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Category: Academia

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

Ant Colonies and the Art of Managing Universities

One of the problems in being a university manager is this assumption that being in charge of all or part of an organization means you actually have some control over what goes on inside it.  But this is not, in fact, true, or at least not in the way that anyone outside academia would understand the word “control”.  This is because individual universities are basically ants.  Individual biological entities?  Certainly.  But more importantly, they are part of a larger colony

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October 1, 2019 3 Comments

Sagas and Plots

Late last year I wrote about Burton Clark and the notion of “organizational sagas”; that is, the stories people in organizations…

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September 20, 2019 3 Comments

Servant Universities

A couple of days ago I discussed the choice Canadian institutions had between pursuing an international student market and serving local communities.  I am sure this remark will have been denounced as a false choice by many – and to be fair, it isn’t a perfect binary – so I thought I would expand on that thought. The notion of institutions “serving” their communities is, in some ways, a comparatively recent one.  The medieval universities “served” their communities by attracting students and

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August 29, 2019 No Comments

Private Capital in Higher Education (Part II)

To really understand universities, you need to understand their cost structure.  And to understand their cost structure, you need to understand that unlike businesses, they keep score not by profits but by prestige, and that prestige – to the extent it does not derive from events and successes in the long-ago past – is, to a considerable extent, driven by total expenditures.  Thus, to “succeed” institutions must spend as much as possible.  This leads to what is known as the

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June 19, 2019 No 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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