Financial gains. Acquiring new customers. Making your presence felt in the online market. Motive could be any of these, but the fact of the matter is that every business is looking to grow.
In addition to teaching content, the primary, avowed purpose of higher education is to teach people how to think, and take information and turn it into knowledge. The difference between information and knowledge is understanding. Knowing that 2X2=4 is nothing more than information if you really don’t understand that 2X2 means two groups of two things, which leads us to four things in total.
In my last article, I tried to articulate the primary definition of Sex, Gender, and Sexual Orientation. I had, in my mind, this thought to write a follow-up article, which shall deal with 'Gender' in more detail because it needs special attention (without a doubt it is a sophisticated topic).
From the articles that I have written about higher education and our collective failure to carry out our responsibilities to develop, in our students, higher order thinking skills, one of the questions that I have pondered as I have wrestled with some of the responses over the series of 80+ articles published about The Science of Learning, is, “What has the impact on society been as a result of our failure to teach higher order thinking skills?”.
Sometimes I wonder that our lives would have been so different if there was no technology.
A few years ago Quintin McKellar mentioned the long established link between research expertise and teaching, stating that “Although the evidence for the contribution of research activity to teaching excellence is thin, what exists is largely positive…”. In searching through the evidence, the teaching referred to appears to be the kind of teaching done in an apprenticeship/master (Ph.D.) relationship rather than what is normally thought of as undergraduate teaching (lecturing). The skill set required for excellence in research is not related at all to the skill set needed to be a good teacher.