Is there a tipping point at which students who take a blend of online and in-person coursework are doing too much online? That question goes to the heart of something called the online paradox.
The online paradox has inspired much debate, and it describes two seemingly contradictory things. The first is
that community-college student who take an online course are more likely to fail than are those who take it face-to-face. The second is that community-college students who take some online classes are more likely to complete their
degrees than are those who don’t take any.
Schools are also looking to encourage domestic students to benefit from international students’ presence.
As the blip-blip-bloop of the classic Skype ringtone connects me with Zack (Guanglong) Pang at Wilfrid Laurier University, it occurs to me that a little box like this on a computer screen may be the only window through which this international student has seen his family for the past few years – they live half a world away in his hometown of Shenyang, an industrial city in the northeastern part of China. Mr. Pang, who at the time of this interview was finishing his bachelor of science degree at Laurier and preparing for a master’s in geography at York University starting this fall, cheerfully returns my wave at the screen.
This pilot study examines alternative entrance pathways into York University undergraduate degree programs for students who apply from outside the formal education system. These alternative pathways are designed to facilitate university access for students from under-represented populations (for example, low-income, first-generation, Aboriginal, racialized minorities, differently abled, newcomers to Canada, sole-support caregivers, students with incomplete high school education, or some combination of the preceding).
Self-care -- maintaining a healthy and balanced lifestyle through individually determined activities -- has been found
to improve productivity and a sense of well-being as well as physical and emotional health in a variety of work
settings. Although it is still considered a somewhat controversial concept, many colleges and universities are now
regarding self-care as essential for the optimal well-being of everyone in their community: faculty, staff,
administrators, students, support personnel and others. The benefits of promoting self-care in the workplace are
well documented.
Recent commentary on the appointment of Grant Devine to the board of the University of Saskatchewan misses an
important question: What, exactly, qualifies an individual to serve on a board? Public exchanges have focused on
partisan issues or on Mr. Devine’s career, including his PhD and his knowledge of agriculture, without reference to
whether any of these things are needed for the U of S board to be effective.
Our research on governance leads us to make three observations that could guide such processes and reduce
future controversy.
The University of Washington, for the first time ever, has fired a faculty member over findings of sexual harassment.
The termination surprised some not only for the what, but also for the who: Michael Katze, a professor of
microbiology. Well funded and a major player in infectious disease research, Katze appeared to some as exactly the
kind of professor who might have been protected by his (or any) institution in the past.
Despite the cash injection, campus services will not be able to meet everyone's mental health needs, Minister of
Advanced Education and Skills Development Deb Matthews said in a statement to the Toronto Star.
"Mental illness is a spectrum," Matthews said. "For some students, on-campus resources such as counselling
and/or peer support may be the best and most helpful provision of care. For students with more complex mental
health needs, the institution can serve as a point of referral or information in helping that student access the
appropriate community supports and get the help that they need."
Just starting out? Worried about your lectures, your students, your time-management skills and more? Eight academics offer up their advice.
There are plenty of mistakes to go around early in one’s academic career. Whether they happen in front of a class or
behind the scenes, hindsight shows us how to do better. Here you’ll find a mix of experience and advice from eight
professors who’ve been there, done that and lived to share some lessons.
The University of Waterloo will decide this fall whether a standardized system for course evaluations can balance
student demands for more feedback on their classroom learning with faculty concerns about the impact of bias and
evidence that such surveys may not improve student outcomes.
The national high school graduation rate has continued to rise – but do students feel prepared for what comes next?
To help answer this question, YouthTruth analyzed survey responses from over 55,000 high school students. The data was gathered between September 2015 and December 2016 through YouthTruth’s anonymous online climate and culture survey administered in partnership with public school districts across 21 states. Our analysis looked at a subset of questions relating to college and career readiness and uncovered some key insights.
Purpose/Objective: This study documents the ways in which successful, award-winning teachers function creatively in their classrooms. It investigates their beliefs about creativity in teaching—what “creativity” means, and how skilled teachers instantiate it in classroom practices. Finally, this research examined the teachers’ personal creativity (in terms of creative pursuits, hobbies, and habits of mind) and the practical ways this translates into teaching.
Institutions across the country have been considering carefully scripted general-education courses in lieu of
traditional distribution requirements (see “No Math Required,” “Rethinking Gen Ed” and “Gen Ed Redesigns”). Some
months ago, the American Council of Trustees and Alumni issued a report pointing out the efficiencies that would be
realized by sequenced general-education courses with prescribed curricula, little student choice and lots of
requirements.
The same organization also issued a letter deploring the fact that most college students could not identify James
Madison as the father of the U.S. Constitution (most chose Thomas Jefferson) and that 40 percent did not know that
Congress has the power to declare war. Their solution: a course on civic literacy required of every college student.
Institutions across the country have been considering carefully scripted general-education courses in lieu of
traditional distribution requirements (see “No Math Required,” “Rethinking Gen Ed” and “Gen Ed Redesigns”). Some
months ago, the American Council of Trustees and Alumni issued a report pointing out the efficiencies that would be
realized by sequenced general-education courses with prescribed curricula, little student choice and lots of
requirements.
