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Category: Academia

Risk (Reputation and Relationships)

When institutions talk about risk management, they primarily mean two things: operational risks (i.e. things which might prevent the institution from going about its usual business, which we’ll deal with tomorrow), and reputational risks.  This latter is not generally seen as relating to the actual quality of teaching and research (that has more to do with prestige, which we dealt with yesterday); rather, it has to do with “issues management” or worse, “crisis management”.  Risks to prestige are slow moving; risks

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April 17, 2018 4 Comments

Designing a University from Scratch (II)

Following on from yesterday’s discussion of the Minerva model (you might want to refresh your memory by re-reading yesterday’s entry, as detailed in the book Building the Intentional University: Minerva and the Future of Higher Education, I wanted to get into a bit more detail about whether the Minerva curriculum is a foretaste of things to come, a weird one-off, or an evolutionary dead-end. Short answer: I certainly hope Minerva represents a new trend in curricula, but I see one big

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April 5, 2018 No Comments

University Commons Divided

A couple of months ago I reviewed Christopher Newfield’s The Great Mistake and said it was a great book that was very much worth reading, despite the fact that I disagreed with its central premise.  Well, I have another one of those, and it’s Peter MacKinnon’s new book: University Commons Divided: Exploring Debate and Dissent on Campus. What MacKinnon – ex-President of the University of Saskatchewan (1999-2012) and Athabasca University (2014-2016)  – has produced is a truly marvellous re-cap of all the major

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March 16, 2018 No Comments

The Advance of Online Education in Canada

There was a time – six years or so ago now – when people were talking about the death of universities and the rise of MOOCs. (A collection of my previous posts on MOOCs can be found here).  Among the many, many things this debate obscured was the fact that education delivered online was almost as old as the internet itself. Online education was mature, not some newfangled idea (in the Silicon Valley version of history, everything not invented in

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January 31, 2018 4 Comments

Ideal Academic Workloads

So, I got a bit of mail last week in response to my analysis of the COU data (as I usually do whenever I’m presenting data on academic loads) to the effect that I am being overly reductionist about the teaching loads and perhaps implying that profs aren’t working hard.  Generally speaking, these comments come in two varieties and I will take the time to answer each of them. The first line of critique has to do with unit of

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January 30, 2018 5 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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