Research by geographers in Canada, the United States and Hong Kong identifies lessons for universities and colleges from the 2020 move to online learning.
Holland Taylor as Professor Joan Hambling in The Chair.
Elize Morse/Netflix
Academics described their universities as exploitative, oppressive, toxic and fiscally driven. They felt themselves being dehumanised and demoralised by management. Most reported feelings of burnout.
Faculty in a cross-country survey recommended modifying metrics used to gauge productivity to account for the differential impacts of the pandemic on women and racialized faculty.
Teaching News You Can Use is a new online resource to guide and inspire university teachers and, in doing so, help build an academic community that recognises good teaching practice.
You’d think class sizes would be an important consideration for students when choosing a university, but universities don’t make that information public. They should.
Student experience or satisfaction surveys are not a reliable guide to teaching performance. Even worse, anonymous survey responses are at times little better than university-facilitated hate speech.
Casual staff often miss out on professional development and feel isolated and invisible. Team teaching helps support these staff while improving the continuity and quality of university teaching.
T.J. Thomson, Queensland University of Technology; Glen Thomas, Queensland University of Technology, and Lesley Irvine, Queensland University of Technology
We live in a world of spoken, visual and written communication, but the third mode continues to dominate teaching and assessment in university communication courses.
The sameness of the way in which universities present themselves is based on a shared view of what they think stakeholders want. Behind the official facade it’s more like ‘organised anarchy’.
Workplace stress among academics has long been higher in Australia and New Zealand than overseas, and research suggests the flow-on impacts on students could fuel a vicious cycle of negative feedback.
The Job-Ready Graduates policy aims to remove ‘the misalignment between the cost of teaching a degree and the revenue that a university receives to teach it’. But new research challenges its costings.
At best, when universities differentiate and specialise it can marshal talent and sharpen their focus. At worst. though, this debate can present universities with a false dilemma.
The shift online demonstrated the convenience of distance learning and has convinced some learners, including workers and unemployed people, to study.
(Pexels/rfstudio)
Treating online education as a cheap alternative to lectures will be a mistake. At first universities will probably have to allow more preparation time and invest more in training and technology.
More than 90% of universities in the world have been built since 1949. The vast majority built large campuses outside city centres, and all for much the same reasons.