The World of Higher Education Podcast Listen now →

The World of Higher Education Podcast Listen now →

Category: Artificial Intelligence

Back to School 2026

Welcome back everyone. It’s the Tuesday after Labour Day, and that means it’s time to start Blog Year 16 (gulp) with a look ahead over the next ten months or so. I’m looking at three very big themes. Let’s start with the one big piece of news over the summer that has the potential to overwhelm pretty much everyone: the release of the Report on Campus Antisemitism and Student Experiences. It’s not the world’s most sophisticated piece of analysis –

Read More »
September 8, 2026 No Comments

Canada AI Strategy and Higher Education

Morning all. Today is a special blog to cover an important Ottawa policy development. Back in June, the Government of Canada released its National Artificial Intelligence Strategy, with the somewhat awkward subhead “AI for All”. Due to a packed blog schedule, I didn’t have time to really get to it. But now I can! So here goes: First, it’s not a real strategy, obviously. Ottawa-drafted strategies never are. Real strategies have a reasonably-well sketched out desired end-state and a theory

Read More »
August 20, 2026 No Comments

Some Notes on Artificial Intelligence in Higher Education, May 2026

Today is just a quick round-up of recent news and trends re: artificial intelligence in higher education – hopefully one which is a bit different from the everything-is-awesome/everything-is-terrible style of think pieces that you often see on this subject. Artificial intelligence is having significant impacts in fields like astronomy and molecular biology, and large language models quite unexpectedly seem to be capable of making significant contributions to mathematics. In other fields, AI does not eliminate any steps in the research

Read More »
May 27, 2026 No Comments

Overestimating in the Short Run

Nearly fifty years ago, California futurist Roy Amara coined a widely quoted adage on the subject of technological change. It says: “We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.” This is a quote very much worth keeping in mind when it comes to thinking about how higher education should react to the growth of artificial intelligence and, in particular, how we grapple with educating students for an

Read More »
May 26, 2026 No Comments

Lectures, Essays, Genies, and Bottles

A couple of weeks ago, the Times Higher Education printed a kind of farewell interview with the University of Waterloo’s outgoing President Vivek Goel. Like many THE interviews of this nature, it’s a bit of an odd duck, spending half the time explaining to a global audience who this person is and why they and their institution are important and leaving only a couple of hundred words for the subject to say anything useful about their own legacy and the future. But what Goel did say

Read More »
May 13, 2026 1 Comment
Load More

One Thought to Start Your Day

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.

Subscribe

Search Posts

Search Publications

Social Media

Linkedin Youtube Spotify

Recent Posts

More thoughts on...