Tag Archives: higher education

What works in Higher Education…

University lecture class by NeONBRAND via unsplash.com

… and perhaps what doesn’t seem to be working.

Recently, thanks to a tweet from Jenni Case, I came across Michael Schneider’s and Franzis Preckel’s analysis on the influence of 105 variables influencing student learning performance in higher education [1].

Teaching staff are being urged to adopt new and supposedly better teaching methods than traditional lectures. With more than 60 different methods ranging from problem-based learning to flipped classrooms, it can be hard for even an experienced university teacher to know where to begin. And then there are dozens of student factors that also influence learning performance. Knowing which characteristics of students, teachers and instruction methods influence learning outcomes and by how much will be immensely helpful which is why this is an amazingly useful paper.

The results should be compulsory reading for everyone involved in university teaching.

Read on for more details and the results summary

Why graduates have poor business skills – part 2

On repeated occasions, surveys in Australia and elsewhere report business leaders complaining about graduates without appropriate skills.

Recently I wrote about one factor that could explain this: the implicit privileging of writing about all other forms of communication throughout our education system. Graduates, therefore, tend to have weak skills in listening, seeing and reading, even drawing and visual communication, all of which are critical for engineering and most other professions.

This helps to explain why the reputation of graduates is so low, particularly in the minds of business employers. And it is not just engineers, apparently, that are said to have terrible communication skills.

My research on engineers provides some novel answers that lie deep within the structure of our education systems. There are some other factors that have emerged from this research affecting not just engineers, but all graduates.

In this post I will describe the second of these factors: the implicit relegation of collaboration. Continue reading →

Why graduates have poor business skills – part 1

On repeated occasions, surveys in Australia and other countries report that business leaders complain about graduates without appropriate skills. It is not just surveys that tell this story.

Not so long ago, a well-known Australian university decided to promote itself by seeking local business leaders to extol the benefits of their experiences at the university. Well, it turned out that most had actually dropped out of their courses and never finished their degrees! So the campaign was quietly abandoned.

Why is the reputation of graduates so low in business circles, particularly in the minds of business employers? It is not just engineers, apparently, that have terrible communication skills.

Continue reading →