Any seasoned academic who has been involved with job searches knows there are two sets of criteria for some positions: the ones in the published ad and the "hidden" ones.
"The dean says we must hire a woman this time," reports the chair. Or the dean says: "The department’s lack of racial diversity is becoming a problem, you’ve got to fix that with this year’s search." Or the department’s star faculty member tells the chair, "If you don’t hire my spouse into a permanent line finally, we will take jobs elsewhere next year." All of those fall into the hidden-criteria column.
The purpose of this research study was to investigate if and how mobile devices could be used to support the required program outcomes in a blended pre-service teacher education degree. All students enrolled in an educational technology course during the fall 2011 semester were provided with ViewSonic tablets. Through faculty interviews, student online
surveys, and a post- course focus group, the study participants indicated that mobile devices could be useful for supporting future professional responsibilities (e.g., career-long learning, collaboration) and facilitating student learning but less effective for planning, assessment, and managing the classroom environment.
Discussions of Canada’s so-called “skills gap” have reached a fever pitch. Driven by conflicting reports and data, the conversation shows no signs of abating. On the one hand, economic indicators commonly used to identify gaps point to problems limited to only certain occupations (like health occupations) and certain provinces (like Alberta) rather than to a general skills crisis. On the other hand, employers continue to report a mismatch between the skills they need in their workplaces and those possessed by job seekers, and to voice concern that the postsecondary system is not graduating students with the skills they need.
On the basis of national surveys conducted in 1998, 2004 and 2010, about half of Canadian adults were found to participate in further education courses annually. The vast majority of adults were participating in informal learning related to paid employment, housework and general interests. About 20 percent express unmet demand for further education. Older and working class people may have somewhat lower rates of participation in further education courses but not in informal learning. There are also suggestions of a trend toward increasing underutilization of educational qualifications and continuing underuse of computer skills in paid workplaces.
It’s something many graduate students have heard: “You must be very intelligent.” It’s also the title of a new novel about academic life that asks if going to grad school really is a smart choice -- or even a sane one.
Author Karin Bodewits, co-founder of NaturalScience.Careers, an advice website, started writing You Must Be Very Intelligent: The Ph.D. Delusion (Springer), between the submission and defense of her doctoral thesis (biochemistry and microbiology) in 2011, while backpacking around South America. The first scribbles of it remain in the back of her travel guidebook. While people who read the first chapters encouraged her to continue, she said, she was scared of the potential consequences. Why? Take the prologue, to start.
Vision:
• We create vibrant, engaged and sustainable communities of learning, teaching and research committed to free enquiry and expression.
• We encourage the dynamic interplay of research, teaching and learning, which enhance and energize each other in the classroom and beyond.
• We strive to make valued and socially responsible contributions to our local communities, to Canada, and to the world.
• We support a diversity of faculty, staff and students who share a commitment to the learning experience and are responsive to its challenges.
• We foster an environment where Indigenous knowledge are respected and recognized as a valid means by which to understand the world.
• We offer an enriched learning environment that encourages a passion for all knowledge, the exploration of the creative links between fields of study and a critical engagement with the world.
• We create opportunities for students, staff and faculty to flourish and develop as individuals and as global citizens.
• We affirm our commitment to excellence, to innovation and to leadership in research, academic programmes and community partnerships.
• We commit to building an inclusive intellectual and social community that values the collaboration of all of its individual members
Dan Lang
Can all the universities that claim to be “world-class” actually live up to the claim? If they could be, would that be desirable public policy? It could be that there are so many different meanings of “world-class” that the term in practical effect is an oxymoron: the definition of “world” is determined locally when conceptually it should be defined internationally.
This paper discusses different kinds of institutional quality, how quality is formed and how it can be measured, particularly by comparison. It also discusses the subtle but fundamental differences between quality and reputation. The paper concludes with the suggestion that world-class comparisons of research quality and productivity are possible, but that any broader application to the “world-class” quality of universities will be at best futile and at worst misleading.
The United States remains the leading educational destination of globally mobile students; however, actionable information about the experiences that mitigate the key challenges international students face is rare. Almost weekly, new headlines highlight the uneven and unequal experiences of international students.
This report confirms many of the disturbing trends reported in major higher education periodicals, including a lack of community, low-quality faculty-student interactions, and uneven global learning. It adds to the nation-al conversation by highlighting “encounters with difference that make a difference” based on an analysis of a representative sample of 36,973 U.S. and international students from 135 U.S. colleges and universities using the Global Perspective Inventory (see Braskamp, Braskamp, & Engberg, 2013).
Michael Skolnik
Canadian higher education has in the past few years succumbed to a mood of despair and defensiveness. Until just a few years ago, it was characterized by a confident, forward-looking energy, secure in the notion that it was the pre eminent engine of national development. Since then, we have seen our relative salaries decline; our plant,
equipment, and libraries erode; our jobs threatened; and the value of our contribution to Canadian society severely questioned. A number of explanations could be given for this dramatic reversal of our fortunes, with emphasis ranging from demographics to poor public relations, from economic stagnation to short-sighted political manoeuvering. One popular
explanation is that Canadian higher education is now Qustly) paying off debts it incurred in a Faustian compact with homo economicus. We financed our tremendous growth of yesteryear, this explanation purports, on promises of contributing substantially (or worse, by ourselves, delivering) unprecedented economic growth and industrial expansion. Now that industrial expansion has come to a standstill (and even declined), the primary case for generous funding of higher education is at best called into question, and at worst severely undermined. For those who accept this retributional explanation of the cause of the current crisis of finance and purpose in higher education, Global Stakes
With so many classroom research studies published daily, you can be forgiven for missing some. The techniques below are super-tactical and, for the most part, unsung strategies that you’ll be excited to try tomorrow.
