Philip Preville is an award-winning journalist and a former Canadian Journalism Fellow at Massey College at the University of Toronto. He’s currently a member of the Professional Advisory Council with the Department of English at Ryerson University.
Authors of digital textbooks are short-circuiting the gatekeepers and saving their students money. In this extract from our e-book, Textbook Heroes: How Digital Textbooks Make Learning More Impactful, Philip Preville considers how the textbook market is changing in favor of the way modern classrooms operate. Every professor has a textbook in them. It’s the sum of […]
Educators have good reasons for turning their backs on traditional textbooks. While textbooks have until now been an essential teaching tool, they’re no longer doing the job they need to do
Three years ago, the global consulting firm McKinsey & Company provided a dire forecast for the sector in a report titled The Future of Textbooks. “Higher education publishers face a growing threat from the rental-textbook market,” the report said, predicting that rentals would begin to cannibalize new textbook sales by 2017. “Publishers can meet this […]
Teaching STEM students often means rote memorization, a technique that can cause disengagement and resentment. Our latest innovative educator, Professor Neil Garg, has found a more effective way of teaching organic chemistry—his BACON project, which supplements complex molecular diagrams with common visualizations. As undergraduate science courses go, organic chemistry has a terrible reputation—and Neil Garg […]
Back in 1996, just before joining the faculty at Ohio’s Oberlin Conservatory, music theory professor Brian Alegant took a workshop for university and college professors on student-centered teaching. He had been teaching for a number of years already, at McGill University in Montreal, and was beset by the nagging sense that his teaching—and that teaching […]
In researching her book Helping Faculty Find Work-Life Balance: The Path Toward Family Friendly Institutions, Virginia Commonwealth University professor Maike Philipsen looked at work-related stress for academics at different stages of their careers. What she found: workplace stress never goes away, but the sources change. Subscribe to Top Hat’s weekly blog recap Get the best […]
Successful teaching will depend on how technology is applied to keep students engaged. Here are five ways professors can use new technology to greatest effect, and keep their tech-savvy students focused on learning.