Month: March 2011

Categories
Academic

UBC-GLOBAL INDIGENOUS CONFERENCE

The Global Indigenous Conference at the University of British Columbia (UBC) will be held on April 1st and 2nd, 2011 in Sty-Wet-Tan, the Great Hall of the UBC First Nations Longhouse in Vancouver Canada.

Indigenous and non-indigenous students at UBC have collaborated to bring together Canadian and international Indigenous activists, academics, and youth for this conference on Indigenous People’s and Globalization. A highlight of the conference will be a case study on mining and oil development within recognized Indigenous lands in Peru by Canadian and American companies.

Keynote Speaker:

DR DAVID SUZUKI, cofounder of the David Suzuki Foundation. A geneticist and broadcaster, Dr. Suzuki is well known as host of The Nature of Things and is a professor emeritus at UBC.

For more information please visit:

http://aboriginal.ubc.ca/gic/

Also, for a link to Dr. David Suzuki’s “The Real Avatar” on the Nature of things check out: http://www.cbc.ca/documentaries/natureofthings/2011/peru/

Categories
Announcements

Course Evaluations

Hello All,

Last Friday I went to a meeting with a handful of student representatives and Dr. Kathryn Harrison, the Associate Dean of Arts, regarding course evaluations. The reason for the meeting was simple – response rates  have been dropping steadily every semester since evaluations were put online. As it stands, the completion rate for the faculty is somewhere around 50%.

The Dean’s office is working hard to fix to this problem, but the solution ultimately rests with students. I know you have probably heard this before, but course evaluations really, really matter. Departments take them extremely seriously when deciding whether or not to promote professors, and when assigning merit pay. Professors, for their part, really care about how they are evaluated by their students. Your professors are here to help you learn but remember,  they see the classroom from a very different perspective than you do, so student feedback is critical for them to make their classes the best they can possibly be.

Please, do your part to make UBC the best it can be for its student community and fill in your course evaluations. It will only take 10 minutes of your time – both your peers and your professors will be thankful.

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