Today's students increasingly expect ubiquitous lecture capture so they can review lectures to improve their understanding
of the material or catch up on a class they missed. "Lecture capture in general is becoming very quickly an
expectation of students," said Chris Edwards, assistant vice president at the University of Cincinnati in Ohio.
O ne characteristic that distinguishes academics from professionals in the corporate world is the former don’t necessarily aspire to climb the management ladder. Many professors — perhaps most, and especially the tenured — are content to spend their lives focusing on teaching and research, with no desire to become a department chair or dean.
That said, some faculty members do want to scale the ladder of academic administration, the first rung of which is usually department chair. Others may not have pursued a management job but nevertheless find it extended to them. And still others may feel some obligation to "take their turn" at the helm, for the good of their department or simply to share the burden. Professors in all three of those groups, at some point, face the same dilemma: "Should I do this, or not?"
Instructors have temporary experiences with groups of students each semester. Even so, these brief moments have the power to change lives. As professors, we decide the impact of our semester-long relationships. We decide to what degree we will work towards student engagement and transformation within our courses. If you would like to create a community of engaged learners within your classroom, it takes more than regurgitating the most compelling content, and it goes beyond collaborative pedagogical practices. The secret to inspiring and transforming students rests in the power of building a community of learners.
There is a global trend toward improving programs and student experiences in higher education through curriculum review and mapping of degree programs. This paper describes an action research approach to program improvement for a course-based MEd degree. The driver for continual program improvement came from actions and recommendations that arose from an
institutionally mandated, year-long, faculty led curriculum review of professional graduate programs in education. Study findings reveal instructors’ perceptions about how they enacted the recommendations for program improvement,
including (1) developing a visual conceptualization of the program; (2) improved connections between the courses; (3) articulation of coherence in goals and expectations for students and instructors; (4) an increased focus on action research; (5) increased ethics support and scaffolding for students; and (6) the fostering of communities of practice. Study findings highlight strengths of the current program and course designs, action items, and research needed for continual program improvement.
Universities Canada members voted to uphold seven “inclusive excellence” principles and to undertake an action
plan from 2017 to 2022.
At Universities Canada’s fall membership meeting, university presidents endorsed a set of principles to advance
diversity, equity and inclusion on their campuses, and committed to a five-year action plan to measure their progress
and outcomes.
“It’s the coming together of a number of things that have led us on this path,” said Mike Mahon, the president and
vice-chancellor of the University of Lethbridge, who was voted in as the new board chair of Universities Canada at
the meeting on Oct. 25. On top of the many conversations over the years in the university community around
creating inclusion, “there is this landscape around us – the commitment of the federal government to be as
inclusive, diverse and equitable as possible,” he said, and that includes efforts to increase equity and diversity in the Canada Research Chairs program.
Will community colleges be prepared to accept the changes ahead, from economic difficulties and fast-changing technology, to the public’s distrust and disenchantment with academic credentials?
PwC has been retained by Colleges Ontario to provide an independent assessment of the fiscal sustainability of the Ontario college sector over the next decade to 2024-25.1 To that end, we have analyzed the current fiscal condition of Ontario’s 24 public colleges (collectively referred to hereafter as “colleges”) and conducted interviews with senior executives at each college to augment our understanding as to how recent economic and demographic trends have affected colleges’ financial condition, as well as the challenges and opportunities they foresee, for their respective college, over the course of the next decade.
Abstract - The earliest studies of undergraduate retention in the United States occurred in the
1930s and focused on what was referred to at the time as student mortality: the failure of students to graduate (Berger & Lyon, 2005). Historically higher education research has had an eye toward pathology with a focus on repairing students’ problems (Shushok & Hulme, 2006). To this end, much research exists on why students fail to persist as opposed to why they succeed. Strength-based approaches to the study of undergraduate retention involve studying successful students. Studying
what is right with students may illuminate new aspects of successful student experiences which can in turn be applied to supporting all students. This paper will provide a brief historical overview of undergraduate retention followed by factors commonly related to undergraduate retention. Finally, an overview of the recent application of motivational theories to understand undergraduate retention including attribution theory, expectancy theory, goal setting theory, self-efficacy
beliefs, academic self-concept, motivational orientations and optimism will be provided. Considerations for the future of motivational theories in undergraduate retention will be discussed with particular emphasis on the value of strength-based approaches to study and practice.
Educators have long been concerned that fewer women than men pursue STEM
(Science, Technology, Engineering, Math) focused programs at the post-secondary level. Less than
25% of the STEM workforce in Canada is women. Research has indicated that this reality reflects a
trend in high school that sees girls lose interest in STEM studies and careers.
The goals of this study, which focused on junior high school students, was to understand how engaged they were in math and science, their future intention for studying science and math, and the likelihood that they would consider a STEM career down the road. Research also addressed students‟ knowledge of how relevant science and math were across various types of careers. Gender and grade differences, and influencers on science and math study, were also examined.
The study of leadership has been an important and central part of the literature on management and organization behavior for several decades. Leadership is a topic of interest, study and debate in almost every professional community worldwide. Organizations are constantly trying to understand how to effectively develop leaders for long term success within their organizations. The systemic problem with this endeavor is that there are many different leadership theories and styles. These options make it virtually impossible for professionals to agree concerning which one theory and or style can best help organizations to develop great leaders. Indeed, “no other role in organizations has received more interest than that of the leader” (Schwandt & Marquardt, 2000,p. 177).