Category: Education and Administration

The Globe and Mail has an Associated Press article by Justin Pope, Classes without the commute (Tuesday, Jan. 17, 2006) about the growth in people taking online courses, including con-campus students. The story points to a Sloan Consortium survey, Growing by Degrees: Online Education in the United States, 2005. (The free PDF of the complete report is available.) This report concludes that there is still significant enrollment growth in online courses, though Chief Academic Officers still believe that it takes more effort to deliver online and students need to be more disciplined to succeed.
Continue reading Online courses for campus students

SSHRC in their Transformation added the new value of “interactive engagement” to what social science and humanities research should involve. At McMaster we discussed how researchers can engage the broader public better and more. It is not as easy as it sounds. Intellectual Entrepreneurship: The New Social Compact by Richard A. Cherwitz (Inside Higher Ed, March 9, 2005) is a short opnion piece that nicely sets out the challenges. He argues that professors are becoming (should become) intellectual entrepreneurs – something I have heard in other contexts regarding intellectual property and research. Cherwitz believes,

Public intellectual practice is a noble quest – one that doesn’t inherently or automatically require us to choose between a commitment either to research or service or between disciplinary and interdisciplinary knowledge.

Continue reading Engagement and the Professoriate

But if educators were unsure what to do for undergraduates, the implications for graduate education were clear enough: The drive to ever greater research-based specialization was on. Over the past two decades in particular, universities have further reorganized themselves to emphasize research, especially scientific research. This has meant adopting the superstar model of faculty recruitment (which generally includes an enticing package of high salaries, research funding, and reduced teaching). It has also meant the creation of research centers, stocked with graduate and postgraduate students, as sites often equal in importance to the disciplinary departments, and more important than departments for their capacity to attract external research funding. The rapidly growing research specialization of the university has had the effect of making the content of undergraduate majors themselves more and more specialized and research-based.

America’s Top University – Does college need to be reformed? By Stanley N. Katz is the opening article in a series, Slate Goes to College – A week of articles about higher education.

We all know the problem, but we don’t really want to do anything about it. We like our research perks and we don’t want to end up back teaching enourmous classes which we know are not about learning so much as processing.

The solutions are obvious, but they mean redesigning universities, not just fiddling with curricula. The solutions are:

1. Look at the student experience, not courses. Design for a breadth of experiences from small group learning to project learning. And … yes, include lectures in that experience.
2. Weave students systematically into research if you believe in the connection. Don’t leave it to luck or the need for bottle-washers in the summer. Create a team research model where students can join teams and apprentice.
3. Trust students, don’t treat them like cheaters who have to be processed and examined.
4. Allocate the teaching resources to when the students need good teaching, not when it is convenient to teach them. First year classes should be small not big. By fourth year students should be capable of independent study (if you taught them, that is.)
5. Teach students to assess themselves. After all, if they don’t know what they know, how will they learn on their own.

COU – CUCC (College University Consortium Council) has an interesting report dated September 2005 on “Student Mobility within Ontario’s Postsecondary Sector” which looks at students going from university to the colleges and the other way. It seems the number of college students planning to go on to university is going up. “College studentsí goals increasingly include both a diploma and a degree.” (p. 17) Also, the largest percentage of university graduates going to college are in teh social sciences and humanities.

Seven percent of each of social science and humanities graduates was attending college at six months
and just fewer than 5% were attending college two years after graduation. Graduates from the social science or humanities areas made up the majority of those going on to college. Although these areas made up only 36% of surveyed graduates they are responsible for 60% of the graduates who attended college at six months and 50% at two years. (p. 14)

I’m guessing that a number of humanities students go to college to get a job specific diploma once they have a sense of their career goals.

The Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences is sponsoring a National Dialogue on Higher Education in November in Ottawa.
How is it a dialogue? They have an online forum and at the conference there will be “Table Talk” sessions at meals. There has also been a lot of discussion behind the scenes between the organizations sponsoring this. I can’t help feeling, however, that some of this is about promoting higher education outside the academy.
Continue reading A National Dialogue on Higher Education

Concordia: EV Complex sneak peek tour is a multipage tour by pictures of the new Integrated Engineering, Computer Science and Visual Arts Complex. This building is interesting for a number of reasons. First, it encodes in the building an intergration of visual arts and computing/engineering – not a normal mix. Second, because it was built in downtown Montreal, they had to build up and there are a number of interesting ways they get around the problems of building up. They have these three floor atriums with spiral stairs that connect departments and they have high-speed escalators and elevators to move people up quickly.

An article in yesterday’s Globe and Mail titled Wanted: a great many professors reports on the need for professors in Ontario. The article by Caroline Alphonso (Tuesday, April 12, 2005, Page A12) reports on a OCUFA study, Closing the Quality Gap which argues for the need for hiring 11,000 faculty by 2010.
Continue reading Globe: Professors Wanted

A column in today’s The Globe and Mail by John Fraser titled, “Universities need money, yes, but a social mission, too” (Saturday, March 26, 2005, Page F9) drew my attention to a longish submission to the Rae commission by George Fallis from York. Titled “The Mission of the University” this report is available on the COU Think Ontario ª Resources ª Documents page. The report is a good overview of the history of the university, the uses and expectations of the university leading into the current mission of the Canadian university.
Continue reading Fallis: The Mission of the University

There is no such thing as a corporate culture. Companies are made up of many cultures, the strengths and weaknesses of which are a result of local conditions.

Marcus Buckingham Thinks Your Boss Has an Attitude Problem is a story about the research of marcus Buckingham into corporate culture or the lack of it. For various reasons I have been reading about management, and this is one of those rare stories that made me think. I suspect the same is true of universities – they don’t have one culture, but many (called departments) and we don’t know what makes one healthy and another problematic.
Continue reading Large organizations don’t have a single culture