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Do You Get an Allowance?

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Do You Get an Allowance?

Find all our Student Opinion questions here.

Do you get an allowance? Do you have to do household chores in exchange for the money? In general, how much do your parents or caregivers talk to you about money and how to manage it?

In “Average Weekly Allowance? It’s $30, a New Survey Finds,” Ann Carrns writes:

If you think an allowance is a dollar bill or two handed to your child each week, think again.

Two-thirds of parents give their child an allowance, and the average weekly amount is $30, according to a survey published this week by the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants. That’s up from $17 in 2016, the group said.

Many children aren’t simply getting a handout, though. Four in five parents who give an allowance said they expected their offspring to work for the money — about five hours a week of household chores, on average.

Children whose allowance is based on their completion of chores earn an average of about $6 an hour, an increase of 38 percent from three years ago. Over the same period, the average hourly pay rate for all Americans rose 10.5 percent, the institute said, using federal labor statistics. (The group said it could not explain why the amount had increased, because the survey didn’t ask parents about that.)

Three-quarters of adults surveyed said the main reason for giving an allowance was to teach the value of money and financial responsibility. But just 3 percent said their child mainly put the money aside for savings, a proportion the institute deemed “alarmingly” low. Most said their children spent the money on things like outings with friends, digital devices and entertainment, or toys.

Students, read the entire article, then tell us:

  • If you get an allowance, is it close to $30 a week? What, if anything, are you expected to do in exchange for the money you get?

  • What do you tend to spend your money on? Do you save any of it? Do you donate any? How do you decide?

  • To what extent have your parents or caregivers tried to teach you the value of money and financial responsibility? What lessons have you learned from them or from your own experiences with earning, spending and saving that have been especially memorable? Why?

  • Do you think giving children an allowance is a good idea? How do you think you might handle allowances for your own children if you have them someday? Why?

Students 13 and older are invited to comment. All comments are moderated by the Learning Network staff, but please keep in mind that once your comment is accepted, it will be made public.

Study in the fast lane

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Study in the fast lane

Darren is a young man to watch out for – he’s 20 years old, intelligent, and immensely driven. His dream is to become signed to a record label, and he wants to start pursuing it now. With skills in singing, piano, guitar and saxophone, Darren’s got the artistry behind him, but it’s the marketing skills he’s building through work and uni, that will ensure he stands out from the crowd.

After leaving high school, Darren wasn’t sure where to turn. “I was having a bit of difficulty deciding which degree I wanted to do” he says, eventually deciding to study a Bachelor of Arts and Commerce double degree, on campus at Curtin University. When it finally clicked as to what career to chase, Darren felt the urge to move faster through study and into the real world. “I wanted to get into the workforce, to make a name for myself,” he says.

Darren against door

After talking to a careers counsellor at Curtin, Darren discovered he was able to fast-track his degree. He had only 4 timetabled subjects per semester, but he was able to study extra subjects online through Open Universities Australia (OUA), and have them credited towards his on-campus degree.

Not only could he study online in his own time, but Darren was able to choose subjects from outside of Curtin University – he studied subjects from Griffith, Swinburne and Macquarie universities too.

“Last semester I did 8 units instead of 4. The one before that I did 6 units, and then during the summer and winter I do 2 on average,” Darren recalls.

Loading up on more subjects means that Darren is due to graduate a year earlier.

Darren on computer at work

In moving faster through his degree, Darren was able to start a business internship sooner, as part of his studies. He teamed up with a digital marketing agency called Social Appeal, which provides full marketing services, mainly to small businesses in the Perth area.

After interning for 100 hours, Darren was offered a full-time position before graduating from his degree.

“I was such a great opportunity to get my foot in the door, and to get started right away while I’m concurrently studying my degree,” Darren says.

Darren now has a solid grasp on digital marketing, gained through his work, and hopes to continue using these skills in his pursuit of a music career. Getting noticed can often depend on knowing how to market yourself, so Darren feels that he’s gaining the right skill-set.

“[My degree] will really help in producing a good foundation to launch off, and to achieve those goals.”

Get the right skills for the job – quick smart!

Short on time, but in need of a broader skill set? Through OUA, you can study at your own pace, whether you want to study fully online, or supplement your on-campus study with online subjects. You don’t have to stick to one uni – you’re free to pick subjects across a range of leading Australian universities.

To learn more about how to study through OUA – fill out the form on this page, and a friendly student advisor will get in contact. You can also chat to them on Messenger, What’s App, or SMS.  They’ll help you find the right course your future.