The same organization also issued a letter deploring the fact that most college students could not identify James
Madison as the father of the U.S. Constitution (most chose Thomas Jefferson) and that 40 percent did not know that
Congress has the power to declare war. Their solution: a course on civic literacy required of every college student.
Across academe, the conversation about career diversity for Ph.D.s has cracked wide open up in just a few years.
That’s equivalent to the blink of an eye in academic (read: glacial) time. The proposition that graduate programs
should prepare students for the actual jobs that they’ll get — not just for professorships — no longer receives the
fierce pushback that it did even five years ago. We’ve gone from "Why should we?" to "How should we?" in a
remarkably short time.
The question has two sides: how to prepare students for diverse career paths and how to prepare employers. Most
of the attention up to now has gone to the former — debating and adopting reforms to train graduate students (and
their teachers) for what amounts to a new reality. We’ve got to change graduate school so that doctoral education
can support students who pursue a range of careers. That’s a big job, and it’s still under way.
Why we need to promote socioeconomic diversity.
Sarah Green Carmichael, an editor at the Harvard Business Review, recently talked with Joan C. Williams, director of the Center for WorkLife Law at the University of California's Hastings College of the Law, about her new book, White Working Class: Overcoming Class Cluelessness in America, which examines how class divisions affected the recent election. Ms. Williams contends that liberals have long been hung up on identity and cultural issues at the expense of socioeconomic ones. While she believes that eliminating racial and gender inequality is a good thing — she’s a progressive and a feminist, after all — she suggests that there’s been a blindness to class inequality, which is alive and growing in America. As one example, she points to a recent study of fictitious résumés, which found that male law students from privileged backgrounds were far more likely to get callbacks for coveted internships at top law firms than their working-class counterparts were. Socioeconomic bias is all too real, she argues, yet many corporate and college diversity efforts tend to overlook it. It’s time to expand diversity programs to include class, she tells Ms. Carmichael.
The headlines are full of trans rights stories these days. From the federal government’s introduction of Bill C16
to finally add gender identity and gender expression to the Federal Human Rights Code, to Ontario’s upcoming reform to add the sex designation “X” to public registries, trans rights are on the move. But where exactly are they going? While the right to nondiscrimination seems to be increasingly recognized, there is a newer right on the horizon: the right to gender self-determination. It is a more positive right—one that gives the power over gender to individuals themselves. It means that gender variant people, like nongendervariant people, have an autonomous right over their gender that others are obliged to respect and protect.
This is the first article in a series designed to help you create an Individual Development Plan (IDP) using myIDP, a new Web-based career-planning tool created to help graduate students and postdocs in the sciences define and pursue their career goals. To learn more about myIDP and begin the career-planning process, please visit: http://myidp.sciencecareers.org.
Throughout the nearly three years of career advice from “Carpe Careers,” we’ve advised you on myriad topics --
including pursuing professional development opportunities and networking, writing application documents,
interviewing and the existential crisis of leaving academia, to name just a few. You name it, we’ve discussed it.
Put simply, the culmination of our advice should be to tell you that you need a plan. You need a map of the steps to
take toward your career goals -- from soft- and technical-skill development, to the people you should meet and
speak to in order to help you land that next job. But with all the focus on your next steps, there has been little
discussion of what you leave behind. In other words, as you embark on your next career steps, how do you manage
a graceful and less stressful departure from your current job? A new job offer may tempt you to go out in a blaze of
glory (advice: don’t), but the manner in which you leave your current job has professional implications. In addition,
you must consider personal matters, especially regarding finances and your health care.
Recently we posted a brief research finding from Stanford math professor Jo Boaler: “Timed math tests can
discourage students, leading to math anxiety and a long-term fear of the subject.” That terse conclusion, from a
2014 article in Teaching Children Mathematics, provoked a torrent of passionate comments as educators and former
students weighed in on the merits of timed testing.
The debate split the audience in half. One side argued that timed testing was valuable because there are real
deadlines in life and careers—and real consequences to missing them. Others felt that timed testing causes a kind
of paralysis in children, throwing a wrench into students’ cognitive machinery and hindering deeper learning. What’s
the point of timed testing, the latter group argued, if the results are as much a measure of fear as aptitude?
Regardless of our subject area, we’ve all had moments where some students appear to hang on every word,
gobbling up our messages, images, graphs, and visuals with robust engagement. Within those very same classes,
however, there will be a degree of confusion, perplexed looks, or at worst, the blank stare! In my field of anatomical
education, like many other STEMM* disciplines, the almost ubiquitous use of multimedia and other increasingly
complex computer visualizations is an important piece of our pedagogic tool kit for the classroom, small group, or
even the one-on-one graduate-level chalk talk. Although a picture indeed does say a thousand words, the words that
each person hears, or more importantly, comprehends, will vary widely.