To meet the challenges currently facing it—chief among them, to remain viable in an era when traditional sources of funding such as state funding and tuition are decreasing or reaching their market limits—higher education depends on its leaders’ capacities to deal with current challenges, envision change, and make that change happen. In March 2012, the TIAA-CREF Institute hosted a summit on leadership and governance to explore what it will take to steer higher education through this new landscape.
Has there ever been a worse time for faculty and university administrators? Faculty and administrators alike are under siege on multiple fronts—huge budget cuts have been made in most states with more expected, collective bargaining has come under attack in some states, and an underlying threat to tenure permeates academe. A historian might simply attribute this to a poor economy and conclude that such conflicts, cyclical in nature, will pass. But it is far from clear that this storm will subside as others have. Higher education is at a critical juncture and many legislators, donors, trustees, and tuition-payers are fed up with academe’s perceived excesses and excuses.
This paper is aimed at combining the advances in argumentation theory with the models used in the field of education to address the issue of improving students’ argu- mentative behavior by interacting with an expert. The concept of deeper or more sophisticated argumentative strategy is theoretically defined and used to advance two new coding schemes, based on the advances in the argumentation studies and aimed at capturing the dialectical, or structural, behavior, and the argumentative content of each dialogue unit. These coding schemes are then applied for a qualitative analysis of a study designed to investigate how students’ argumentative behavior can be influenced by the interaction with an expert, who used
specific types of attacks to the interlocutors’ posi- tions. The twofold coding shows at which dialogical level expert–peer interactions can directly and more stably affect students’ argumentative behavior, and what effects such more sophisticated strategies can have on the discussion and the analysis of disagreements. In particular, this paper shows how a specific type
of deep-level attack, the underminer, can open dialogues of a different level, focused on unveiling and debating background beliefs underlying a specific position.
"The current economic crisis is a structural one. Emerging industries require that young people possess new knowledge and entrepreneurial skills. Furthermore, tax and regulatory systems often inhibit business formation by young people. Systemic change is needed to help the new generation of young entrepreneurs to succeed in the innovative economy of the 21st century.”
With experts projection that five million K-12 students will enroll in online course by 2016, thee is no doubt that blended learning asking the key question: "Does blended learning give better outcomes than traditional classes?"
International Ph.D. students at U. of Western Ontario say their program can't be completed in four years, and that without fifth year of funding they risk having to leave empty-handed.
As the year 2015 has begun, a worldwide racialized conversation continues about the inability of police, judicial systems, and public policy to address what Derrick Bell (1992) has long framed as the “permanence of racism” (see also Knaus, 2011; Ladson-Billings, 1999). Race riots and police brutality in Ferguson and the Charlie Hebdo murders and their aftermath in Paris punctuate a constant backdrop of racialized policy-making, violence, and inequity. While small, short-lived protests sprang up in reaction to these events, systemic and long-term responses to the larger global context of racism are less common and largely not deemed media-worthy. Within the U.S. context of charges of sanctioned, racialized police brutality representing American racism being framed around the killing of individual Black men, larger arguments about the role of public education in challenging the very conditions that lead to such racism become silenced.
Three teacher education tasks are analyzed using Bateson's "levels of learning" and the distinction between reference experiences and cognitive maps (Dilts, l994). The tasks were 1) writing a risk log of classroom innovations, 2) writing articles, and 3) doing public presentations. Student feedback indicated perceived shifts in behaviors, beliefs, and identities
through both active tasking (reference experiences) and their ongoing dynamic "explanations" (cognitive mapping). The results and activities are then discussed in relation to Freeman's (1992, 1994, 1995) concept of the socialization of teachers into professional discourse and the value of communities of explanation toward continual teacher development.
Strong culture, strong impact focuses on the role of culture in driving high-impact entrepreneurship in G20 countries. The report provides actionable recommendations for governments and a clear, time-bound path for achieving support for young entrepreneurs. Our report, released alongside this year’s G20 Young Entrepreneurs’ Alliance (YEA) Summit in Turkey, builds on our Avoiding a lost generation reports. It drills down on the one driver that is at once omnipresent, yet difficult to quantify or capture, for an entrepreneurial ecosystem:
entrepreneurial culture.
