Whether it’s talking to colleagues, reading the latest research or visiting a teaching and learning center, professors have places to turn to learn about best pedagogical practices. Yet faculty members in general still aren’t known for their instructional acumen. Subject matter expertise? Yes. Teaching? Not so much.
The first initiative of its kind in an Ontario University
The Nipissing University Promise Program will support you through all aspects of the University journey. Newly admitted and transfer students with less than 30 transfer credits enrolled in the Promise Program will have an advisor to help navigate each step of your academic and co-curricular involvement at Nipissing — the transition into academic studies, life on campus as a Laker, and career development.
What is the NU Promise?
Nipissing invites you to return, tuition free, for up to 30 additional credits* if 6 months after completing your 4-year undergraduate degree program with a 70% GPA and all required elements of the program, you have not secured career-related employment.
Year after year, school boards receive reports echoing what many before them have concluded — that First Nations, Inuit, and Métis students don’t achieve as highly, or graduate as often as the average Alberta student.
Educators often call it the “achievement gap” — a large, measurable difference in how Indigenous students fare in school compared to students overall.
Last week, I described how what some observers might see as a bad approach to teaching -- focusing on our weakest students -- can, in fact, have good results. Continuing with that theme, let us take a look at a second aspect of good teaching -- promoting student learning -- and consider its inverse. In award letters, students regularly talk about how much they learned from award-winning professors and how new worlds were opened to them. It is hard to argue that learning is not fundamental to effective instruction.
Among the most heartwarming experiences of my academic career has been serving on university committees. You don’t often hear a faculty member say that, but in this instance, the committees involved awards for teaching at the college and university level.
Determining the best instructors on a campus involves reading through numerous files. In doing so, one learns about the wonderful accomplishments of colleagues and the innovative things they are doing in their classrooms. Perhaps most compelling are the letters from students who describe the life-changing experiences that come from a particular teacher.
I’ve been especially appreciative of my colleagues this week and there are lots of reasons why.
My colleagues teach me.
My colleagues let me teach them.
My colleagues disagree with me.
Young Ontarians are more concerned than older people about the impact of teaching by parttime university professors, according to a poll released Wednesday by the province’s faculty association.
Seventy-one per cent of people between 15 and 17 said they want to see a permanent instructor at the front of the class, compared with 64 per cent of all Ontarians, a result that the group that commissioned the survey says shows support for measures that would improve the working conditions of part-time faculty.
“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.
Study hard, earn good grades and career success will follow.
Actually, a new study finds that this common advice given to college students isn't true.
The grades of new college graduates who are men don't appear to matter much in their job searches, according to a new study. And female graduates may be punished for high levels of academic achievement. The study comes at a time of growing evidence that female students are outperforming their male counterparts academically in college (after also having done so in
high school).
Don’t overlook the benefits of working in a non-faculty role at a university.
It was a chilly December morning at work. I was sipping on my first coffee of the day, reading my emails and making my plans for the day, when an email notified me that one of my publications had been referenced. No way! It had been almost eight years to the day since I defended my PhD thesis and I had long stopped adding research publications to my resumé.
Still, it was exciting to find out someone referenced my research.
To build an effective network that can lead to referrals, starting early is best.
Networking can happen anywhere; both formally (at an official networking event) and informally (meeting a friend of a friend who works at a company that interests you), as well as online, and in person. However, the very thought of actively meeting new people and conversing can make students shudder (especially us awkward folk), but the process of creating and managing your network connections doesn’t have to be so daunting. While it is work, it can also be incredibly rewarding!
While we want to instil discipline and responsibility in our students, there is also pedagogical value in compassion.
It’s that time of year again, when panicked students start asking for extensions. They will send desperate emails and come knocking with trepidation on our office doors. They will arrive with excuses and cite extenuating circumstances, and faculty far and wide will have to make tough decisions about whether or not to accept late work.
A look at some UCASS data from 1970 to 2016.
Last year, Statistics Canada released University and College Academic Staff System survey data for the first time in five years. (The survey had been scrapped in 2012 and revived in 2016.) This data on full-time faculty at 112 universities and colleges offers an important snapshot of Canada’s professoriate (read more about the latest results here).
The UCASS survey goes back to 1937, but 1970 is the earliest date for a continuous time series.U niversity Affairs took a closer look at this data, starting from 1970, and the resulting six charts tell a partial history of Canada’s full-time faculty over nearly five decades (no data was available from 2011 to 2015 while UCASS was on hiatus).
Abstract
This paper presents an empirical analysis of the Ontario-led strategic mandate agreement (SMA) planning exercise. Focusing on the self-generated strategic mandates of five universities (McMaster, Ottawa, Queen’s, Toronto, and Western), we asked how universities responded to this exercise of strategic visioning? The answer to this question is important because the SMA process is unique in Ontario, and universities’ responses revealed aspects of their self understanding. We adopted an organizational theory approach to understand the structure and nature of universities as organizations and explored how
they might confront pressures for change. Analysis of the universities’ own proposed strategic mandates found elements of both conformity and striking differentiation, even within this sample of five research-intensive university SMAs. Directions for further work on this planning exercise and on higher education reform more generally are discussed.
Here's an unsettling fact. One of Canada's most-renowned universities, with a student population the size of a small city, is chronically reliant on philanthropic donations to meet the demand for on-campus mental-health programs.
Let's think about that for a second.
Imagine having to scramble every year for donations simply to meet a minimum service standard. Now imagine being an institution without the luxury of a large rolodex of donors – relying only on tuition fees or internal funding.
Too many students are dropping out of doctoral programs or taking too long to finish, prompting some universities to question what they can do to help them along.
After completing five years of study towards his PhD in English at Queen’s University, Ian Johnston dropped out. To those who have similarly slogged through a doctoral program without success, his reasons will sound all too familiar: his funding had run out; he hadn’t yet begun to write his dissertation; the isolation had become oppressive; and the prospects for landing a tenure-track faculty job in English studies – were he to forge ahead and finish – were dim.
This document was written by a working group of the Canadian Association for Graduate Studies* and is intended to promote and facilitate discussion on the doctoral dissertation of the 21st century among those responsible for or undertaking doctoral education. The outcome of these consultations will help inform the development of a series of recommendations by the working group.
Ontario universities came under the provincial ombudsman’s oversight in 2016. The office has since received more than 500 university-related complaints.
Paul Dubé is in the “persuasion game.” Whether it’s overseeing complaints about provincial government ministries, municipalities or universities, Mr. Dubé, Ontario’s ombudsman says his modus operandi remains the same. “My approach as an ombudsman has always been to show all stakeholders what’s in it for them, why they will benefit from these recommendations,
that it’s in their interest.”
If graduate education is to undergo serious change, relying on the development of supervision abilities only through modeling or memory seems out of step.
In light of recent national discussions on the purpose, content, structure, and assessment of the doctoral dissertation, the highly competitive (academic and non-academic) job market and the increasing precarity of employment in the academy—it is no surprise that the design and role of graduate education has been called into question. While some might cheekily say “So
you want to earn a PhD?” and outline the employment outcomes for PhD graduates, it might be time to ask “could the process of earning a PhD be improved?” More importantly, who could do so?
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.