universités canadiennes participent à l’Enquête nationale sur la participation étudiante/National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE), qui est basée aux États-Unis. Plus le niveau de « participation étudiante » est élevé, plus la probabilité de résultats positifs est élevée, et plus l’école est considérée comme étant de bonne qualité. Le magazine Maclean’s publie certains des résultats de cette enquête. Les établissements y sont classés selon leur score dans dix catégories de « participation » et quatre résultats. Les résultats considérés sont la manière dont les étudiants de première et de dernière année évaluent leur expérience globale (satisfaction), et leur désir de retourner étudier au même endroit si c’était à refaire. Les universités utilisent fréquemment les résultats rapportés par Maclean’s à des fins d’autopromotion. Dans cet article, je me penche sur les niveaux de satisfaction présentés par Maclean’s. Sur la base d’une régression multiple, je montre que sur les dix variables de participation considérées comme importantes par la NSSE, au niveau des établissements, une seule explique la majeure partie de la variance en ce qui concerne la satisfaction des étudiants de première année. Les autres ont peu d’effet. Je démontre également, par le biais d’une analyse par grappe, qu’au lieu d’être hiérarchisées comme le suggère la façon de faire de Maclean’s avec les résultats de la NSSE, les universités canadiennes peuvent être divisées de façon plus adéquate en un nombre limité de grappes de satisfaction. Ces découvertes peuvent servir de mise en garde aux parents et aux étudiants qui considèrent les classements de Maclean’s pour comparer les universités. Globalement, en ce qui a trait à la satisfaction des étudiants de première année, elles suggèrent qu’il y a plus de ressemblances que de différences entre les universités canadiennes.
Mots-clés : enquête nationale sur la participation étudiante, Maclean’s, classement des universités canadiennes, participation
étudiante, satisfaction des étudiants
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.
You have chosen to teach in higher education because you are a subject-matter specialist with a tremendous knowledge of your discipline. As you enter or continue your career, there is another field of knowledge you need to know: teaching and learning. What we know about teaching and learning continues to grow dramatically. It includes developing effective instructional strategies, reaching today’s students, and teaching with technology. Where is this
knowledge base? Books, articles in pedagogical periodicals, newsletters, conferences, and online resources provide ample help. Take advantage of your institution’s center for teaching and learning or other professional development resources.
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.
I’ll get right to the point because I know you don’t have much time. A new semester is looming, and you are overwhelmed. It could be because you’re early in your teaching career and still feeling your way. Or it could be related to the impossible amount of work you are facing, as teaching loads grow ever heavier. But some of it arises from a common problem that you can help to alleviate yourself: You are overpreparing for class.
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.
Have you ever become so frustrated with students and overwhelmed by your workload that you start questioning what you are doing? At times it can feel suffocating. Baruti Kafele, an educator and motivational speaker offers a perspective of being mission-oriented to educators and others working with young people in our nation’s classrooms. He suggests affirming your goals and motivations to facilitate successes among students. However, in the college classroom, it is also essential that we, as faculty members, remember and affirm our purpose, acknowledge the contributions we make in students’ lives and professional
pursuits, and respect the call or passion that brought each of us to the teaching profession.
Last year I was given a career choice that was not, in fact, a choice. The particulars of my situation aren’t important, but here’s the upshot: Last March, I was sitting in a meeting with my university’s new president, discussing my reappointment as dean, and it wasn’t going well.
Ultimately the president offered me a graceful exit: He suggested I stay in the job for an additional year while I searched for a new deanship elsewhere. That way, I could write my own career narrative as one of continual ascent. I hadn’t been ousted — I had decided to "seek a new challenge," "apply my skills to a different kind of institution," or (in the words of
LeBron James, when he left Cleveland the first time) "take my talents to South Beach."
Following an incredible two-decade run of growth, Canada is now home to the third largest population of international students in the world, with over 642,000. That includes a sixfold increase seen since 2000, with a tripling in numbers over the last 10 years alone.
To maintain that momentum amidst the current challenges of COVID-19, it will be crucial for universities to continue to stay on top of their international student admissions.
Educational Credential Evaluators has expanded their services across the border to assist Canadian universities and their applicants with international educational credential assessments.
While new to Canada, ECE has been a trusted name in assessments in the United States for 40 years. In that time ECE has served over 2,000 institutions and completed over 600,000 high-quality reports, with over 35,000 completed in 2019 alone.
Depending on their needs, students seeking to further their education in Canada can choose from three different types of academic assessment report: a General Assessment Report, a General Assessment Report with Grade Average, or a more thorough Course-by-Course Assessment Report.
The most powerful self-revelation of my adult life occurred while I was eating a Cubano sandwich in a Florida strip mall. I was running some teaching workshops at a university in Fort Lauderdale and had an open slot for dinner. On the recommendation of my host, I walked from my hotel to a small Cuban restaurant nestled amid a random assortment of storefronts. As I usually do when I dine alone on the road, I brought a book.
Decades-long research on implementation has shown the importance that local context plays in implementing reforms across districts, schools, and classrooms (Anderson et al., 1987; Elmore & McLaughlin, 1983; Honig, 2006; McLaughlin, 1990; Odden, 1991; Purkey & Smith, 1983). New approaches have emerged that take advantage of these lessons; continuous-improvement research, for example, responds to evidence that deep and sustained implementation is likely to occur only when the implementing unit (e.g., a school) is encouraged to modify or adapt a program to its context as it is being designed and tested (Bryk, Gomez, & Grunow, 2011; Cohen-Vogel, Tichnor-Wagner, Allen, Harrison, Kainz, Socol, & Wang, 2015; Langley et al., 2009; Penuel, Fishman, Cheng, & Sabelli, 2011).
