HLRC - Higher Learning Research Communications (E-Journal)
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Enhancing student learning with case-based teaching and audience response systems in an interdisciplinary Food Science course
Full text linkA growing body of research in higher education suggests that teachers should move away from traditional lecturing towards more active and student-focus education approaches. Several classroom techniques are available to engage students and achieve more effective teaching and better learning experiences. The purpose of this paper is to share an example of how two of them – case-based teaching, and the use of response technologies – were implemented into a graduate-level food science course. The paper focuses in particular on teaching sensory science and sensometrics, including several concrete examples used during the course, and discussing in each case some of the observed outcomes.Overall, it was observed that the particular initiatives were effective in engaging student participation and promoting a more active way of learning. Case-base teaching provided students with the opportunity to apply their knowledge and their analytical skills to complex, real-life scenarios relevant to the subject matter. The use of audience response systems further facilitated class discussion, and was extremely well received by the students, providing a more enjoyable classroom experience
Cultural Perspectives on Social Responsibility in Higher Education
Full text linkThe writers of the UNESCO document, Rethinking education: Towards a global common good? challenge educators to address their efforts to meet the current threats to sustainable life for all who share this planet. One way that higher education has been attempting to do this is through campus-community partnerships working to solve social problems locally or further afield. In this exploratory study, answers were sought to the question of why faculty members and administrators participate in these service partnerships, both in terms of what motivates them to do so and what they hope to accomplish, and how cultural context may influence their answers. Answers to these questions may have implications for faculty recruitment and support and for curriculum design and student preparation for serving the common good as well as for the larger vision of how institutions might fulfill their social responsibility. Using one-on-one semi-structured interviews in a number of different countries, some trends could be identified. Responding to a sense of duty was found across all cultural contexts as a primary motivator for faculty members and administrators, but how duty was interpreted and legitimized depended on their various religious and political grounds. Cultural context also influenced whether participants saw their impact as empowering their service partners or establishing social justice.
Managing Large Enrollment Courses in Hybrid Instruction Mode
Full text linkWhile Indian education system is still debating on values of Gurukal system to imperial western education; the world moves on to the hybrid teaching learning system. Though the western world started hybrid teaching in early 1990’s, it took us good 30 years to follow the Westroes. Even when we have initiated the process in few institutions there is much to understand and do before we actually get to see the success of Hybrid online teaching and learning. This paper set to study the hitches and glitches in Hybrid Instruction system of teaching and learning for large enrollment courses. This new instructional methodology ask for redesigning the entire traditional teaching and learning practices where motivation of the felicitator is of prime concern that whether they are motivated enough to come out of their comfort zones
Faith-Based Institutions, Institutional Mission, and the Public Good
Full text linkRooted in historical foundations and demonstrated by continued government financial support, one purpose of higher education is to contribute to the “public good,” or support and further social causes and human flourishing. This notion has received renewed attention in both the literature as well as in professional practice. Given the variety of institutional structures (e.g., public, private, religiously affiliated, nonprofit, and proprietary), the influence of institutional mission varies. Yet, aside from institutional leadership, an institution’s mission is potentially most significant in influencing public good. Faith-based higher education institutions often have missions that are inextricably interconnected with service and community engagement. With these missions, faith-based colleges and universities are distinctively positioned to address social issues, engage in service to the local and global community, and to involve students, faculty, and administrators in this shared purpose. These institutions are uniquely accountable and have the greatest potential in this outcome precisely because of their faith commitment that both informs and motivates their policy and practice. In this essay, the role of faith-based institutions of higher education in promoting public good is explored. In addition, an analysis of both opportunities to enhance public good, as well as obstacles and challenges faced are provided
What If a State Required Civic Learning for All Students?
