The current public assumption that safe spaces and trigger warnings conflict with academic freedom and are the result of political correctness gone mad is a false dichotomy. If students today are indeed more fragile, then it is vital that we in higher education understand: (1) the specific nature of this sensitivity and (2) what colleges can do to help.
After this divisive election, we will need more capacity for talking about controversial issues. While the anonymity of social media may have escalated invective, it has not made for more ease with difficult conversations. Technology has allowed a generation to end relationships by text message, or even by “ghosting” an ex -- deleting a relationship from your life without any conflict or effort.
The convenience and flexibility of the online learning environment allows learners to develop new skills and further their education, regardless of where they live. However, for all of its benefits, online learning can sometimes feel isolating for students and faculty. The question is: how do you build a sense of community in your online courses? One approach involves cultivating more interaction—between you and your students and among the students themselves. Here are five practical tips for increasing the human connection in your online classrooms.
There’s a lot of talk these days about evidence-based instructional practices, so much that I’ve gotten worried we aren’t thinking enough about what that means. Let me see if I can explain with an example.
Recently I’ve been trying to locate the evidence that supports quizzing, wondering if it merits the evidence-based label. Tracking down this evidence in our discipline-based research is challenging because although quizzing has been studied across our disciplines, it’s not easily searchable. My collection of studies is good, but I know it’s not complete. As you might suspect, the results are mixed; they are more positive than negative, but still, a significant number of researchers don’t
find that quizzes affect learning outcomes.
Several days ago, President Trump issued an executive order barring immigrants and nonimmigrant visitors from seven Muslim-majority countries from entering the United States -- significantly impacting many students and scholars. This follows on the heels of two other executive orders focused on immigration enforcement and border security that he signed last week, which froze
refugee admissions and called for the immediate construction of a wall along the southwestern border of the country.
Canadian nursing students are calling for changes to the current entry-to-practice exam which they say is loaded with American content and lacks crucial Canadian context.
The calls were made Friday at the Canadian Nursing Students' Association national conference in Winnipeg. More than 400 nursing students gathered for the event and many signed a related petition.
The new exam was developed by the National Council of State Boards of Nursing in the United States and replaced the Canadian Registered Nurses Exam in 2015.
Students must pass the new exam to be able to practice nursing. If they fail, they can retake it after 45 days.
Many adolescents are experiencing a reduction in sleep as a consequence of variety of behavioral factors, even though scientific evidence suggests taht the biological need for sleep increases during maturation. Consequenlly, the ability to effectively interact with peers while learning and processing novel information may be diminished in may sleep-deprived adolescents.
Many people decide to get a Ph.D. because they feel a strong personal connection to the subject matter. Thinking, writing and talking with people who appreciate a subject or field of study as much as you feels validating. For some, the discovery of that subject may have clarified a sense of educational purpose. Perhaps it even illuminated a sense of individual purpose or a frame through which the world makes more sense.
Of course, not everyone feels that way about the material they research and teach during graduate school. But for those who do, it can be easy to tie one’s sense of identity to the academic enterprise. “I am a scholar of 19th-century German painting.” “I am an ecologist.” Rather than “I am currently teaching a course on the figure of the child in British poetry.” Or “Right now I am working on understanding the how the charter school movement impacts social mobility for low-income children.”
Midterm evaluations bring a host of institutional measures to reach out to underachieving students. However, what might make the most difference to students’ success in their courses is to enable them to assess their own performance and set goals as well as to ask questions of and provide feedback to the instructor. Instructors can give students this reflective opportunity through an online journal assignment in which students do the following:
Report their overall grade in the course
Report their attendance record (when attendance is required) Reflect on their performance, whether
it meets their expectations
Provide goals for the rest of the course (often in the form of a GPA, but can also be learning outcomes)
Provide feedback and ask questions
Higher education's approach to fostering students' innovation potential has focused mostly on developing innovation leadership among a select cadre of students, originally in entrepreneurship and more recently in social sector innovation. But what about the rest of our graduates: what capability do all our graduates need if they're going to engage effectively with innovation in the workplace? Can elements of this capability be adapted to enhance their roles as community members and global citizens as well?
In order to develop the capability for workplace innovation in all our students, we're going to have to begin tackling the challenge in the space where all of them already participate – within our teaching and learning environments.
All willing and qualified students in Ontario must be able to access and excel within Ontario’s post-secondary education system. This is a foundational principle of OUSA’s policy and advocacy work. We believe universities are currently underserving students with disabilities and that this needs to change.
In support of this change, we conducted an exploratory primary research study during September and November 2015. We intended to learn about the lived experiences of attending university in Ontario for students who identify as having one or more disabilities. Specifically, we wanted to investigate the challenges associated with persistance and graduation. This report will start by presenting the external research on which this project is based, move on to describe the methodology, and end by presenting and discussing the findings.
OUSA’s LGBTQ+ Student Experience Survey was a mixed methods research project conducted in Novem-ber 2014 designed to gain understanding of the opinions and experiences of Ontario university students who identify as Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans, Queer, Questioning, or other orientations or identities that do not conform to cisgender and heterosexual paradigms (LGBTQ+). The purpose of the survey was to identify any gaps that might exist in university services, programming, and supports that can diminish or negatively impact university experiences for these students.
