Feedback on Feedback Questionnaires’ Use and Misuse

Jay Michela addresses misconceptions in Alex Usher’s analysis of the Ryerson arbitration decision.

Guest post by Jay Michela, Psychology.

Alex Usher of Higher Education Strategy Associates (HESA) has offered his analysis of an arbitration decision at Ryerson University which ruled against conventional use of students’ course ratings for personnel decisions (tenure and promotion decisions). It has been circulated within our university and elsewhere (e.g., to OCUFA), and appears on the HESA website under the headline “Time to Talk Teaching Assessments.”

I was moved to respond to Usher’s statement because it expresses many of the misconceptions that exist around summative use of students’ ratings of courses and instructors.

What follows is the full text of Alex Usher’s analysis, with my responses interspersed. I hope this format for explaining the urgent need to change university practices around student questionnaires turns out to be more engaging and pithy than some of the literature reviews and other research reports on which this material is based. Continue reading “Feedback on Feedback Questionnaires’ Use and Misuse” →

Using Your Resources: A Different Approach to Mentorship

Jo Atlee is a professor in the Cheriton School of Computer Science and the director of Women in Computer Science. She helped us prepare our faculty guide section on mentorship and has agreed to share here what she’s learned from her experiences—both positive and negative—with various mentoring models. Here’s Jo:

I’m not a big believer of the formal-mentor model of mentorship. Such a model of mentor and protégé makes sense for supervisor-student (or supervisor-postdoc) relationships, because there is an aspect of apprenticeship in the progression from student to faculty member. But outside of these relationships, I think that people have unrealistically high expectations of being able to find and establish a really strong relationship with some singular mentor or mentee. This is especially true with respect to finding a mentor within one’s department who is worth meeting with regularly.

I prefer a model of having a network of colleagues—peers, senior colleagues, junior colleagues, preferably at multiple institutions—that you can draw on for advice, feedback, or ideas on how to navigate a sticky problem. A wide network provides the obvious advantage of diversity in advice and expertise. I also like this model because the time commitments on mentors are relatively lightweight. Mentoring interactions tend to be a lunch, a phone call, or a quick email response that is purposeful, as opposed an expectation to meet regularly with a mentee. As a busy person, it is easier for me to say “yes” to an invitation to lunch with someone looking for advice than to a request to be a mentor, not knowing what kind of time commitment the requestor is expecting.

In my years of work with Women in Computer Science and Women in Math, one problem with the formal-mentoring model has always been that, while senior students recognize the value of mentoring and are interested in being mentors, junior students are not interested in being mentored. They believe that others have gotten by without this extra “help,” so they can as well. I’ve seen junior faculty take a similar view of formal mentoring programs within their departments; these pre-tenure faculty would prefer to be acknowledged as peers within their departments than as formal mentees or protégés.

An advantage of the network model of mentoring is that the vocabulary surrounding mentoring is devoid of this power differential. There is no notion of protégé. Best of all, the network model changes the vocabulary associated with “seeking advice”: by reaching out to members of your network for advice, you aren’t “asking for help”—you are simply “using your resources.”

Faculty Members Advocate for Divestment from Fossil Fuels

This is a guest post submitted by a member. For FAUW’s position on this issue, please see our recent blog post on the Responsible Investing Working Group.

—David DeVidi, Philosophy

The global movement to divest from fossil fuels has been growing on our campus since 2015, initially driven by undergraduate and graduate students. Faculty members are now organizing to support students in their call to the administration to withdraw our endowment and pension investments from fossil fuels and re-invest in a low carbon future. This post outlines the reasons for divestment and the progress toward it—globally and on our campus—and welcomes you to get involved.

Why divest?

Available data indicate that our university has invested at least $68 million in fossil fuels, in companies like BP, Total, Exxon/Imperial Oil, and Royal Dutch Shell that have been leading contributors to the climate crisis. There are pressing environmental and ethical reasons to withdraw our support from these companies. There are also reputational costs to consider: it is difficult to present Waterloo as an innovative, socially responsible university concerned with advancing environmental sustainability if our investments say otherwise.

The financial case for divestment is also very strong. A PhD student in our School of Environment, Enterprise and Development (SEED) program estimated that our university lost approximately $20 million over the 2011-15 period by investing in fossil fuels as opposed to having a low-carbon portfolio. These significant losses mirror the ongoing devaluation of fossil fuels as the global community decarbonizes to align with the 2015 United Nations’ Paris Agreement. Continue reading “Faculty Members Advocate for Divestment from Fossil Fuels” →

Digital Privacy Colloquium: A Summary and Follow-Up

– Karen Jack, University Privacy Officer, UW Secretariat

The university held a privacy colloquium on December 4th 2013 in light of the potential adoption of Concur, a US-based online expense claim processing system. There were two speakers: Jim Turk, Executive Director of the Canadian Association of University Teachers, and Fred Carter, Senior Policy & Technology Advisor of the Ontario Privacy Commissioner’s Office.

Jim Turk’s presentation is available here (PDF), and Fred Carter’s is available here (PDF).

Following their presentations, attendees participated in a question and answer session with a panel that included Fred Carter, University of Waterloo professor Ian Goldberg, and Blair Campbell, Senior Privacy Manager of Scotiabank. During the lively panel discussion, several attendees expressed concerns about the proposal. They spoke of a desire to retain control over their personal information, expressed reservations about the security of information in the cloud, and described issues relating to “anonymisation” techniques. In turn, the panel spoke about: the need to ensure that robust contractual safeguards re: privacy and security are in place in any outsourced solution, no matter where the company is headquartered; insights into encryption possibilities and pitfalls; the benefits of data minimization and privacy by design. Members of the project’s steering committee spoke of the efficiencies of an outsourced solution and of the consultation undertaken to date. There was consensus in the room that privacy and security can’t be afterthoughts.

Near the closing of the panel discussion, the university’s privacy officer advised that she and the university’s information security services director are undertaking a privacy and security impact assessment (PSIA) on this project. This tool, new at UW, helps to identify potential privacy and security risks and mitigation strategies for projects being proposed at the university that use personal information. As of the date of this post, the PSIA is nearing completion and, save those aspects which could create security risks if disclosed, will be made available to the community so users will have the opportunity to understand what’s at issue.

When the PSIA documentation has been posted, an alert will be posted on this blog.

Have questions about the project? Contact Connie van Oostveen or Ann Williams-Gorrie with any questions or ideas you may have about the online expense claim project.

Open Access

– Christine Jewell, University of Waterloo Library

Do you follow developments in the Open Access (OA) movement? If so, you’ll have heard the exciting news on the Canadian front. This past October, the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), and the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) together launched a consultation on a harmonized open access policy.

The agencies are aiming for a policy that is in tune with global trends toward open access of scholarly literature, specifically, peer-reviewed journal publications arising from publicly funded research. The consultation document, entitled the Draft Tri-Agency Open Access Policy, is modeled after the CIHR Open Access Policy that has been in place since 2008. The CIHR policy states that peer-reviewed journal articles must be freely accessible within 12 months of publication. The CIHR policy remains in effect throughout the consultation process. The proposed policy would apply to CIHR grants as well as SSHRC and NSERC grants awarded after September 1, 2014. More information and answers to frequently asked questions are posted on the NSERC website.

The consultation stage of the proposal will end on December 13^th. NSERCC and SSHRC are calling for individual as well as collective responses to be sent to openaccess@nserc-crsng.gc.ca.

Continue reading →