By Peggy Berkowitz. The centre’s focus will be research about pre-Confederation treaties from BC and across the country. Vancouver Island University sits on territory where a treaty was signed between the Crown and First Nations people in the decade before Canada became a country. So it is fitting that the university will now become home to a Centre for Pre-Confederation Treaties and Reconciliation. More...
By Natalie Samson. “Food history is exploding right now as an area of academic inquiry.” Associate professor Robert Nelson has been resident foodie in the University of Windsor’s history department since he joined the school almost 10 years ago. He speaks as passionately about last night’s family meal as he does of his latest research on Modern European cultural history. When it’s time to wine and dine a departmental guest, Dr. Nelson can be relied on to push for the best Windsor has to offer. And at a recent staff potluck, his mélange of greens and lavender transcended the staple bean and potato salads. More...
By Sparrow McGowan. A registrar who helps school leavers qualify for university understands their mindset. The University of Toronto welcomes some 14,000 first-year students every September, but for many individuals the prospect of a university education appears out of reach. Yet, some of them will graduate, with the help of a little-known program for people who lack the formal education to qualify for university admission. The eight-month Transitional Year Program is for “somebody who may have dropped out of high school, somebody who may have been in prison, homeless, a sole-support parent, LGBTQ,” says Lauriann (“L.A.”) Wade, the program’s registrar. Yet, these factors don’t “necessarily determine that they wouldn’t be successful in university.” More...
By Diane Peters. Years of work by medical schools has changed students’ perception of family medicine, and that could make it easier for Canadians to find a family doctor. Last march, the University of Calgary issued a press release with some big news from its medical school: 45 percent of graduating students had chosen family medicine as their first choice for a residency program. It’s a dramatic turnaround for a school that saw just 18 percent choosing the profession in 2008. More...
By Rosanna Tamburri. Programs based on independent study are cheaper and allow students to progress at their own rate. When Shelly Redman, a 41-year-old nurse practitioner and clinical manager at the Grand River Hospital in Kitchener, Ontario, decided to pursue an MBA to further her career, she found that most programs required her to take a year off work. Even many online programs required some in-class instruction, which would have made it difficult for her to juggle work and home responsibilities. Then she discovered Western Governors University, a private, online institution based in Salt Lake City, Utah. More...
SOUTH Australia’s three public universities will lose $78 million over the next four years as local students are forced to pay thousands and even tens of thousands more for their degree, analysis shows.
State Government number crunching on the effect of the Federal Government’s higher education Budget measures show a basic three-year humanities degree could cost at least $10,000 more – up to $29,000. University of Adelaide’s six-year medicine degree could rise to at least $80,000. The modelling shows engineering students face a steep fee hike as their four-year degrees rises from $34,500 to at least $53,000. Premier Jay Weatherill said the Federal Government’s “Americanisation” of Australia’s universities would make higher education unaffordable. More...
By Matthew Knott. Fee deregulation will reverse the "dumbing down" of higher education and the era of "one-size-fits-all" universities, according to one of the icons of Australian science.
Harry Messel, who was Head of Physics at the University of Sydney for 35 years, was last week awarded the Academy Medal, one of the Australian Academy of Science's highest honours. The author of the Messel "blue book", once ubiquitous in Australian high schools, founded the International Science School and is a former vice-chancellor of Bond University. Read more...
By Torsten Wiesel. Overseas scholarships that encourage scientists to return to their home countries are helping to rebuild science in Latin America, says Torsten Wiesel. It takes a long time for a country to build a strong base in science, but only a short time to destroy it. Germany was a sad example. It was a world leader in the sciences for more than a century, until its science base was demolished during the Nazi era, and the country ceded its position to the United States. It has taken decades for Germany to rise again to its current level of excellence. More...
By Goolam Mohamedbhai. The recent findings of the Inter-University Council for East Africa regarding the quality of graduates in Burundi, Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania and Uganda must be considered a wake-up call for African higher education. Between 51% and 63% of graduates from these countries were found to be ‘half-baked’ according to the employers. This is, to put it mildly, alarming. By Chiao-Ling Chien and David W Chapman. Across Asia, higher education enrolment has experienced explosive growth over the last few decades, from 20 million students in 1980 to 84 million in 2011. To serve this growing enrolment, graduate programmes needed to expand, both to supply more instructors and to upgrade existing instructors’ qualifications in cases where unqualified lecturers were hired to teach in response to increasing numbers of undergraduates. Read more.../https%3A%2F%2Fprofilepics.canalblog.com%2Fprofilepics%2F1%2F0%2F1076071.jpg)
