By Elizabeth Redden. An influx of governmental funding has helped fuel major increases in research capacity and scholarly productivity as well as impressive internationalization at Chinese research universities, but these institutions face significant challenges, including ones related to institutional autonomy and academic freedom, in their continuing quest to achieve “world-class” status. Read more...
By Charlie Tyson. After years of enrollment losses, Anthem Education, a for-profit chain of colleges and career institutes, filed for bankruptcy Monday. The company has abruptly shut down a number of its campuses, leaving state agencies struggling to funnel displaced students into other institutions. Nine more campuses may close today, Anthem officials said. Read more...
By Chris Takacs. Daniel Chambliss and Chris Takacs are the authors of our current book, How College Works. They have kindly agreed to guide our discussion. If you don’t have the book, it’s not too late! Try your campus library. The discussion will take place on Twitter (#ChronBooks, @DanFChambliss, @ChrisGTakacs). Our other featured participants are listed to the right. More...
By Margot Mifflin. It happened again: the single most contentious and edifying day of the semester, which I look forward to year after year. It’s the session in my editing class where we discuss racial and gender bias in language. And it’s the one in which my undergraduates, mostly blacks and Latinos from the Bronx, do the educating. More...
By Robert Freeman. There may have been a time when it made sense to encourage college freshmen to follow their career dreams, no matter what supply and demand suggested. But when the national infrastructure is decaying, the national debt approaching the GDP, and the indebtedness of our college graduates aggregating to more than $1-trillion, that time has clearly passed. More...
By Konrad M. Lawson. The new learning management system (LMS) offered to Google Apps for Education users has recently become fully available: Google Classroom. In its current early incarnation, the option may be attractive for instructors who are not currently using an LMS and want to give one a try, but only if they are already using the Google Apps for Education or have a registered domain that they can configure for its use. More...
By Natalie Houston. Do you ever find yourself attending an event or participating in a project that you don’t really have time for, aren’t interested in, or won’t benefit from in some personal or professional way? It happens to all of us. It can usually be traced back to that moment when you agreed to do the project, or attend the meeting, even though you already knew you didn’t want to. Or maybe you did think you wanted to attend – it seemed like a reasonable thing to do, or you wanted to support the person or group hosting the event, or you just said yes without really thinking too clearly about how you’d feel on a Wednesday night, late in the semester, the week after attending a conference. More...
By Amy Cavender. Since ProfHacker first launched (can it really be five years ago?), we’ve written numerous posts referencing Google Docs. One of my own earliest posts dealt with using Google Docs in my writing course when portfolio readers might still need paper copies of students’ work, and Ryan’s written about using it to run a peer-review writing workshop. More...
By Anne Curzan. At a teaching workshop last week, a new faculty member asked me how I felt about students using laptops in the classroom. I replied, “I ask students not to use laptops in my classroom—unless a student tells me they need or strongly prefer a laptop to take notes (for any reason), in which case we make that work.” She looked relieved to have this endorsement of a learning zone with fewer electronic distractions. More...
By Lucy Ferriss. I’ve already confessed my love of Roget’s Thesaurus, so I am not simply going to pile on with the current wave of complaints about its popularity among students. This popularity, dubbed Rogeting by the British lecturer Chris Sadler, is apparently a side effect of rampant plagiarism and professors’ efforts to curb it by means of software like Turnitin. More...
/https%3A%2F%2Fprofilepics.canalblog.com%2Fprofilepics%2F1%2F0%2F1076071.jpg)