Still exploring? Head over to our website to browse hundreds of degrees and subjects from leading Australian universities.

Related courses:

Bachelor of Arts – Macquarie

Bachelor of Communication – UniSA

Bachelor of Business – Swinburne

Master of Business Administration (MBA) – RMIT

Master of Marketing – Curtin

Get ahead with soft skills

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Get ahead with soft skills

This week is learning at work week in the UK. But making sure you have the right professional skills is important wherever you’re based. So how good are your soft skills?

These aren’t the specialist skills required in your role that you might already have (for example coding or writing) these are skills that are often missed by most of the working population. Despite the fact that employers are looking for them.

What are soft skills?

‘Soft’ skills, sometimes known as ‘transferable skills’, can be quite hard to define. But generally soft skills refers to a group of skills that help you work successfully with other people. Common examples of soft skills are communication, leadership and collaboration.

They are usually contrasted with ‘hard’ skills which are more technical skills, like knowing how to wire a plug, write code or drive a car.

Why are they important?

For two reasons. The first is that you need hard AND soft skills to succeed. Let’s use the example of writing code. Imagine you’re hired as a programmer. You’ve built a web page, but when you show your team the page they don’t seem to understand it and when you explain  your language is confusing and you forget things. They choose to remove the page. With better communication skills you could have helped your team understand, with collaboration skills they would have already been on board with your project.

In a globalised world you might end up working with a huge range of people, being able to communicate and work with them is vital.

The second reason is a changing job market. The advance of automation means that soon machines might well be capable of more and more technical or ‘hard’ skills. But we still can’t teach a computer how to collaborate or show leadership – having soft skills like being able to negotiate well or motivate others means even in a digital world you can add value to a company.

How can you improve your soft skills?

We’re here to help. So far over 300,000 learners have joined our most popular ‘soft skills’ courses. To make it easy we’ve grouped them together, along with some extra information about soft skills, so you can easily find which skill you want to improve.

We’re also going to be sharing more advice this week about how we’re improving our soft skills at FutureLearn, so keep an eye out!

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New LGBTQ+ Courses: Free, High-Quality Resources for Allyship and Awareness

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New LGBTQ+ Courses: Free, High-Quality Resources for Allyship and Awareness

By Kyle Shiells, Data Science Manager & Queersera Co-Lead

Queersera, Coursera’s LGBTQ+ employee resource group, celebrated its fourth anniversary at San Francisco Pride in June of this year. In the last four years, we’ve had the opportunity to not just march in Pride parades, but also host community events for Coursera employees, connect our team to volunteer opportunities with the broader LGBTQ+ community, and advise Coursera’s product and people teams on how to support LGBTQ+ people at Coursera and around the world.  

I signed up to co-lead Queersera because I wanted to make sure that as Coursera grows, we work to increase access to informative and affirming content for queer people and allies around the world.

Earlier this year, we invited our partner universities to create new, affirming content and allyship resources for LGBTQ+ people and communities. Thanks to the dedication of Coursera’s partners and their course teams, we now have more courses specifically designed to help allies understand and support LGBTQ+ students, patients, and the broader transgender community. 

From parents to doctors, to educators and friends, each course has been developed to offer practical advice and real life stories that can empower anyone, anywhere to create more inclusive environments at work, at home, and at school. 

We encourage you to explore and enroll to learn something new. Together with our partners, we’re proud to make these courses available to the world for free*:  

Explore LGBTQ+ History

Get a better understanding of the history of Pride in the United States, while diving deeper into sub-themes of representation, community, and space. 

This course is for anyone interested in learning more about queer and transgender people, or about key issues in LGBTQ+ inclusion. 

Uncover the cultural, historical, and medical overview of the history of AIDS, including the economic, social, and political factors that determine who gets sick and who remains healthy.

Build Your Awareness

Take this Gender 101 course to better understand the nuances of gender, as well as resources for supporting gender non-conforming children in healthcare and school settings.

Hear transgender people discuss their life experiences with modules focused on issues like bathroom rights, access to healthcare, employment and housing discrimination, and military service. 

Explore how gender and sexuality are constructed in societies and how they are reflected in cultural media in this Spanish language course. 

Be an Ally 

Uncover insights and strategies for building an inclusive learning environment for LGBTQ+ students in this Specialization designed for educators. 

