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Category: Academia

Stacking and Micro-credentials

Just a short one today, on micro-credentials. In theory, micro-credentials can serve one of two purposes.  One is that they can be used as bespoke workforce-oriented training to fill very specific/niche labour market ends; the other is that they can be used – like credits – to stack towards large credentials such as diplomas, master’s degrees, and others.  If you draw up the policy framework for micro-credentials in the right way, they can achieve either or both of these goals

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November 16, 2022 3 Comments

Visible Minority Students and Professorial Time Use

Unfortunately, I’m not here to announce that Canada has overtaken Nigeria or Burkina Faso for the time it takes to release national-level enrolment data (we still lag, sadly).  But the only national statistical agency we have has still managed to put out a couple of interesting pieces of interest to higher education over the last few months.  Together they make a neat little post. Let’s start with the Profile of Canadian graduates at the bachelor level belonging to a group

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October 4, 2022 No Comments

Viewpoint Diversity

Last week, the MacDonald-Laurier Institute released a truly bad paper on “viewpoint diversity” at Canadian Universities.  How bad was it, you ask?  Really bad.  Icelandic rotting shark bad.  Crystal Pepsi bad.  Final Season of Game of Thrones bad.  The basic thrust of the paper, co-written by Christopher Dummitt and Zachary Patterson, is that The Canadian professoriate is well to the left of the Canadian public Within the academy, those who describe themselves as being on the right are much more

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September 22, 2022 2 Comments

Institutional Strategic Plans: Control v. Vision

Here are a couple of quick thoughts on institutional strategic plans and how they tend to fall into two big categories. Most institutions typically prefer plans that are about control.  That is, they want the plans to focus people’s agendas within an organization on a few key goals.  Sometimes these plans take the form of task-lists; other times they are focussed on a few institution-wide goals, complete with metrics (not surprisingly, these are the kinds of plans that the big

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April 19, 2022 1 Comment

La loi 32

Come.  Let us speak together, honestly, about Loi 32, An Act Respecting Academic Freedom in the University Sector in Quebec.  Because it sets a new standard both in government interference in universities and in all-around sheer holy-crap-this-is-what-public-policy-is being-reduced to. If you read the law itself – and please do so, it’s short and only takes a minute or so –  you’ll see that for the most part it is pretty bland.  The meat of it, in articles 4 and 5,

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April 13, 2022 2 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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