I am teaching a graduate course in the winter semester. The course is called NRES 704, and it’s a typical “graduate seminar” course. In fact, that’s the course title – Graduate Seminar.
The course description is as follows:
The purpose of this graduate seminar is to develop and sustain an interdisciplinary approach to graduate education. Students will be given the opportunity to present ideas pertaining to their research proposals, or the overall research design, methodology and results of a thesis or non-thesis project. The seminar will encourage interactions, mutual support and sharing of ideas to assist in the advancement of each student’s research program at UNBC.
As you can see, it’s a pretty broad mandate. And from what I can tell, there’s a fair amount of variation in how it’s taught as there seems to be a revolving door of professors who teach it from semester to semester.
Along with the fairly traditional and useful components in a course like this – having students attend weekly departmental seminars, present their work in class, and also attend and participate in the annual graduate student conference at UNBC – I plan to include a weekly blogging assignment (stay tuned for details) and to spend quite a bit of discussion time on the shifts (and non-shifts) in scholarly communication.
Here’s where I’m asking for your help. I have published a draft schedule of topics, along with links to articles that should inform our discussion at this link. I would love it if some of you would take a look at my topics and links and make suggestions. Suggestions such as other topics or subtopics to include or links that would be particularly useful are very welcome.
In the latter case, if you have written something that is pertinent to a particular topic, I’d love to hear about it so that I could consider putting it into the mix for class discussion.
I’m really looking forward to teaching this class. I suspect that the way I’m planning on running it will make it into something that’s not really your grandpa’s graduate seminar course… or at least I hope it isn’t. And I’d love to have feedback to make it as relevant and interesting as possible.
(Note: I’ll be updating the web page linked here as I receive comments, etc.)
(Another note: As I mentioned in the comments below, I figure that I’ll have about a half-hour to “cover” any one of these topics. I’ll be looking for pre-reading from the students, and then some active discussion, hopefully providing some tools/ideas/topic for further investigation.)
Looks a bit one-sided to me. There remains a place for traditional publication in science, despite a noble shift to open access. In the US, there is a requirement to publish in OA journals when public funds are used. Consequently, funding for OA publication is built into grant budgets. In Canada, that’s not the case (at least not yet). Until Canada starts paying for OA, I wouldn’t discard traditional publication venues anytime soon . . . especially when training early-career HQP who will likely find themselves competing for diminishing NSERC pennies.
I’d balance it out a bit. (Just my $0.02)
I tend to agree with Greg – one week on “traditional” publishing, but 4 on various aspects of OA (a whole week on predatory publishers? A class on pre-prints?) Seems like it’s a course in publishing (which is all well and good). But perhaps I’m over-estimating what’s known about these.
Practice NSERC grant writing (PGS, PDF, NOT Discovery Grants)? How to find a postdoc/PhD/do you need to do a PhD/postdoc? Do you even want to approach job applications, or is this an early cohort?
SWOT analysis (Strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats) to help make career decisions (a tool from social sciences that’s under-used in my view).
I’m also not a fan of mandatory seminars – http://labandfield.wordpress.com/2013/10/14/why-research-seminar-series-suck-and-how-to-make-them-better/
And perhaps because I’m a bit late to this, but what differentiates “Big Data” from the data that I use in my day-to-day research? Is it treated any differently than “small data”? How applicable is this topic to the cohort of students? (in my grad cohort from just a few years ago, I’d argue not very much).
Sounds like an awesome course though – best of luck!
Thanks Greg and Alex. Yes, I was worried a bit about potential one-sided-ness (are there sides?). I did try to put in some perspective on either end of the issues while possible, but I’ll try to dig up more.
As it turns out, I’ll likely have only about 1/2 hour per week to cover any one of these subjects, since a chunk of each class (only one hour and twenty minutes in total each week) will be taken up by presentations. I’m mainly hoping to stimulate conversation at those times.
Thanks for the links and thoughts. Very helpful.
“one sided” isn’t the right word, but it certainly shows a propensity for one view which may not be shared by all (and their supervisors, future hiring committees, etc). Half an hour isn’t a lot of time, so I see now how some of those topics could be covered in one session.
Can’t wait to see the blogging component!
Thanks again. I guess another one of my objectives here is to get a few of these issues – which are obviously arising in academia and elsewhere – out there for discussion during the class. I don’t expect to convince anyone on this, but I hope that they at least get to see where some of the current discussion is.
And, e.g., since they’re likely going to see their fair share of predatory publishing spam (etc.), I figure that a course like this is a good place to discuss this and develop a few tools to recognize scams.
Looks like a brilliant course – which I could be a fly on the wall for it. I think its an ambitious amount to cover in a (relatively) short amount of time – good luck!
Personally I think week 2, esp. written scholarly communication, could be a course on its own. I think this is a major weakest of most grad students, i.e. how to write a paper that is easily read and often cited and how to write/submit a paper to the correct journal according to its focus. The lack of these skills often cause good science to be badly communicated and bog down the review process with manuscripts in revision limbo.
Looking forward to future posts and blogs. I would love to organize a similar seminar one day – as you said these are important issues in academia and ones that grad students should be made aware of and have a chance to discuss/practice.
Thanks Barbara. I really appreciate your comments.
I agree, it is quite ambitious. I’m expecting there to be some overlap in topics. And I’m hoping that, to a great extent, our rather short discussion will stimulate further investigation by class participants on their own time, or as they encounter these issues in their career.