With globalisation, economic integration and increased academic and professional mobility, there is a growing need for the recognition of qualifications outside the country which awards them. The “borderless” delivery of higher education has made cross-border quality assurance increasingly important.... Quality assurance helps to make higher education transparent and trustworthy for European citizens and employers as well as for students and scholars from other continents.

Report to the European Council on Progress in Quality Assurance in Higher Education (Brussels, 2009)

The scholarship of teaching is problem posing about an issue of teaching or learning, study of the problem through methods appropriate to the disciplinary epistemologies, applications of results to practice, communication of results, self-reflection, and peer review.

Barbara Cambridge, “Fostering the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning: Communities of Practice,” in To Improve the Academy (2001)

Teachers who engage in scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) take what the scholarly teacher does one step further and “go public” with their work – making it available to colleagues in a public forum and accessible to peer review. This one step represents a change in practice that can transform casual observations about student learning into scholarly work that frames the questions, systematically gathers and explores evidence, reflects on and refines new ideas, and crafts the results in a form that is suitable for public presentation.

Nancy E. Fenton and Karen Szala-Meneok, Research on Teaching & Learning Guidebook (McMaster University, Centre for Leadership in Learning, 2010)

Good courses:

•Challenge students to significant kinds of learning.

•Use active forms of learning.

•Have teachers who care—about the subject, their students, and about teaching and learning.

•Have teachers who interact well with students.

•Have a good system of feedback, assessment, and grading.

Dee Fink, Creating Significant Learning Experiences: An Integrated Approach to Designing College Courses (2003)

Professors have a very pleasant life. They can make $125,000 a year, with a good pension and six months off each year to do as they please. Their duties include sharing their research at conferences in Italy or Mexico, whose popularity hasn't waned despite the advent of the Internet.

Margaret Wente, “Want to Know Why Professors Don’t Teach?” Globe and Mail, Sep. 18, 2009

Academic salaries are far higher than most people’s, and have been rising faster. Professors also have good pensions and job security.... According to one 2008 survey, Canadian faculty were the highest-paid among 15 countries studied.

“Universities Are Sitting Ducks for Reform,” Globe and Mail, April 13, 2010

You are paying the salaries of these scholars. You are paying for the books they publish, the conferences they hold and the knowledge they’re imparting to your children. You are subsidizing their students’ tuition. I leave it to you to decide whether you’re getting your money’s worth.

“They Hijacked the Humanities, Then My Canoe,” Globe and Mail, Oct. 22, 2010

Though faculty salaries now mirror those of most upper-middle-class Americans working 40 hours for 50 weeks, they continue to pay for teaching time of nine to 15 hours per week for 30 weeks, making possible a month-long winter break, a week off in the spring and a summer vacation from mid-May until September.

David C. Levy, “Do College Professors Work Hard Enough?” The Washington Post, March 23, 2012

Teaching has not just fallen down the priority list; it has been pushed there by conscious resource allocation decisions… In 1988, almost 65 per cent of operating funds were directed to instruction and non-sponsored research, where the teaching happens. By 2008 this had fallen to 58 per cent—an effective cutback of $30 million a year at the average top 25 school.

W.D. Smith, “Where all that Money is Going: Tuition Rises, Class Size Grows, and the Bureaucracy Gets Big,” Maclean’s, 14 Jan. 2010

A set of podcasts is the 21st-century equivalent of a textbook, not the 21st-century equivalent of a teacher. Every age has its autodidacts, gifted people able to teach themselves with only their books. Woe unto us if we require all citizens to manifest that ability.

Pamela Hieronymi, “Don’t Confuse Technology with Teaching,” Chronicle of Higher Education, 13 Aug. 2012