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Category: Artificial Intelligence

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

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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

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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

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May 13, 2026 1 Comment

Branch Campuses, Fake Research, and the Future of Indian Universities

India’s higher education sector is in a permanent state of flux. There’s constant friction between the federal government and the states, as well as ongoing rivalry between a centralized public system and a dynamic private one. In the background, there’s a society that is deeply unequal and riven with discrimination, especially on the basis of caste. And all of this is happening in a country which, despite healthy growth since the turn of the century, is still poor, and where

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April 2, 2026 No Comments

Zombie Universities and the Politics of Survival in South Korean Higher Education

South Korea has one of the world’s liveliest higher education policy scenes. For over a decade now, the country’s been dealing with the challenges of a declining youth population, and hence, declining student numbers. Yet at the same time, it’s continuing to invest heavily in knowledge and education from programs in artificial intelligence, to the upgrading of 10 major regional universities, while all the while seeking to offset population loss through the expansion of international student numbers. And all of

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March 26, 2026 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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