It only took a few days for “pedagogical continuity” to become a subject of national concern. Until recently, this was a principle that was invoked when talking about students moving from one class or cycle to the next – and the arrangements required to ensure student success during these transitions. With the Covid-19 pandemic, pedagogical continuity refers to […] … learn more→

No one who aspires to a fancy job as a tenured research professor in the life sciences should read this article. For those who wish to follow this career path, I can give only one piece of advice: make sure it’s EXACTLY what you want out of life. Life as an Academic I started out […] … learn more→

  The past few days have seen increasing numbers of schools and universities across the world announce that they are moving to online-only learning. Hundreds of thousands of teachers are busy working to move their face-to-face lessons online. Designing online courses takes significant time and effort. Right now, however, we need a simpler formula. Here […] … learn more→

The pandemic is upon us. My university is moving rapidly online with everyone who can working at home. I’ve seen a lot on social media about how to teach online, whether to teach on line, and how to offer students support. I haven’t yet seen a lot about PhDers and their research. Well maybe a […] … learn more→

Nobody planned for an abrupt mass migration of traditional college courses to the internet. But because of coronavirus, that’s where we are. Hundreds of thousands of students have been told to clear out their belongings and head home, many through the end of the semester. In nearly every case, colleges have said that instruction will […] … learn more→

When the novel coronavirus first hit Singapore in January, universities were two to three weeks into a new semester. As the number of cases climbed, university administrators grappled with challenging questions of protocol and pedagogy. Today Covid-19 knocks on doors worldwide, and universities everywhere face unprecedented challenges. One of the strategies embraced by many universities […] … learn more→

The professor started the seminar with an instruction. If students wanted to succeed, they’d have to learn to think like her. She distributed a copy of a sonnet she had annotated: students would be required to annotate their sonnets in her way and turn them in throughout the course for credit. In the second week, […] … learn more→

Amid concerns about the deadly coronavirus pandemic, a rapidly growing number of colleges and universities are closing their classroom doors, forcing faculty to teach students online instead of in person. The risks posed by COVID-19, the disease caused by the new coronavirus, are both dramatic and abstract. Without a vaccine, scientists can’t say how long it will last […] … learn more→

As the latest wave of strikes at UK universities has unfolded over the past four weeks, the question has once again been raised of whether the impact on students – and, hence, the efficacy of the industrial action – could be minimised by simply showing them recordings of absent academics’ lectures from previous years. That […] … learn more→

“The horror! The horror!” Rarely have so few words done so much for so many academics. Uttered by the dying ivory trader Kurtz in Joseph Conrad’s 1899 novella, Heart of Darkness, interpretations range from the political to the psychological, metaphysical and autobiographical. The hermeneutic jungle is as dense as the one the story’s narrator, Marlow, […] … learn more→