"Historians value integrity, David; you should too if you truly are one of us." So wrote a senior professor, a named chair at a regional public university on the West Coast, chiding me in an email. My sin: calling myself a "senior academic adviser to the history department at the University of Minnesota" in an opinion essay I wrote recently for CNN.
This professor decided I was falsely claiming to be some kind of senior adviser to the faculty, rather than merely an academic adviser, senior in rank, assigned to work with undergraduates in the history department. By suggesting that history departments need senior advisers, he wrote, "you make us look like incompetent fools." He added: "Good for you that you have this public profile. But please don’t advance it by trivializing what tenured and tenure-track history faculty, including those at your own university, do." As for my job title, he insisted that "no such positions formally exist at universities, those that still have
standards, at least."
This essay is based on an episode of the University of Technology Sydney podcast series “The New Social Contract”. This audio series examines how the relationship between universities, the state and the public might be reshaped as we live through this global pandemic.
Leesa Wheelahan
Students who engage in active learning learn more -- but feel like they learn less -- than peers in more lecture-oriented classrooms. That's in part because active learning is harder than more passive learning, according to a new study in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Based on their findings, the researchers encourage faculty members to intervene and correct what they call students' "misperception" about how they learn.
For most faculty members, the hardest thing about entrepreneurship is the marketing — figuring out how to "monetize" your academic skills and services.
It’s a tedious and time-consuming process that depends largely on trial and error. It also involves a fair amount of self-promotion, something that is anathema in faculty culture. Words like marketing and monetize tend to make academics very uncomfortable. And yet, without marketing, you’re just a person sitting around waiting for the phone to ring.
It’s no surprise that would-be academics find reading a faculty job ad to be a highly confusing experience. For one thing, there is no standard format for the description of faculty positions. Throw in the fact that institutions are creating more and more part-time
positions with never-before-heard titles, and the result is a lot of perplexed young Ph.D.s.
As a new season of academic hiring gets under way, I want to offer a basic primer on how to interpret a faculty job ad, aimed at early-career scholars going on the market this fall.
Abstract
While Indigenous entrepreneurship is associated with significant economic promise, Indigenous innovation continues to be invisible in Canadian policy contexts. This article examines how Indigenous entrepreneurial activities are framed in government policy, potentially leading to another wave of active exploitation of Indigenous lands, peoples, and knowledges. The
article first discusses the concepts of Indigenous entrepreneurship and innovation through a decolonizing lens, drawing links to education. Then, it provides a set of rationales for why governments need to re-think and prioritize Indigenous entrepreneurship. Next, it maps the current federal government initiatives in this policy sector. Drawing from the Indigenous entrepreneurship ecosystem approach (Dell & Houkamau, 2016; Dell et al., 2017), the article argues that a more comprehensive policy perspective guiding Indigenous entrepreneurship programs should inform Canadian innovation policy. Individual voices from 13 Indigenous entrepreneurs in Manitoba point to three core issues: (a) relationships with the land and the community; (b) the relevance of (higher) education and training; and (c) the importance of cultural survival and self-determination. The article makes an argument for a systemic decolonizing change in how Indigenous innovation is approached in government policy and programs, supported by the work of higher education institutions1.
Keywords: Indigenous entrepreneurship, decolonization, ecosystem, innovation, policy
Résumé
Alors que l’entrepreneuriat autochtone est associé à une promesse économique importante, l’innovation autochtone est toujours invisible dans le contexte des politiques publiques canadiennes. Cet article examine la manière dont les activités entrepreneuriales autochtones sont encadrées dans les politiques publiques, laquelle risque de provoquer une autre vague d’exploitation des terres, des peuples et des connaissances autochtones. Dans un premier temps, l’article discute des concepts d’entrepreneuriat et d’innovation autochtones sous l’angle de la décolonisation et établit des liens avec l’éducation. Ensuite, il fournit un ensemble de justifications expliquant pourquoi les gouvernements doivent repenser et prioriser l’entrepreneuriat autochtone. Enfin, il recense les initiatives actuelles du gouvernement fédéral dans ce secteur. S’inspirant de l’approche écosystémique de l’entrepreneuriat autochtone (Dell et Houkamau, 2016; Dell et al., 2017), cet article soutient qu’une politique publique plus complète pour orienter les programmes d’entrepreneuriat autochtone devrait éclairer la politique d’innovation canadienne. Les voix individuelles de 13 entrepreneurs autochtones du Manitoba permettent de souligner trois enjeux fondamentaux : 1) les relations avec la terre et la communauté; 2) la pertinence de l’enseignement (supérieur) et de la formation; 3) l’importance de la survie culturelle et de l’autodétermination. Cet article plaide en faveur d’un changement décolonisant systémique dans la façon dont l’innovation autochtone devrait être abordée dans les programmes gouvernementaux
et les politiques publiques, avec l’appui des établissements d’enseignement supérieur.
Mots-clés : entrepreneuriat autochtone, décolonisation, écosystème, innovation, politique publique
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.