Build an understanding for why it’s important for doctors to learn about treating transgender patients and uncover resources for supporting transgender patients in primary care with lessons that cover everything from how to administer hormone therapy to an overview of the various surgeries transgender patients may want to undergo.

In this short course built for medical providers and patients, get an overview of pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP), which is used for preventing new HIV infections. Learn who can benefit from PrEP, how to access services, what to expect, and how to stick with a PrEP program long-term.

Identify strategies for improving inclusion in your workplace and walk away with resources and checklists that you can use to develop an inclusion policy at your organization.

 

*Take a Queer Studies course on Coursera for free. Brought to you by Queersera, Coursera’s LGBTQ+ employee resource group. Discount will be applied at checkout after choosing a course from this promotion page. Offer valid until 12/31/19.

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Word + Quiz: insouciance

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Word + Quiz: insouciance

: a cheerful lack of concern

_________

The word insouciance has appeared in 30 articles on NYTimes.com in the past year, including on May 23 in “The Cannes Red Carpet Is So Much Better Than the Met Gala or the Oscars” by Vanessa Friedman:

In the wake of what seems like an increasingly calculated Met Gala and boringly serious Oscars (except for the men), this defining quality is starting to seem lost. The deals have taken the fun out of dressing, which is ironic, because fun is why we watched in the first place, and the watching is why the deals began to be made. This year, Cannes brought it back.

It’s about time.

So there was Charlotte Gainsbourg, in short, zebra-striped Saint Laurent, thrown on with the insouciance of a T-shirt: Yeah, I’m dressed up, but whatever! It’s sunny. Here was Helen Mirren, going old-school glam in pink and gold Elie Saab — and matching pink hair. There was Dakota Fanning in an utterly stripped-down Armani ball gown; here was Julianne Moore in a slither of silver Givenchy armor, capped by a fluttering rose cape.

_________

Compassion in Action: Humanizing Politics and Inspiring Global Change

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Compassion in Action: Humanizing Politics and Inspiring Global Change

I invite students to reflect on their own levels of self-compassion, and then debate the merits of the advice: “Before you can help others, you must first help yourself.” They usually come to the consensus that humans project their pain onto others and that this reflective work is key to imagining a holistic inner-outer peace while facilitating mutual understanding across cultural divides.

For homework, I ask students to put self-compassion into action by choosing or adapting one of the exercises from this article. It details some ways to improve your self-compassion skills, such as keeping a journal, imagining how you would treat a friend in need and learning how to comfort yourself when you’re suffering.

From compassion for the self, we move to the next level of analysis: compassion for a neighbor, or, in this case, a classmate, by playing “The Kindness Game.”

For this activity, I randomly provide each of my students an envelope that contains a slip of paper with the name of one of their classmates. I then give them the following instructions: “You have 48 hours, if you choose to participate, to perform an act of care for the person listed on your piece of paper.” I remind them that, like in the real world, inaction is a political statement. So, if they choose not to participate, their grades will not be affected as long as they explain their reasoning for doing so.

The simulation has profound implications. Students discover that both action and inaction are contagious. For example, when an influential member of the class chooses not to participate, others follow. However, when a student raises the bar by their compassionate act — like one student who produced a video capturing the reasons their classmate is an asset to their community — the thoughtfulness of the other deeds increases.

Students also begin to distinguish pity, sympathy, empathy and compassion. They realize that there is a distinction between, say, being polite and actually making someone feel seen and heard. This is when I introduce the “Spectrum of Empathy” graph from the Nielsen Norman Group. In “Sympathy vs. Empathy in UX,” Sarah Gibbons explains:

There is no firm threshold that marks one’s transition from sympathy to empathy. Rather, the relation between the two is best represented on a spectrum with pity (the most disconnected and abstracted version of sympathy) on one end and compassion (the more connected and embodied version of empathy) on the other.

As we examine the graph, we discuss how higher levels of effort, understanding and engagement are key facets of compassionate action.

A Place of Solace

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A Place of Solace

Where do you go when you need to get away from it all?

For one writer, it is a local garden, but your spot could be anywhere that makes you feel calm and happy, whether the beach, a friend or relative’s house, a park or just your living room couch.

Why do you think being in that place makes you feel so good?

Tell us in the comments, then read the related essay about a place where one writer can feel her “soul unfurl.”

Find many more ways to use our Picture Prompt feature in this lesson plan. You can find all our Picture Prompts in this column.

Why Is It Important for People With Different Political Beliefs to Talk to Each Other?

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Why Is It Important for People With Different Political Beliefs to Talk to Each Other?

