By Carol Patton. Smooth onboarding by Human Resources gets incoming campus leadership off to good start. Chances are, your institution is or may soon be recruiting for leadership positions, such as president, chancellor, or vice president. At Alfred University (N.Y.), for example, the search is underway for a new provost, and within the next five years, the institution plans to recruit two vice presidents and a president, says Mark Guinan, HR director at the private university, which supports approximately 1,000 employees and 2,300 students. Read more...

By Amanda Murdie. Hopefully, another semester has come to a close for you and you’re catching up on some much needed research/sleep.   After I’ve doled out grades for my students, I usually get a nice big stack of evaluations of my teaching abilities, filled out by those very same students who squeaked by with a “C-“in my class. At my previous university, it was the ONLY way my teaching was evaluated; for better or worse, no senior faculty or peers ever evaluated my teaching content, style, or skills in the classroom.  A whopping 40% of my annual evaluation came from what my students recorded on bubble-sheets and, occasionally, their written comments. As a social scientist, I have had some general questions about the validity and the reliability of the whole process. Do students really know a good teacher when they see one?  Isn’t this a little bit like letting the inmates evaluate the prison warden?  I was glad to know that there has been a ton written on the topic, some of which has been summarized as implying that student evaluations of instructors are “highly reliable” and “at least moderately valid.”  Others, however, disagree or call for more research. Read more...

By Dean John LaBrie. You hear the word “employability” everywhere you go these days, which is no surprise when domestic and international unemployment rates are what they are. Inevitably, the discussion about workers’ readiness for real and beneficial work inevitably turns to the relationship between education and economic development. And although this relationship gets periodically debated, most of the developed and developing world has come to realize that a vibrant, diverse and economically strong society hinges on a strong and diverse higher education system to feed industry, government and business. Countries around the world are developing policies and infrastructure to grow and import educated talent to feed their local and national economies. International mobility for the educated class is a reality that countries such as Canada, Australia and the UK are exploiting to their tremendous economic benefit. Read more...

MOOCs:  Gender, Class and Empire
Much of the discussion of MOOCs has focused on (alternately) their promise of providing “the best teachers” to students around the world, and presenting cheap quality education to the masses; or the threat they pose to education, in replacing face to face contact with potted lectures, further deskilling and de-professionalizing those of us who teach at less elite universities.  We want to argue that MOOCs raise broader questions than those usually mentioned. In the course of listening to a discussion of MOOCs at the recent meeting of the ACLS (American Council of Learned Societies), we realized that MOOCs must be analyzed in the context of the U.S. American discourse of gender, class, and empire.
One aspect of MOOCs is that the stars are (almost) all men.  At one website only 9 of 56 History MOOCS were presented by women.  Without a doubt, the model of the MOOC – of the authoritative talking head – is one that privileges cultural perceptions of men and male control over certain types of knowledge.  The gendered nature of the hierarchy of knowledge transmission that takes place is clear in the MOOC model of education. Although “students” are invited to respond at different points, to a large extent, the presenter controls the topic, the vocabulary, and the trajectory of whatever “dialogue” might take place. In recent stories on MOOCs at Princeton and Harvard, the instructors (all men) are described by their reputation as charismatic teachers. Read more...