One of the core principles of the Ontario Undergraduate Student Alliance (OUSA) is that all willing and qualified students should be able to attend post-secondary regardless of their ability to pay. However, students in Ontario face the highest tuition fees in the country and the cost and perceived costs of post-secondary education are consistently identified as barriers to post-secondary education. These barriers are contributing factors to the persistently high attainment gaps for various vulnerable groups in pursuing an undergraduate degree.
he postelection climate has heightened concerns about managing incivility in instructional settings and society as a hole. In October, I wrote an essay for Inside Higher Ed that explored how understanding what constitutes lassroom incivility can help faculty members minimize its dangers while maximizing the teaching and learning pportunities it presents. In this article, I will describe how, in order to deal with the challenges that incivility poses, aculty members must move beyond seeking solutions to every case of incivility they might encounter -- an mpossible task. Instead, we must consider the contexts and larger forces driving civility issues in higher education. uch a macro-level approach can help faculty members understand incivility better and thereby manage it moreeffectively.
Two major developments in the financial management of higher education have occurred more or less contemporaneously: incentive or performance funding on the part of government and incentive-based budgeting on the part of institutions. Both are based on fiscal incentives. Despite their several inherent and interconnected similarities, incentive funding and incentive-based budgeting have been viewed and appraised on parallel tracks. This study investigates their convergence. In doing so, it sharpens the definitions of both, identifies their respective track records, and discusses problems that are chronic to both. The study concludes that although incentive funding and incentive-based budgeting are sometimes at cross-purposes, they are func-tionally interconnected. The study uses Canada as an example because it is the jurisdiction that so far has seen the most extensive mutual deployment of performance funding and incentive-based budgeting.
In last week’s post, we looked at a sample of the discipline-based evidence in support of quizzes with the goal of gaining a better understanding of what it means to say that an instructional practice is evidence-based. We are using quizzes as the example, but this type of exploration could and should be done with any number of instructional practices.
Paré, D. E., Collimore, L.-M., Joordens, S., Rolheiser, C., Brym, R., & Gini-Newman, G.
(2015). Put Students’ Minds Together and their Hearts Will Follow: Building a Sense of Community in Large-Sized Classes via Peer- and Self-Assessment – Appendix. Toronto: Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario.
Multiple and competing priorities within a dynamic and changing academic environment can pose significant challenges for new faculty. Mentorship has been identified as an important strategy to help socialize new faculty to their roles and the expectations of the academic environment. It also helps them learn new skills that will position them to be successful in their academic ca-reer. In this article, the authors report on the implementation and evaluation of a mentorship circle initiative aimed at supporting new faculty in the first two years of their academic appointment. Participants reported that the men-torship circle provided them with a culture of support, a sense of belonging, and a safe space to discuss concerns and learn strategies from both mentors and fellow mentees as they adjusted to their new position. The interdisci-plinary nature of the mentorship circle further facilitated faculty members’ capacity to navigate their role as new faculty and foster colleagueship.
In this article, which is grounded in my own experiences, I discuss the responsibilities of new immigrant teacher educators when teaching courses related to diversity and multiculturalism in Canada. I highlight the complexities that underlie discourses of multiculturalism in teacher education, and the important role that new immigrant teacher educators have in locating themselves
within the frame of settler colonialism in Canada. I argue that there is a need for genuine dialogue and critical reflexivity that encourage teacher educators and teacher candidates to locate themselves within a complex web of privileges and oppressions, and I explore possible new directions for teaching
multiculturalism and Indigenous content in teacher education.In this article, which is grounded in my own experiences, I discuss the responsibilities
of new immigrant teacher educators when teaching courses related
to diversity and multiculturalism in Canada. I highlight the complexities that
underlie discourses of multiculturalism in teacher education, and the important
role that new immigrant teacher educators have in locating themselves
within the frame of settler colonialism in Canada. I argue that there is a need
for genuine dialogue and critical reflexivity that encourage teacher educators
and teacher candidates to locate themselves within a complex web of privileges
and oppressions, and I explore possible new directions for teaching
multiculturalism and Indigenous content in teacher education.
Anyone hoping to understand China and Chinese people’s behaviour in the present day must examine China’s long history and culture, as these often have crystallized into current behavioural patterns. This paper discusses one important push-out factor for Chinese students’ outbound mobility, and an element that is ignored in many futuristic predictions of international student
mobility: traditional Chinese educational culture. I conduct an in-depth analysis of three major aspects of Chinese educational culture in relation to Chinese students’ international mobility: the education-first culture, the saving culture, and the extended-family culture. I argue that these three aspects will continue to drive Chinese students’ outbound mobility.
Interprofessional education (IPE) is a growing focus for educators in health professional academic programs. Recommendations to successfully imple-ment IPE are emerging in the literature, but there remains a dearth of evidence informing the bigger challenges of sustainability and scalability. Transforma-tion to interprofessional education for collaborative person-centred practice (IECPCP) is complex and requires “harmonization of motivations” within and between academia, governments, healthcare delivery sectors, and consumers. The main lesson learned at the University of Manitoba was the value of using a formal implementation framework to guide its work. This framework identi-fies key factors that must be addressed at the micro, meso, and macro levels and emphasizes that interventions occurring only at any single level will likely not lead to sustainable change. This paper describes lessons learned when us-ing the framework and offers recommendations to support other institutions in their efforts to enable the roll out and integration of IECPCP.