Black students continuously experience, fight against and bear emotional scars from
racism, which can lead to increased anxiety and poor mental health outcomes. Some
colleges are just starting to address these issues.
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.
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."
Some professors go into administration as a career choice, scaling institutional ladders. Some are coerced into serving temporarily as department chair because of rotating leadership rules. And some professors, like me, do it because we grew weary of being acted upon by supervisors.
You’ll find two types of administrators in that third group:
Those who wreak havoc, doing unto others as they had done to them — e.g., playing
favorites, concealing budgets, excluding critics from participation.
Those who treat everyone as they always wished to be treated.
So here’s an interesting question: How do you effectively connect with students, form relationships, and be present in their lives in an online platform? Community is such a valuable commodity that is often overlooked. Students want to know their facilitator will support them, be active in their course, and create a sense of belonging. “Instructorstudent relationships lie at the heart of humanizing, serving as the connective tissue between students, engagement, and rigor” (Pacansky-Brock, Smedshammer, and Vincent-Layton 2020, 2). We must never underestimate the impact of authentically relating to our online students.
Online learning can feel very isolated and stressful for our learners. Many are raising families or are single parents working full or part time jobs, dealing with aging parents or sick siblings, or working through a major crisis in their life—all while completing their education in a virtual setting.
This paper examines the policies to achieve universal participation in postsecondary education of 3 governments: those of Ontario, the UK (for England) and Australia. All 3 jurisdictions have high tuition fees and already have high access yet seek to further increase participation and attainment. But they do so in very different ways. The paper compares the governments’ policies on financing, relations between institutions, the involvement of community colleges and the role of private institutions in progressing towards universal postsecondary education. The paper finds two different approaches to achieving government goals in higher education – by formal planning and by constructing a market – and suggests that each is likely to achieve the goals government set for them.
In an era of heated debates around the purpose, priorities, and payment of senior administrators in Canadian higher ed, relationship management has become a key part of dayto-day life for many institutional leaders. This often takes the form of carefully worded interactions with the media, social media channel monitoring, and face-to-face meetings with important stakeholders.
But there’s one major set of opinions that’s often missed in all this: that of the students. As the group that feels it has the most at stake when it comes to the public standing of their institution, students are among the fastest to speak out on social media or fill the window of the president’s office with poster board when a PR disaster strikes. In their roles as current students, peers, and family members, they also stand to be one of the biggest influencers of a next year’s postsecondary applicant pool. As the savviest enrolment and communications staff know, current students are more than a listserv - they’re the future of your school.
Given this critical positioning, we reached out to over 1,400 students, applicants, and alumni across Canada to see what they thought of postsecondary senior administration today.
Presentation courses are becoming more prevalent at Japanese universities. This paper focuses on one small cohort of students (n=5) that took an elective presentation skills course at Nanzan University. The paper initially looks at some of the salient themes related to teaching presentation skills and then outlines the design of the course. The main focus of the paper is on the students’ reflective comments on the course and how it affected their presentation skills. Finally, some example guidelines are offered for teachers who are teaching similar courses
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.
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.
Have you ever taken one of those implicit bias tests that assess your hidden prejudices about characteristics such as age, gender, weight, or skin tone? As I reviewed the list of test options recently on Project Implicit, it occurred to me that the site was missing one that would be especially helpful to those of us in higher education: a quiz to assess our bias for charismatic leaders.
It would be interesting to test how much we value confidence over competence and how often we gravitate toward those who are charming, dynamic, and engaging — even when they lack the skills or intellect to effectively lead a college or university into the future.
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.
After I received word of my promotion to full professor this past June — a day after my 39th birthday — I decided to text my friends rather than post the news on Twitter. One of them asked how I was celebrating. I told her that I wasn’t yet. Instead I was making a list of all the people who had tried to destroy my career.
"Wow, that’s heavy," she said. It was.
But it was also cathartic. Writing the list helped me realize something. From the outside, being a mother probably seemed like the greatest challenge on my path to full professor (the most common reply to my text was some version of "I can’t believe you did that with two kids!"). In fact, the biggest obstacle was actually race.
Like many faculty members, I approach my syllabus before a new semester begins with some trepidation: Do I need to add anything new?
Usually the reasons for inserting additional language are quite valid: Perhaps a student identified a loophole last semester that needs to be corrected. Maybe a colleague suggested a new provision that has been neglected on course syllabi, such as contact information for mental-health resources or gender-pronoun policies.
Students are at increasing risk of mental health problems, and universities are struggling in their efforts to respond.
