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Category: Teaching & Learning

How to Measure Teaching Quality

One of the main struggles with measuring performance in higher education – whether of departments, faculties, or institutions – is how to measure the quality of teaching. Teaching does not go entirely unmeasured in higher education.  Individual courses are rated by students through course evaluation surveys, which occur at the end of each semester.  The results of these evaluations do have some bearing on hiring, pay, and promotion (though how much bearing varies significantly from place to place), but these data

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July 7, 2014 10 Comments

Teaching Load Versus Workload

I often get into discussions that go like this: Me: Over time, the number of classes each professor teaches has gone down.  Places where people used to teach 3/2 (three classes one term, two the other) now teach 2/1.  Places where 4/3 or even 4/4 were common are now 3/2.   This has been one of the main things making higher education more expensive in Canada. Someone else (usually a prof): Yeah, but classes are so much larger now than they

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June 9, 2014 4 Comments

Permeability

Once upon a time, we thought that to indulge in serious thought, scholars needed to be protected from the hurly-burly of commerce and politics.  That’s why an awful lot of American campuses were built out in the middle of nowhere (eg. Dartmouth, Princeton, U Illinois, U Indiana, U Virginia, U Washington), and why many of the medieval universities of Europe have walls – both were strategies to keep out the riff-raff. Nowadays, of course, we think exactly the opposite.  Urban

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May 28, 2014 1 Comment

Re-Imagining an Arts Curriculum

Basically, Canadian higher education programs can be divided into two types.  First, are programs that must be accredited, and where graduates’ ability to work in their field is tied to accreditation (e.g. Law, Medicine, Engineering).  These programs start with desired outcomes, and work backwards to make sure that graduates have the skills required to meet professional certification.  Second, there are the Arts and Sciences, which more closely resemble a free-for-all, in which curriculum is driven at least as much by

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May 20, 2014 4 Comments

The MOOC Conversation We Should Have (But Won’t)

In all the hype and backlash about MOOCs, it seems that we forgot to have a really important conversation about what MOOCs actually tell us about traditional higher education. The thing that freaked absolutely everybody out (some positively, some negatively) about MOOCs was the idea that a single instructor could teach tens of thousands of students around the world, simultaneously.  “Oh my God”, people panicked/enthused, “what will happen to the university once content is available freely everywhere”.  Well, not much,

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May 5, 2014 4 Comments

One Thought to Start Your Day

One Thought to Start Your Day is our founder and CEO Alex Usher’s popular daily blog, brimming with up-to-the-minute insights and informed opinions on today’s higher education industry.

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