University of Wisconsin-Madison
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Thursday, March 8, 2018
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NOW IN FRANCE, RICHARD CREDITS HER TIME AS A BADGER
GET YOUR KICKS ON FOR BENEFITS THIS SPRING +SPORTS page 8
+L&S page 2
Overworked, stressed faculty fight burnout By Bremen Keasey SENIOR STAFF WRITER
GRAPHIC BY JADE SHENG
UW-Madison will transition solely to Canvas by June 1, discontinuing its use of Moodle and Desire2Learn.
UW transition to Canvas will create ‘consistency’ By Lawrence Andrea CAMPUS NEWS EDITOR
If you’ve logged in to Learn@ UW recently, you may have noticed that each one of your classes is listed under the same software. Over the past 18 months, UW-Madison has been working to transition from using three learning management systems — Desire2Learn, Moodle and Canvas — to just one, Canvas, by June 1. According to Brian Rust, communications director for the Department of Information and Technology, using a single software will create “consistency and
familiarity” for students and faculty, regardless of the variety of courses they either take or teach. This is beneficial, according to UW-Madison freshman Jai Khanna, who has the Canvas application on his phone. “Compared to any other application, Canvas is much better because it is on my phone as well,” he said. “I have all my courses handy, and I can check any of them whenever I want.” Rust also noted the open nature of Canvas and the ease with which the university can access student data on the software. While learning management
systems usually provide universities with student-performance metadata that they analyze to determine how to help students succeed in their courses, this information was not accessible on Desire2Learn. To solve this issue, UW-Madison helped found Unizin, a higher education association of universities — including nine Big Ten universities — who wanted to own and manage their own instruction software, according to Rust. Rust said the association
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Is the local economy growing? Check the sky. By Max Bayer CITY NEWS EDITOR
The Dane County Regional Airport had the most usage in its history in 2017. The more than 1.9 million passengers traversing the terminals marked the fourth consecutive year of growth. As of December 2017, Dane County’s unemployment rate was 1.9 percent, tied for the lowest in the state. To those who focus on southcentral Wisconsin’s economy, the airport is both a cause and effect of the region’s economic boom. “It kind of becomes a mutually reinforcing situation where as the airport expands its service opportunities, we likely have an opportunity to grow businesses within Madison and in turn as those businesses grow, they will drive more usage of the airport,” said Matt Mikolajewski,
GRAPHIC BY MAGGIE LIU
The airport’s recent growth has made it a vital piece of the local economy. Madison’s economic development director. “On many, many levels, we benefit from a very well-run airport,” he added. The way Madison and the surrounding area benefits is clear: A robust and well-maintained air-
port is an attraction to prospective companies, and local officials have invested accordingly. In the city’s official proposal for Amazon’s HQ2, Airport Director Bradley Livingston
airport page 3
Students are well aware of the stress of their classes. In one week, they might have three midterms, a group project and a 10-page paper due. But professors and other faculty face the same stressors as students. Professors, especially those on the tenure track, overwhelmingly report feeling professionally burnt out. Initial findings of an ongoing study on faculty at Boise State University released in 2014 found that many professors reported working an average of 61 hours per week with a large portion of the time not spent teaching, but doing administrative tasks such as corresponding with students and colleagues or over email and attending meetings. Noel Radomski, a director and associate researcher for the Wisconsin Center for the Advancement of
Postsecondary Education, said the hardest time for professors is the first few years. Research and grant writing are “front-loaded” into professor’s contracts. Later, however, they face an increase in their “required credits taught.” “[Universities] expect [new professors] to come in and write grants and write articles in the top journals both to publish in the best journals and to get as much research grants as possible,” Radomski said. The stress for most faculty comes from the ability to meet their three big requirements: research, teaching and university service in the form of committee work, Radomski said. Most assistant faculty have a mentor to guide them through the most stressful first few years. By that point, departments begin assessing whether an assistant professor has the
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UW-Madison program works to lessen shortage of rural mental health care By Luisa de Vogel ASSOCIATE NEWS EDITOR
When Rebecca Radue began her work providing psychiatry services in rural Wisconsin, she met patients who had previously driven from Green Bay to Wausau and back, just to receive psychiatric care. “There were people driving three hours north to see a psychiatrist,” Radue said. “That really stuck with me, so I wanted to train myself to work in a rural environment.” Radue is a resident in UW-Madison’s Rural Psychiatry Residency Program. The program is aimed at meeting the needs of psychiatric patients in the states most underserved regions. The Wisconsin Office of Rural Health identifies 48 of Wisconsin’s 72 counties as facing a “geography-based shortage” of mental health care providers. But Radue says the problem isn’t just the lack of mental health resources in rural counties. Psychiatrists are often under-prepared to meet the unique needs of rural populations. Poverty in rural areas is different than in urban areas, and can have significant effects on patients’ physical and mental health, according to Radue. Mental health concerns
affect all populations, but in varied ways. Because most medical schools and psychiatry programs are located at major research universities in cities, residents are often trained to handle patients in an urban setting. UW-Madison’s rural psychiatry program aims to change that, giving residents the chance to rotate through different rural clinics across the state. Additionally, because graduates often choose to live near the university they were trained at, rural counties currently see a shortage in these services, according to Art Walaszek, director of Residency Training in the UW-Madison Department of Psychiatry. “Physicians in general and psychiatrists … tend to cluster in more urban areas,” Walaszek said. “There’s kind of a mismatch between where these providers are located and where these services are needed.” Recruiting psychiatrists to work in rural settings is also difficult because of the high cost of medical school and the promise of a higher salary in an urban setting. The Wisconsin Office of Rural Health helps encourage recent graduates to work in rural environments through funding for
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“…the great state University of Wisconsin should ever encourage that continual and fearless sifting and winnowing by which alone the truth can be found.”