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Category: Academia

An Open Letter to Provosts and Presidents

Le français suit l’anglais Good morning, everyone.  Today’s blog is a bit different from the usual format.  I am here to ask you all to participate in an act of radical self-interest. A few weeks ago, I suggested that the biggest problem Canadian universities would face this fall was working out how to deliver those big, ugly first-year classes online.  I also suggested that many of those big first year-courses cover similar topics (e.g. Microeconomics 100, Introduction to Physics, etc.) and

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April 30, 2020 4 Comments

Time to Talk Workloads

No one wants to be the first one to say it, so I will.  Regular academic workloads are going to have to be re-arranged for the Summer and Fall Terms.  In most cases drastically. This is simple math.  Providing quality teaching in the fall is going to require – in part – significantly smaller classes.  This will not only be true if the fall is fully online.  It will also be true if – as the currently fashionable musing has

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April 27, 2020 1 Comment

Coronavirus (16) – Shared Sacrifice

Lots of people are gaming out what post-Corona looks like economically.  Increasingly, we seem to have consensus that 2020 will be the worst year for the global economy since the early 1930s, with GDP drops for the year landing somewhere between 5-10%.  There is considerable debate about the speed of the bounce-back, with people talking about recoveries that V-shaped (i.e. quick), U-shaped (not so quick), or bathtub-shaped. We could be in this a long time: no one really knows the

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April 15, 2020 No Comments

Coronavirus (12) – A National Effort in Online Education

Today, I want to issue a challenge to all Canadian universities.  I think a lot of universities are going to be in significant trouble come September.  I know everyone is working hard to avoid this outcome but fixing what needs to be fixed for September is simply too big a job for individual institutions.  And so, I am going to argue that the only way forward is for institutions is to do something which does not come naturally to them,

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April 7, 2020 12 Comments

Working Hours

I was intrigued to read this story in the Times Higher Education about Dutch academics complaining about having to work “structural unpaid overtime” of 12-15 hours per week, which this report says is 36% above their regular paid hours.  One can infer that Dutch academics’ contracts actually stipulate they are to work a 35-hour week, which is quite a foreign concept in North America, where many “professional” jobs usually have no hours attached to them, our theory effectively being that if you are in one of

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January 29, 2020 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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