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Tag: Technology

Whales

One of the weirdest thing about Canadian tech policy (insofar as we have one) is the obsession with Canadian “champions”.   Whenever a promising company – say Verafin, or Element AI – gets sold to a foreign (mainly American) buyer, there is always much wailing and gnashing of teeth about Canada being “unable to compete”.    The idea seems to be that unless we have big behemoth players striding the globe, we are not a serious tech country.  It’s not entirely clear why competitiveness should

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January 6, 2021 3 Comments

The Follies of Technological Determinism

One of the most enraging things about people doing drive-by takes on higher education is their insistence on focussing on the “implications of technology” rather than looking at consumer demand.  This month’s example comes to us from the Research Department of the Royal Bank of Canada and their piece entitled The Future of Post-Secondary Education: On Campus, Online and In Demand. The piece is a little uneven, in the sense that it mixes grand pronouncements about the future of higher education

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June 11, 2020 No Comments

Where Are All the Job-Killing Robots?

It’s Davos time, when we get to find out what the world’s power elite would like everyone else to freak out about for the next twelve months.  What is happening this year?  The theme is “stakeholders for a cohesive and sustainable world”, and while my impression is that the emphasis will be on the latter (Greta Thunberg has already had a powerful headliner), I think cohesion will still get some attention.  And where cohesion is concerned, they’re going to be

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January 22, 2020 1 Comment

Time for a MOOC reckoning

Ah, MOOCs.  The decade’s most over-hyped higher education fad: indeed, possibly the most ludicrously over-hyped fad the sector has ever seen.  About three years ago, I chronicled the decline of MOOCs from the dizzying heights of 2012 onwards.  But in the last couple of weeks, there have been a few developments which suggest that the MOOC era may be well and truly dead. First up was the news that Arizona State University was letting its “Global Freshman Academy” wind down.  The Global Freshman

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October 10, 2019 4 Comments

LinkedIn and the Future of New Credentials

One of the many unrealized promises of the last decade or so has been the idea that the types of credentials available to student – micro-credentials, stacked credentials Coursera-style “specializations”, whatever – would proliferate.  Certainly, the world would probably be a better place if there more alternatives to diplomas, bachelor’s degrees and master’s degrees, but the problem is that for a new credential to gain traction, it must have a labour-market value (otherwise why would students pay money to obtain

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December 5, 2018 1 Comment
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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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