Author: Alex Usher

European University Alliances

For a long time, whatever came out of Europe in terms of big higher education ideas made waves overseas. The Bologna Process was widely imitated, or at least name-dropped as something that it would be good to do (I remember people talking about a Canadian Bologna Process, even though we were already a common higher education area). Erasmus, diploma supplements, the Tuning Process have all also have their moments in the sun. But, over the last four years, there has

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A Smart Paper on Access and Persistence

Last week Statistics Canada came out with a damn good paper on post-secondary access and persistence which I thought was worth highlighting. The paper is called Enrollment and Persistence in Postsecondary Education Among High School Graduates in British Columbia: A Focus on Special Needs Students, and it was written by Allison Leanage and Rubab Arim. It was made possible by linking together two databases: the Post-Secondary Student Information System (PSIS), which contains unit-record data on all post-secondary students in Canada

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Higher Education in China

One of the things we try to do on this show is introduce people to various higher education systems around the world and the various histories that shaped those systems. In doing so we have had some marvellous discussions: with Dr. Pushkar on India, Andrée Sursock on France, Marcelo Knobel in Brazil and Maria Yudkevich in Russia. But one major system we haven’t done yet is China. China is a hard country to a handle on. It’s massive, obviously. And its post-secondary education system

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Cité internationale universitaire de Paris

Nested between the Parc Monsouris and the Boulevard Péréphique, at the very southern end of the 14ieme arrondissement, lies the absolute apotheosis of one vision of international education. And that is the Cité Universitaire Internationale de Paris (CIUP). CIUP is not a university in and of itself. It is, rather, a set of student residences which serves universities and Grandes écoles and other institutions like Sciences Po across the entire city. The history is a little bit complicated because until

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Are We Lacking AI-mbition?

If you’ve been following the latest developments on artificial intelligence (AI) in recent months, you’ve probably seen that higher education institutions all around the world are more and more aggressively starting to incorporate GenAI into their ways of doing. We’ve all seen Arizona State University announce its partnership with OpenAI at the beginning of 2024. The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, on its end, has started to invite artificially generated ‘academics’ to teach to students in between lectures from real-life instructors, and

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