Before the pandemic descended and emptied its hallways, the Davis Building at the University of Toronto’s suburban Mississauga campus (UTM) was a busy hub of academic and social life, and the students walked with a briskness that matched the pace in any urban rail station. The campus’s Health and Counselling Centre (HCC) is just down a set of stairs, in the basement of the building. Last November, a young woman went there after struggling with feelings of being overwhelmed and anxious about living up to academic demands and grappling with unresolved trauma. Anushka* was experiencing suicidal
ideation that culminated in a specific plan involving a bottle of pills that she carried in her backpack.
Providing a high-quality education where students have the opportunity to take part in active learning is one of the most important things we can do for our students. Doing so, however, is much more involved than we may think. All of our instructional work functions within a broader teaching and learning ecosystem where intentions interact, for better or worse, with the expectations and assumptions we have for ourselves and our students. Falling into the trap of attempting to engage students in a large class discussion, where random students reluctantly respond or provide additional information, is one of the most
common teaching practices applied in the higher education classroom. The problem is, large class discussions can feel like a waste of time as students are unmotivated, unprepared, and therefore unwilling to speak.
In preparation for the coming semester, a faculty member recently asked me how to change deadlines on the LMS to midnight on
a given day. After helping the professor, I started thinking about why we might need to reconsider this option, both for our own good and for our students. How did so many of us come to accept the universality of a midnight deadline that casts professors in the fabled role of fairy godmothers, and what exactly turns into a pumpkin when the clock strikes twelve in this scenario?
After reading and hearing about the physical and mental benefits of meditation, I decided to take up the practice several years ago. This led to some discussions with colleagues at work, which eventually morphed into the idea of using mindfulness in the classroom. Mindfulness is a way to pause and reflect on the here and now. To be fully present in what is happening in the
present, without worry about the future or past. The idea is that teaching this philosophy and using activities and practices in the classroom should allow students to release tension and anxiety so they can focus on the material in the classroom. Rather than coming to my biology class lamenting over the test they just took in another class, worrying about the homework, or
making a check-list of “to dos”, the student can release that tension become present with my biology course.
Abstract
Several individual differences have been shown to predict academic and psychological outcomes among university students,
however, it is not always clear which are most impactful, in part because many of the constructs overlap. Thus, the purpose
of the present study was to examine the unique contributions of self-esteem, self-compassion, self-efficacy, and mindsets
when predicting outcomes among university students. Undergraduate students (N = 214) completed an online survey
including measures of the predictors as well as the outcomes of self-control, mental health, and both course and term grades.
Correlations confirmed the overlap among the predictors highlighting the importance of examining the unique contributions
of each. Results of multiple regression analyses showed that self-esteem and self-compassion explained unique variance
in depression and anxiety over and above self-efficacy and growth mindsets. In contrast, self-efficacy and growth mindsets
each significantly predicted self-control when controlling for self-esteem and self-compassion. Only self-efficacy predicted
course grades. Given our results, we suggest that self-compassion and one’s beliefs about their abilities are complementary
strengths for students attending university and should be considered when designing interventions to improve outcomes.
Keywords: self-esteem, self-compassion, self-efficacy, mindsets, self-control, mental health, grades
Abstract
This report observes several limitations of human capital theory, both as a description of the way qualifications are used in
the labour market, and in severely limiting the potential roles of technical and vocational education and training (TVET).
It proposes as an alternative the human capabilities approach which posits that the goal should be for everyone to have the
capability to be and do what they have reason to value. The paper reports the application of human capabilities to TVET as productive capabilities which are located in and concentrate on an intermediate specialised level, the vocational stream which
links occupations that share common practices, knowledge, skills and personal attributes. The paper reports an application
of the concept of productive capabilities to seven countries: Argentina, Australia, Côte d’Ivoire, England, Ethiopia, Germany,
South Africa and Taiwan. From this the report finds that productive capabilities rest upon broader social, economic, cultural,
and physical resources. These include the capacity for collective action, and the maintenance of physical integrity, physical and
soft infrastructure such as legal and social institutions. The cases also illustrate the substantial role of TVET in supporting workers in the informal economy to transition to formal employment, including in developed economies where informal employment is from 10% to 15% of non-agricultural employment. Another case illustrates how marketisation and privatisation separately and together are undermining TVET provision, institutions, systems, and teachers. The report’s final case illustrates the importance of TVET in educating the whole person.
The report concludes by considering implications for TVET’s development of its students, communities, and of occupations
and industries. The report argues that all qualifications have three roles: in education, in the labour market, and in society.
It argues that to develop productive capabilities TVET should Summary Technical and Vocational Education and Training as a Framework for Social Justice develop individuals in three domains: the knowledge base of practice, the technical base of practice, and the attributes the person needs for their occupation. TVET has important roles anchoring its communities and in developing occupations and industries. To fulfill these roles TVET needs to have strong institutions with expert and well supported staff.