Meetings among colleagues are commonplace in every organization. Academe is no exception. We have meetings for our specific schools, departments and units, not to mention the additional task forces, subcommittees, working groups, teams, ad-hoc groups, councils or advisory panels -- with each designed to help us serve the institution.
"Administration" is a cold word. Yet — whether our many campus critics believe it or not — most full-time administrators have very deep feelings about the work they do. I was no exception. I got into the racket as an advocate for doctoral students in English, and I approached all my administrative work as a calling.
A pair of online instructors revisit the assumption that web-based classes are fundamentally better at accommodating a range of students and teachers.
Online education has seen tremendous growth in the last decade and student enrolment in web-based classes continue to grow. For many institutions, online learning has even become a substantial revenue stream. In principle and in theory, online learning offers numerous possibilities to practice educational inclusivity. It has the ability to reach an unlimited number of
students from anywhere, at any time. Learners have the freedom to work at their own pace and build their own learning paths. It can be a convenient and flexible option for faculty and students alike. Yet, our experiences as instructors of online courses in a university setting begin to paint a slightly different story.
Several studies suggest that graduate students are at greater risk for mental health issues than those in the general population. This is largely due to social isolation, the often abstract nature of the work and feelings of inadequacy -- not to mention the slim tenure-track job market. But a new study in Nature Biotechnology warns, in no uncertain terms, of a mental health “crisis” in graduate education.
Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are online courses that cater to a huge population. MOOCs have been around for quite some time; however, they have begun to gain importance only in recent years. With technologyinfused classroom instructions on the rise, techno-savvy students with little patience for hour-long (or even longer) lectures and the necessity to earn has led to the popularity of online courses among the student population. The obvious benefits of taking up online courses include, among others, self-paced learning, and learning while earning, and learning from absolutely anywhere. An upcoming form of online learning is the massive open online courses (MOOCs). This paper discusses the concept of MOOCs, their history, and their need in the present scenario. This paper also focuses on the benefits and the possible challenges that MOOCs face.
Purpose of Study: Our aim was to better understand how students think, feel, and cope—their emotional adaptation—when making mistakes in the pursuit of classroom learning and how this might impact their relationships with peers. We explored the possibility of individual and contextual differences in students’ emotional adaptation dynamics and considered how they might uniquely coregulate students’ coping with making mistakes in classrooms.
OTTAWA — Federal officials, as part of the government’s latest efforts to crack down on bad debts, are trying to figure out why graduates from private career colleges are more likely to have problems repaying their student loans.
Roughly nine per cent of the almost half-million students who receive federal assistance each year through the Canada Student Loans program go to private schools, including career colleges
Critics of posttenure review of faculty members rightly trace the practice’s origins to the 1990s, when tenure came under fire from conservative state legislators and trustees who assumed that, once granted tenure, the typical professor felt free to come in late, go home early and spend the hours in between hiding from students at the faculty club.
The truth turned out to be the opposite. Instead of laying the foundation for an assault on tenure, the rapid spread and implementation of posttenure review on most state campuses and many private ones demonstrated that the vast majority of tenured faculty work just as hard and well as they did during their probationary years.
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.
Is it just that time of the semester, or are academics more and more stressed out? In the past week alone, I’ve talked with:
-A colleague emotionally reeling from counseling two students who each had a parent die this semester.
-Another unsettled colleague who received an expletive-filled email from an angry student demanding to "speak to your supervisor."
-A friend at another institution buried under a mountain of papers — the product of a fourth course that he’s teaching on overload to make a little extra money.
It’s easier than ever for students to buy assignments. Until universities have better measures for rooting out this kind of cheating, professors are focusing on prevention.
How do you deal with cheating if you can’t be sure it’s happening? For universities across the country, it’s an important question as online services and message boards have made it increasingly easy for students to buy whole, made-to-order essays and pass them off as their own. It’s very difficult for professors to catch, and no one is sure just how big an issue it is.
One in three students globally is enrolled in private higher education institutions, according to research that reveals the huge growth and wide reach of private providers.