Find all our Student Opinion questions here.

Would you want to spend a few days sitting down with people and talking about issues that are important to voters in the United States? What if the people came from all corners of the political spectrum?

How do you think the conversations would go? How do you think you would handle yourself in talking with someone with whom you vehemently disagree? Why?

In “These 526 Voters Represent All of America. And They Spent a Weekend Together,” Emily Badger and Kevin Quealy write about the event called “America in One Room”:

GRAPEVINE, TEX. — The voters arrived from all over the country: nine of them named John, 10 who’d come from mobile homes, four who lived in South Dakota. Twenty-seven considered themselves extremely conservative; 30 said they were extremely liberal. Twenty-one were out of work and looking for it. Two came with service dogs. At least one did not tell her parents she was coming here, because talking politics is so hard at home that she didn’t want to admit she was flying to Texas to talk politics with people she didn’t know.

These voters — 526 total, representative of Americans who are registered to vote — were invited to spend a weekend in a resort outside Dallas to prove that there might be a better way to disagree. And, as the furor in Washington was just beginning to build over the possible impeachment of the president, Donald Trump’s name barely came up.

As they arrived, and in breaks between their discussions, The New York Times took a portrait of nearly every one of them. Collectively, their faces are a reflection of all American voters.

Put a diverse group of people in a room, the political scientists James Fishkin and Larry Diamond argue, and they’re likely to mute their harshest views and wrestle more deeply with rebuttals. They become more informed, even more empathetic. And in this setting, the political scientists say, pollsters can get a picture of what people believe when they’re not just relying on sound bites and tribal cues.

The article goes on:

Over four days, mostly in small groups, they debated foreign policy, health care, immigration, the economy and the environment. They talked through policy proposals in a 55-page briefing booklet that made little mention of whom the proposals came from. Partisan trigger words — Democrats, Republicans, progressives, conservatives — were, by design, largely missing from the text.

Often, the language voters used was personal rather than political.

“You have to learn to listen to them,” Mr. Fishkin said. “They don’t talk the way policy wonks talk about an issue. They bring their life experience, their observations. But they’re making arguments when they tell a story.”

In the end, most participants said they did not change their minds about the political issues discussed, but some shared insights about what they learned:

“I did not change my mind about anything,” James Mowrey, a 33-year-old microbiologist from Lincoln, Neb., said during the first full day of discussion. But he thought he understood better why some people feel a moral obligation to resettle refugees.

“I’m sorry, I’m too pigheaded; they didn’t convince me,” said Susan Bosco, a 76-year-old from Democratic-leaning Northern Virginia, who said that in her daily life she rarely encountered people as conservative as those she had met here. “I don’t think the purpose of this conference was to change people’s minds. I think the purpose of this conference was to get people to accept each other’s points of view in a civil manner.”

“I may not have changed my position,” said Bonnie Sumner, 74, from Woodland Park, Colo. “But I’ve changed my understanding of the woman in the group who said, ‘You know what, I had great health care, it worked for me, and the Affordable Care Act changed things, and I’m worse off now.’ I didn’t change my position that I think we should take the A.C.A. and tweak it. But I’ve changed my understanding that there are people who’ve tried their best and done nothing wrong, and it put them in a worse situation.”

Students, read the entire article, then tell us:

  • Why is it important for people with different political beliefs to talk with one another? What can we learn by interacting with people who have completely different life experiences than we do?

  • What do you think might be the danger if Americans don’t interact with people who have different political beliefs — if they only talk and listen to people who share the same viewpoint?

  • Have you ever experienced a conversation with someone that helped you gain a new perspective on an issue? Please share.

  • Would you characterize “America in One Room” as a success? Do you think it was a worthwhile experiment? Why?

  • Do you think attendees’ subsequent conversations about politics will be affected by attending the event? Why?

  • Would you like to participate in an event like “America in One Room”? Why? Do you think this model could be expanded to involve more people around the country — perhaps hundreds of thousands or millions?

How Much Do You Know About the Czech Republic?

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How Much Do You Know About the Czech Republic?

Can you find the Czech Republic on a map? What else do you know about this Central European nation with about 10.7 million people?

University of Glasgow Set to Launch Online Master’s in End of Life Studies on FutureLearn

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University of Glasgow Set to Launch Online Master’s in End of Life Studies on FutureLearn


University of Glasgow — Dumfries Rural Campus

The University of Glasgow has announced that it will be launching an online master’s degree in end of life studies on FutureLearn, the leading European MOOC platform.

