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Tag: Accreditation

Worst Higher Education Article of the Decade (So Far)

Stop the presses.  I have found the worst education article of the decade so far.  It is by Don & Alex Tapscott, and it is called The Blockchain Revolution and Higher Education. How dumb is it?  Solar-powered flashlight dumb.  Tripping over a cordless phone dumb. The problem is that because it’s Don Tapscott and he is – for reasons that are completely beyond me – treated as some kind of national gem, no one ever calls him on his deep wrongness

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March 21, 2017 2 Comments

Can Universities Judge Themselves?

One of the more difficult problems to unravel in the world of higher education is the fact that universities are responsible both for delivering teaching and judging whether or not a student has learned enough to get a degree.  To most reasonable minds, this is a conflict of interest.  Indeed, this is the conflict that makes universities unreformable: as long as universities have a monopoly on judging their own quality, no one external to the system (students, governments) can make realistic comparisons between

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February 9, 2016 6 Comments

Sessionals, Nursing Degrees, and the Meaning of University

Be forewarned: I am going to be very mean about universities today.  One thing the labour disputes in Ontario highlight is the amount of undergraduate teaching done by non-tenure track professors.  Numbers on this are hard to come by, and poorly defined when they are.  York sessionals claim to be teaching 42% of all undergraduate classes – but how do you define a class?  But from what I’ve gathered from talking to people across the province who are in a

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March 9, 2015 5 Comments

The Future of Transcripts

In theory, transcripts are a way to communicate a student or graduate’s academic achievement in higher education.  The problem is, they only really communicate achievements to other people in academia.  Outside academia, they’re fairly useless. They say nothing about the skills a student may or may not have acquired at school.  They say nothing about what extra-curricular activities a student has engaged in.  At best, they communicate the lists of classes that a student took (though without curricula, it’s difficult

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November 5, 2014 2 Comments

Coursera Continues to Confuse

The big news Monday was that Coursera, MOOC provider extraordinaire, had a bit of a re-shuffle at the top.  Founders Daphne Koller and Andre Ng, and erstwhile President Laila Ibrahim, were joined by former Yale President Rick Levin, who is now the company’s CEO.  This, needless to say, got everyone quite excited.  A Big Name Has Joined Coursera!  It must mean… well, what does it mean, exactly? Coursera is a company which – from a growth point-of-view – has two huge positives

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March 27, 2014 2 Comments

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One Thought to Start Your Day is our founder and CEO Alex Usher’s popular daily blog, brimming with up-to-the-minute insights and informed opinions on today’s higher education industry.

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