Every generation has a transformative effect on the economy, but the actions of Generation Y, also known as the Millennial Generation, promise to carry special impact. Gen Y, the largest generation in U.S. history, comprises young, educated, ethnically diverse, and economically active individuals. These Gen-Yers, or Millennials, as they are known, are entering the labor force as the “powerhouse of the global economy” and arriving at critical points of financial decision making in their adult lives
(Deloitte, 2009).
Higher education is increasingly looking to technology as a means of tackling persistent equity challenges and improving student outcomes. Yet technology in and of itself is not a solution -- unless people use technology to create new systems, behaviors and student experiences.
Straightforward advice for job candidates in search of a professorial recommendation.
It is one of the most critical steps in a graduate student’s path to permanent academic employment, yet ironically it’s also one of the most mysterious. Asking a professor for a letter, or more likely many letters, of reference can be stressful, and rarely are
students instructed on proper etiquette. Fortunately, the process doesn’t have to be intimidating.
Employers are uniquely positioned to encourage positive financial behaviors in their early career workers, say human resources leaders at three universities.
“By leveraging the full range of the institution’s resources,” says Laurita Thomas, associate vice=president for human resources at the University of Michigan (U-M), “employers can create the right climate to promote Gen Y’s financial wellbeing.” Here are some of the ways, according to Thomas, that employers can set early career workers up for success:
Want to make Gen Y good financial stewards? Let them learn from
each other—and be prepared to give up control.
nternational students have become an increasingly important dimension of Canada‘s educational and immigration policy landscape, which has led to the development of pathways from educational to working visa status. In this report we present an analysis of international student numbers, visa transition rates, processes and government policy evolution with regard to international student entry to Ontario between 2000 and 2012. The report’s findings suggest four major areas of change: increasing male dominance in the number of student entries; the rise in international student entries into the college sector; the increasing importance of international students as temporary workers post-graduation; and the profound shift in source countries for Ontario-bound international students. Policy knowledge in areas related to these issues is vital to Ontario's ability to compete for international students, who can become potential immigrants, while maintaining high-quality postsecondary educational institutions.
According to the Consortium for School Networking's 2015 IT Leadership Survey, 84% of school technology officials expect that at least half of their insructional materials will be digitally based with three years.
Many schools are emphasizing typing and programming skills to prepare their students for the workplace of the future, but it isn’t just about being able to code.
Tour any IT department and you will find a web of servers and routers that store and disseminate information while firewalls and security systems keep the information safe. To most of us, this tech world is something we know we need and rely on, but have little knowledge of in terms of how it operates.
Should this disconnect of layman understanding of the tech world continue on a wide scale we could see a debacle in the workforce with a lack of qualified technicians. Luckily, there are schools and companies confronting this for new generations of students.
Mention the “classroom of the future” and it might evoke images of an old Jetsons cartoon—Elroy and his fellow students working on tablets, following a lecture by a virtual teacher and collaborating on space-aged technology.
While there is little doubt that classrooms have become more sophisticated and digital; the physical classroom setting and furniture haven’t evolved at nearly the same pace. The tablets that are transforming the learning process still sit on top of the same style desks from the 1950s. The blackboards and chalk may have been replaced by interactive whiteboards connected to a computer or projector, but far too often, students still sit in stagnant rows looking up in the same direction at the teacher for the daily lesson.
The next time you sip fruit-infused water while jogging past a “smart” street lamp and wearing workout gear incorporating “intelligent” textiles, you can thank Canada’s community colleges, institutes and polytechnics.
Through partnerships with companies and community organizations, faculty and student researchers at these postsecondary schools play an important role in helping get products and inventions to market while contributing to the country’s economic growth.
Americans reaching traditional retirement ages during the past two decades and today face a different retirement environment than did prior cohorts. Mandatory retirement has been eliminated for the vast majority of American workers, and important work disincentives (or retirement incentives) in Social Security and in employer pension plans have been eliminated or reduced. Americans are living longer and healthier lives, fewer have physically arduous jobs, and technology has increased the options about where and when people work. In addition, the age of eligibility for ‘full’ Social Security retirement benefits has been increased from 65 to 66 (and will soon increase to 67), which is equivalent to an across-the-board benefit cut, and fewer firms are offering employer-sponsored post-retirement health insurance. There are concerns about the future of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. Some of these changes are good news for older workers and some bad, but they all have altered the relative attractiveness of work and leisure late in life in favor of work.