The analysis, the first study based on comprehensive data on the size and shape of private higher education internationally, finds that private institutions have 56.7 million students on their books, or 32.9 percent of the world’s enrollment.
During a speech on Thursday, President Trump revealed a striking ignorance of one of the pillars of his country’s educational system. In the course of promoting his infrastructure plan, he, a bit perplexingly, dismissed the country’s community colleges, suggesting he doesn’t know what purpose they serve. “We do not know what a ‘community college’ means,” he told the crowd in an Ohio training facility for construction apprentices, moments after expressing nostalgia for the vocational schools that flourished when he was growing up—schools that offered hands-on training in fields such as welding and cosmetology.
Any college leader considering a curriculum change for his or her institution has a lot of questions to ask and answer. First, what are the specific goals? To increase graduation rates? To increase particular knowledge in certain majors? And what changes in the curriculum would achieve those goals? We’ve gone through multiple curriculum reforms at the City University of New York over the past 15 years, and it’s never an easy process. Some faculty members, as well as administrators, can be sceptical and resistant to change, and resources to carry out the reforms are hard to obtain. One of the most important things we have learned during that time is that relevant, clear data can help you make better decisions about curriculum reform. That means you need to put a premium on data — both collecting it and analyzing it.
The 2015 report from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (TRC) provided the country with a roadmap for establishing a new, mutually respectful relationship between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples. Despite the history of Canada's residential school system, the report highlighted the important role of education in the reconciliation process and called upon government and educators to reduce longstanding gaps in education and employment outcomes.
Using a cross-case analysis of online, on-campus and online university teacher preparation courses, this study critically examines the constraints and affordances of online teacher education in preparing teachers for culturally and linguistically diverse (CLO) urban schools. The results of the study indicate that while there was no significant difference between online and on-campus courses in terms of teacher acquisition of knowledge related to CLO instruction and assessment, questions remain about whether online teacher preparation can promote critical self-reflection, culturally responsive teaching practices, and collaboration within schools, when teacher learning is not supported and situated in schools and communities in an ongoing and structured way.
Keywords
teacher education, urban education, linguistically responsive pedagogy, culturally relevant pedagogy, language education, identity, teacher beliefs
While it requires a significant amount of time and persistence, completing a PhD is not now – nor has it ever been – a guaranteed path to a lucrative end, and its general value has come under increasing scrutiny in recent years. This paper is written for aspiring doctoral students, current doctoral students or candidates, recent doctoral graduates, as well as their families and friends. It provides detailed information about the evolution of the PhD and of the broader labour market and educational environment in which it is embedded. The analyses provided in this paper also lead to recommendations to government and institutions about PhD programs.
Many readers who followed the Chronicle articles about the precipitous decline and fall of H. Fred Walker, now former president of Edinboro University of Pennsylvania, no doubt did so with a mixture of fascination and horror. They were thinking either,
"There but for the grace of God go I," or "Been there, done that, never want to do that again." There is much, in fact, that
higher-education leaders can learn from Walker’s downfall.
Here are steps to help them avoid some of the problems that led to Walker’s resignation:
Transgender and gender-nonbinary students share what keeps them from feeling safe and thriving on campus.
The federal law known as Title IX is meant to protect students from discrimination based on their gender identity. But many gay, lesbian, and transgender students say they face an array of challenges and safety issues on their campuses. The Chronicle interviewed more than a dozen of them to hear more about what keeps them from thriving in college.
Faculty and staff are the heart of an institution. Colleges and universities have hundreds and sometimes thousands of employees who each day deliver on the institution’s brand promise to students and others. But have we truly invested in understanding and articulating our institution’s employer brand, with prospective and current employees in mind?
During my dissertation research on higher education multi-campus brand coherence, I studied a peer institution of my university. The qualitative data collection included one-on-one interviews with more than 20 senior administrators (starting with the president), whose areas of responsibility were closely connected to the university’s brand. Participants often asked who
else I was meeting with and responded with surprise when I mentioned the vice president for human resources. “Oh, that’s interesting. Why would you want to meet with HR?”