The degree is currently in development and is set to receive its first student cohort in September 2020. A three-week taster course, End of Life Care: Challenges and Innovation, is already open for registration with the class formally starting in November 2019.

The University of Glasgow is one of Scotland’s four ancient universities and a top-100 institution according to THE and QS world university rankings 2020.

The University of Glasgow was one of the first institutions to partner with FutureLearn. They launched their first MOOC on the platform, Cancer in the 21st Century, in May 2014 — nine months after FutureLearn’s first MOOC went live. Today, they offer about 20 online courses on the platform.

Recently, the university announced that later this year, they will also start offering MOOCs on Coursera. Besides partnering with MOOC providers, the University of Glasgow itself delivers close to 25 online qualifications, ranging from graduate certificates to full degrees. However, their upcoming online master’s degree on FutureLearn will be their first foray into the world of MOOC-based online degrees.

When asked about what prompted them to partner with FutureLearn, John Kerr, Learning Innovation Officer and MOOC Manager at the University of Glasgow, explained that they recognized an opportunity to reach more learners while offering a compelling learning experience. He added that unlike programs that are simply online versions of on-campus experiences, the upcoming degree is being “built from scratch for the web,” allowing to integrate innovative pedagogies that wouldn’t be available through a traditional mode of delivery.

The degree is being developed by the Glasgow End of Life Studies Group. The research group was founded in 2014 by Prof. David Clark and operates from the University of Glasgow’s rural campus in Dumfries, some 80 miles south of Glasgow.

“Every week, over one million people die worldwide,” explains Prof. Clark in a call with Class Central. And that number is expected to almost double in the next 40 years. So how we view death and how we care for people approaching the end of their lives is becoming an increasingly pressing issue.

The degree aims to present a comprehensive, interdisciplinary, and unadulterated view of the delicate subject that is death. It will explore topics including palliative care, bereavement, and assisted suicide. It will approach these topics through disciplines such as medicine, social sciences, and humanities. And it will consider them through the lenses of ethics, policy, and culture.

The curriculum draws from the group’s ongoing research, most notably from its Global Interventions at the End of Life Project — an all-encompassing, five-year study of the challenges related to end of life across the globe. By rooting the degree in their research, the group hopes to offer a genuine and compelling learning experience that will attract learners from all walks of life, including researchers, clinicians, and activists.

The degree will balance theoretical concepts and empirical knowledge and will invite students to engage in research activities. The goal is to establish a two-way street where students benefit from exploring ongoing research, but where said research is also enriched by the students’ perspectives.

In addition to the online master’s degree, the University of Glasgow will launch two other qualifications in end of life studies on FutureLearn:

  • A Graduate Certificate — which corresponds to 1/3 of the master’s degree.
  • A Graduate Diploma — which corresponds to 2/3 of the master’s degree.

These qualifications will be stackable, meaning that they can serve as stepping stones toward the full master’s degree. FutureLearn’s online master’s are often structure this way.

The university is also developing a three-week taster course: End of Life Care: Challenges and Innovation. The course is free to audit for five weeks. It allows prospective students to tentatively explore the subject without having to commit to a full-fledged, paid qualification. The first session of the course will start on November 18, 2019, but registrations are already open.

Finally, students will be able to transfer from the online degree program to an on-campus degree program at the University of Glasgow. John Kerr explains the process:

“[Online] learners will be party to the same rules and regulations as all University of Glasgow learners […] We will allow internal credit transfer if they wish to move from this program to another master’s. Any transfer of credit will [require] that the intended learning outcomes are of a compatible nature.” 

The degree admission requirements haven’t been announced yet. However, all online master’s degrees currently offered by the University of Glasgow require a bachelor’s degree in a related subject as well as English proficiency scores for international applicants. Sometimes, relevant professional experience may be given consideration. The upcoming online master’s degree on FutureLearn will likely involve similar entry requirements.

Note that admissions will initially be limited to ensure adequate levels of student support. In subsequent cohorts, as the number of instructors required to support students becomes clearer, the program will be able to scale to accept more qualified applicants. Throughout their degree, students will be helped by a team including lead instructors (Professors, Lecturers) and teaching assistants (Doctoral Students).

The degree cost hasn’t been announced either. However, all online master’s currently offered by the University of Glasgow cost between £10,500 ($13,000) and £15,000 ($18,500). How FutureLearn’s involvement may impact the cost of the new degree is unclear. Time will tell.

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