No full texthis article tells the story of the first state in the U.S. to set the expectation that every undergraduate in public higher education would be involved in civic learning. In 2012, the Massachusetts Board of Higher Education made “Preparing Citizens” one of seven key outcomes of its Vision Project for public higher education. In 2014, the Board passed a Policy on Civic Learning defining civic learning as “acquisition of the knowledge, the intellectual skills and the applied competencies that citizens need for informed and effective participation in civic and democratic life; it also means acquiring an understanding of the social values that underlie democratic structures and practices” (http://www.mass.edu/bhe/lib/documents/AAC14-48CivicLearningwithPolicy-RevisedFinalforBHE.pdf). First steps toward achieving this goal includedesigning a process to identify and designate on every campus under the Board’s oversight those courses with a substantial focus on civic learning—either with or without civic engagement built into them—anddeveloping a set of rubrics that can be used to assess student learning outcomes in these courses. The article presents the complex issues emerging through the first year’s work on these two steps, and sketches action steps to follow
Faculty Work as Philanthropy or Philanthropy as Faculty Work?
Full text linkEmploying Robert Payton’s (1988) definition of philanthropy, “Voluntary action for the public good” (p. 4), Faculty Work and the Public Good: Philanthropy, Engagement, and Academic Professionalism offers a fresh look at faculty work as philanthropy. The purpose of this review essay is to provide a brief review of some of the key propositions in this book and to explore how faculty work as philanthropy may be understood in non-U.S. cultural contexts. We start our exploration of faculty work as philanthropy in non-U.S. contexts by examining this construct in the U.S. as presented by Faculty Work and the Public Good and by laying out key forces that it sets forth as shaping faculty work as philanthropic practice: institutional structure and employment frameworks, resource constraints, and discretionary constraints
Editorial
Full text linkI am pleased to present Issue 6.3. Articles in this issue focus on aspects of teaching. Sara Sohr-Preston and colleagues examine the student rating of professors. In their empirical work, the authors demonstrate that there are multiple factors, some of which are not under the control of the professor, influence student ratings; this suggests that ratings should be used by faculty and administrators cautiously in any administrative decision process. David Giacalone provides results of a study showing the value of case-based scenarios and audience response systems to improve student learning. We are pleased to publish these works that further scholarship related to learning.As we come to the last quarter of the year, I wanted to let you know that, in 2017, we are going to shift our publication strategy somewhat. We are going to reduce to two issues per year, one that publishes in June and the other in December. To ensure that articles are available throughout the year, we will begin publishing on a rolling basis. This means that once we receive a manuscript, and it is accepted for publication, it will be published online right away. Published articles will then be collected and put into an issue twice each year. We hope that this, along with our goal to continue to reduce the time to publication, will allow you to showcase your work right away to the larger academic and professional communities. We thank you for your readership of the Higher Learning Research Communications journal and encourage you to consider our journal for your publication needs
Towards a New Critical Literacy: Literature, Community Engagement and The Global Public Good
No full textWhat does it mean for a student to be critically literate in the Twenty First Century? How do we teach critical literacy within university humanities programs in the United States? And what are the implications of critical literacy for the conception and praxis of the global good? Using Richard Hoggart and Raymond Williams’ conceptions of critical literacy, I outline a pedagogical approach to literature and cultural studies that offers a conceptual space for students to imagine and engage with ideas of the global good. From the perspective of student learning, this approach to community engagement offers students opportunities to “read” their own social context critically and engage with, as well as, contribute to various local, national and global communities in meaningful, material ways. But what is important is that in doing so, such contributions come from the starting point of disciplinary knowledge, rather than from a problematic volunteerism or service framework that are often associated with the term community engagement. A critically literate approach to community engagement enables students to understand how literary studies can enrich an understanding of their global context in ways that other disciplines cannot and, therefore, the type of knowledge that the field produces. Drawing upon concrete examples of student learning from a range of university classes in which I have employed this pedagogical approach, I conclude that the student learning experience that results from such a process is qualitatively different—both with respect to the sorts of knowledge that students’ produce, as well as the dispositional affects it engenders in students’ lives. Such a learning experience holds the promise of achieving Raymond Williams’ vision of adult education as a process of “building social consciousness” and “real understanding of the world”—a substantive critical literacy for a globalized world
