Does this look easy? It’s not.Moe Doiron/The Globe and Mail
The best of the web on education from kindergarten to postsecondary, as chosen daily by Globe and Mail education editor Simona Chiose.
Least stressful job in the world? Not professor
In the post-holiday doldrums, the hottest topic of faculty debate on Twitter last week was a Forbes article arguing that being a professor was among the least stressful jobs of the year to come. The backlash from professors – many of them likely beaten down by weeks spent marking over the holidays – was fierce. The conversation got so heated, suggests this article, because the wider public has no idea what the tenure-tracked, or tracking, do aside from teaching a few courses a year.
Relationship between scholarships and grades questioned
Entrance scholarships at two Ontario universities had little effect on how students performed throughout their years in postsecondary in this study. Although the researchers point out multiple issues with their research, starting with their limited sample size, their results suggest that the persistence that netted promising high-school students their scholarships in the first place may not be further increased by financial aid from the university. An interesting question that the research provokes, however, is whether that persistence would have been sustained in the absence of aid.
MOOCs for students without means
The whole MOOC phenomenon is "mass psychosis," says a university administrator in a highly critical article about who will benefit – and who could be harmed – by the transformations beginning to take shape in higher education. And if voices resisting the move to online education are not stronger, it is perhaps partly due to the fact that for most students, university classrooms are already what another observer calls "fairly distant" places.
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