The World of Higher Education Podcast Listen now →

The World of Higher Education Podcast Listen now →

Tag: Technology

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

Read More »
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

Read More »
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

Read More »
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

Read More »
December 5, 2018 1 Comment

Skills not Research

The Logic, a new subscription journalism outlet dedicated to Canadian innovation and tech policy, had a couple of great stories about a month ago that are worth highlighting simply to remember the general poverty of the standard U-15/Universities Canada line about higher education and economic growth.  (The articles are behind a paywall, so you’re going to have to trust me on what they say). The first article had a worrying headline, “Ottawa has a plan to build 10 tech companies

Read More »
December 3, 2018 1 Comment

One Thought to Start Your Day

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.

Subscribe

Search Posts

Search Publications

Social Media

Linkedin Youtube Spotify

Recent Posts

More thoughts on...