Editorial
Full text linkIn 2016, Higher Learning Research Communication (HLRC) celebrates its 6-year anniversary. The journal is a collaborative effort amongst Universidad Andrés Bello (Chile), Universidad Europea de Madrid (Spain), Istanbul Bilgi University (Turkey), and Walden University (United States). These four institutions started this journal to provide scholarly focus on international research in higher education, teaching and learning, education policy and practice, and internationalization. It was important that the journal be open access, so that everyone could have immediate and unrestricted access to the latest research. It was also important that the journal be multilingual; we have accepted manuscripts for review in Brazilian Portuguese, European Portuguese, Latin American Spanish, European Spanish, and English. The language capacity of the staff is truly amazing. As I begin my first year as Chief Editor, I have had the time to reflect on the many accomplishments of HLRC. HLRC has published 88 essays, articles, lections, book reviews, and editorials. Several special issues have been published, including Accreditation (2012); Tourism, Hospitality and Leisure in a Globalized World (2012); Selected Papers from the International Conference on Teaching and Learning (2013); International Perspectives on Retention (2014); and English Medium Instruction (EMI) and Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) (2015). We have been fortunate to have essays by scholars such as Drummond Bone, Internationalization (2011); Bill Plater, Quality Assurance (2013); Rogerio Meneghini, Scielo and Open Access Journals (2013); Watson Swail, A Different Viewpoint on Student Retention (2014); and Gonzalo Fernandez-Sanchez, María Olga Bernaldo, Ana Castillejo, and Ana María Manzanero, Education for Sustainable Development in Higher Education: State-of-the-art, Barriers, and Challenges (2014). I greatly appreciate the breadth of scholarship on the latest higher education practices and authors who are writing on issues that are important and relevant to the higher education landscape. We have also seen some great improvements in our metrics. For example, due to some changes to our website in 2015, we saw a significant increase in visits to the HLRC site and more citations. We have averaged about a 53% acceptance rate, which reflects our adherence to quality standards for publication. We also added more content to the website, including information on copyright, self-archiving policies, conflicts of interest, and publication ethics. The new section on author guidelines provides much clearer information that will help with manuscript preparation and submission. In addition, we are registered with a number of indexation services, such as Google Scholar, and our articles are included in ProQuest Education Journals, Questia, and OJS/PKP Library network. We submitted an application for indexation of HLRC, and we should hear back on this initiative sometime later in 2016. I look forward to an exciting 2016. We have two special issues planned. The June 2016 special issue on Higher Education, Community Engagement, and the Global Public Good will commemorate the 5-year anniversary of HLRC. In December, there will be a special issue dedicated to Quality Assurance in Higher Education. We continue to also seek the best research that you are doing for publication, as well as book reviews and other kinds of scholarly contributions. I have been working with the editorial staff to reorganize the editorial board to include associate editors; we are also going to be seeking a broad set of peer reviewers from countries around the world upon whom we can call to review manuscripts. It is my goal to help broaden visibility and readership of HLRC and to make it one of the journals of choice for submissions regarding higher education. I invite you to visit the site at www.hlrcjournal.com and browse the titles of previously published manuscripts. If you are interested in joining the editorial board as an associate editor, or if you would like to serve as a peer reviewer, please do not hesitate to contact me. We welcome new doctoral scholars as well as those who are advanced in their doctoral programs who would like to engage in this type of professional development opportunity
A Course in Critical Thinking for PhD Students in Biomolecular Sciences and Biotechnology: Classical Experiments in Biochemistry
Full text linkThis essay presents and discusses an eight-session seminar course designed to develop critical thinking skills in doctoral biochemistry students by exposing them to classical experiments in biochemistry. During each 2.5 session, different key topics of the discovery and development of biochemical concepts are discussed. Before each session, students are required to read the one or two classical papers. The size of the seminar course and the seating of the students are critical to make this a highly interactive environment for all students to participate in the critique and re-designing of key experiments, including control experiments, which helped formulate these classical concepts. Final student evaluation of the course’s goals has two equal components: Course participation and a final take home exam due two weeks after the course is completed. Together with the take home exam students are also required to write an evaluation of the course, preferably no longer than half a page. Students’ comments of the course have been uniformly positive. The author notes the sooner students are exposed to this manner of thinking, the better they will be equipped to choose an appropriate mentor and contribute creatively to attempt to solve the scientific problem of their PhD thesis