The private return to postsecondary investment varies widely by field, but the resources required by different fields are not well known. This paper establishes five new facts about college costs using novel department-level data. First, costs vary widely across field, ranging from electrical engineering (109 percent higher costs than English) to…

In 1970, education theorist Paulo Freire (1970) sharply critiqued dominant pedagogy--or what he called the banking model of education--for stripping students of their agency. In the banking model, he wrote, instructors are empowered as narrating subjects as students who become alienated as passive listening objects. In the decades since, research…

In October 2014, the University of British Columbia Vancouver campus (UBCV) ran a campus-wide survey to establish baseline information on teaching practices and attitudes among faculty, to measure the impact of existing teaching and learning initiatives and to identify the conditions leading to change in practices and attitudes around teaching.…

Designing and executing a new upper level political science course preparation can be a daunting task, especially when dealing with some of the challenges in the context of teaching-oriented institutions of higher learning. In this paper, I conduct an examination of both the challenges and the opportunities that can be afforded by environmental…

The recommendations of the "Bradley Review" of higher education in Australia identified a clear need for examination of the academic labour market and the limited attractiveness of academia as a profession. Reasons for the lack of attractiveness include increased academic workloads, as evidenced by larger class sizes and staff-student…

The purpose of this study was to conduct descriptive, exploratory research to answer the questions: What is the ideal class size for online courses? What are the variables that affect optimal class size in this environment? As a study of the literature, the goal was to collect research-based evidence supporting optimal class size. The initial…

Traditional conceptions of faculty and program productivity typically emphasize in varying degrees teaching, research, publication, creative work, service to the university, and service to the community. Evaluation of these areas and the relative weights assigned to them varies greatly from unit to unit within a university and even more so among…

This report presents, in tabular format, the following information: (1) FTE Enrollment, FY 2002 to FY 2006; (2) Cost of Instruction Per Full-Time Equivalent (FTE) Student; (3) State Support (SSI) Per Full-Time Equivalent (FTE) Student; (4) Average and Median Undergraduate Class Size in Fall 2005--Classes Meeting as Lectures; (5) Average and Median…

Presents the results of a survey conducted to determine the teacher workload in institutions of higher education, concluding that over one-third of the English teachers teach too many students or too many courses or both. (RB)

Relationship of tuition, faculty size, compensation, work load and class size. (Editor)

Adequate grading of student compositions in large classes makes inordinate demands on the English teacher's time. To convince administrators to reduce teaching loads, teachers need familiarity with research supporting the instructional advantages of smaller classes and closer attention, and with opposing research. (An extensive annotated research…

This document comprises recommendations for the gathering of data concerning section or class size at the universities in Ontario. The objective of a section size analysis is to produce a consistent measure of one important element effecting the allocation of university resources. Three distributions are formed from the data by tallying the…

The responses to questions of class size, degree requirements, starting salaries, and teaching load from 156 academic institutions involved in foreign language teaching are revealed. These may be benchmarks for evaluating and improving programs nationwide. (PMJ)

An analysis is presented of the basic instructional productivity formula, PR = TL x CS, where PR is the index of productivity, TL is the index reflecting teaching load, and CS is the class-size index. Objectives of the analysis are to: extend the basic instructional productivity formula to include recognition of different types of instruction;…

Updates an earlier report to underscore the inadvisability of imposing large sections of freshman composition students on reluctant departments and to promote further discussion of the issues raised by the program. Discusses some of the more controversial implications raised by the program. (RS)