By Jo VanEvery. This is a post for those readers who are starting something new this fall:
Although you may have officially started already, it is the beginning of the fall semester that will feel like the real beginning. More...
By Léo Charbonneau. Last November, the New York Times declared 2012 the Year of the MOOC. Now, halfway through 2013, the MOOC momentum appears to be slowing – or, at least, shifting in a new direction. Some higher education observers go further, claiming the MOOC “revolution” is over.
For the uninitiated, MOOCs are massive open online courses generally offered free of charge by professors at elite universities to tens of thousands of people at a time. They are also a source of much breathless hyperbole about being a “game changer” or “creative disruptor” or “tsunami” that will sweep away traditional university campuses. More...
By Léo Charbonneau. The media are biased in their coverage of higher education in Canada, favouring universities over colleges. That was the contention of Anne Sado, president of George Brown College in Toronto, speaking at the Worldviews 2013 conference on media and higher education held at the University of Toronto near the end of June. “I’m not here to challenge whether university or college education is better,” said Ms. Sado. However, “I do feel there is bias around coverage between universities and colleges.”
Ms. Sado was speaking as part of a panel discussion, alongside University of Toronto President David Naylor and journalists Simona Chiose, education editor at the Globe and Mail, and Louise Brown, education reporter at the Toronto Star. More...
By Léo Charbonneau. Statistics Canada’s recent release of education data from the 2011 National Household Survey had many journalists, public policy analysts and others scrambling to interpret how the country is doing in this important area. Among the key findings: women are earning degrees in ever greater numbers, including in the STEM disciplines, while most apprenticeships are still held by men. There was also much analysis of unemployment rates by level of education. The story is a positive one: generally, the higher your level of education, the lower your chances of being unemployed. The lock-step nature of this relationship is quite remarkable. More...
By Léo Charbonneau. An opinion piece we recently published online and in the August-September print edition has garnered much feedback (12 comments online to date, which is a fair amount for us, a specialty higher-education publication in Canada). The article had the innocuous headline, “Internationalizing the curriculum,” but the subhead gave more of a flavour of what it was about: “ESL students and the erosion of higher education.”
The article, by professors Norm Friesen and Patrick Keeney respectively of Thompson Rivers University and Simon Fraser University, recounts their frustration teaching students with poor English-language skills – typically English-as-a-second-language, or ESL, students – or students whose “academic or cultural preparedness is not up to speed.” The presence of these students in the classroom “fundamentally changes teaching and learning, to the detriment,” they write. “Instead of engaging students in disentangling the nuances and subtleties of a particularly important passage from the assigned readings, one begins speaking to the class as one might speak to academically challenged teenagers.” Ouch. More...
By David Smith. A young professor reminisces on the flourishing expat community of scholars that his father helped found in this wealthy Arab state. It was minus 20 outside, a typical winter night in Sudbury, Ontario, when my father, Frank Smith, sat the family around the kitchen table and unveiled his new job plan. After years of teaching chemistry at Laurentian University, including five years as dean of graduate studies, he’d decided to change institutions. “Not a big deal,” he said. “Your mother and I are going to Qatar. It’s about 10,000 kilometers away and one of the hottest, driest and richest countries on earth.”
Dad had signed a contract with the Weill Cornell Medical College in Qatar (known as WCMC-Q) to teach undergraduate chemistry. But what was intended to be a three-year stint overseas turned into a long-term move and life-changing experience for both my father and mother. Three years became six, then 10. The move also had a positive impact on my life, providing me the opportunity to make many visits to the Persian Gulf region. More...
By Marie Lambert-Chan. Even if they’re not implicated, co-authors may see their careers stalled due to another researcher’s misconduct, Quebec study finds. Diederik Stapel, Eric Poehlman, Woo-Suk Hwang, Yoshitaka Fujii: these are individuals who have gone down in history for cheating the scientific system. They misused public funds, put patients’ lives in jeopardy and abused the public’s trust. They also left in their wake dozens of researchers who had unwittingly collaborated in their deception. What happens to the careers of scientists who co-author articles that are later retracted for misconduct?
This question has weighed on the mind of Vincent Larivière, an assistant professor at Université de Montréal’s École de bibliothéconomie et des sciences de l’information, and master’s student Philippe Mongeon. They studied the career paths of more than 1,700 biomedical and clinical researchers whose names were associated with an article that was retracted for misconduct between 1996 and 2006, but who were not themselves accused of misconduct. The articles had involved fabricated data, falsified data, or plagiarism. The researchers presented their results at the Third World Conference on Research Integrity, held in Montreal in May. More...
By Norm Friesen and Patrick Keeney. One of the most profound recent changes to Canadian higher education seems to have gone little noticed: namely, the increasing numbers of students on campus whose native tongue is not English. Some of these students may be first-generation Canadian or landed immigrants, while many come from other countries. Most universities now have departments dedicated to the recruitment and retention of international students and are busily criss-crossing the globe in search of new customers. Governments and senior administration in universities have been successful in persuading Canadians that “internationalizing” the campus is a positive development for all concerned. Yet, there is a dark and worrying side to this that is felt most acutely in the teaching of the humanities and critical studies. There is no sugar-coated way to say this: many of those who are welcomed at our universities are simply unprepared for the rigours of the university classroom. More...
By Stephanie Hobbis. Both foreign students – and their teachers – need support if the goals of an international campus are going to be met. The following is in response to the opinion piece "Internationalizing the Canadian campus: ESL students and the erosion of higher education" by Norm Friesen and Patrick Keeney.
When I first read the commentary by Drs. Friesen and Keeney on “ESL students and the erosion of higher education,” I was astounded and in disbelief. As an English-as-a-second-language student, I could not but feel offended. Yet, the more I reflected on their sentiments the more I came to see a much broader issue than xenophobia, linguicism or simple ignorance as suggested in some of the reader comments. Internationalizing the Canadian campus is not simply a matter of recruiting more international students. It is also a matter of providing the facilities that are needed to cater to new needs while not only profiting financially but also academically from an increasingly diverse community of students and faculty alike. I came to Canada after completing my undergraduate and first graduate degrees, in English, in the U.K. and in Japan. I had been raised in German in Germany. My English was good enough to get accepted into an English degree program, but not to inevitably succeed in it. The challenges of higher education were multiplied – not only did I have to learn to think academically, but I had to do so in a foreign language and in a cultural environment that I was barely familiar with. Read more...
By . Remember in the last few months leading up to the 2012 presidential election how everyone breathlessly awaited each jobs report? Any change, even of one tenth of a percentage point, was greeted as a glorious victory or a crushing defeat and extrapolated into a long-term economic forecast. What happened to all that attention? Or was President Obama correct when he suggested that the country should resign itself to the fact that a shabby economy is the “new normal,” at least while he’s in charge? More...
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