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Category: Government

Non-existent Preconditions for DARPA Success

The federal government is taking its sweet time being sworn in (apparently the GG is on holiday in Germany or something), so it’ll be another week or so before we get new ministers and new mandate letters.  These letters set ministers’ priorities in a more formal way than manifesto commitments.  My absolute dearest wish, when it comes to Science and Innovation, is that these letters should read “you should take our mandate commitments seriously but not literally”.  That is, the

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October 13, 2021 1 Comment

Fall 2021: Stop Fooling Around

On Tuesday, TV Ontario’s estimable COVID pundit John Michael McGrath – the one who back in February absolutely eviscerated the Ontario government with its own data on how the February re-opening was going to cause a third wave – wrote another wonderful piece on the subject.  But this one was not a pessimistic piece; rather it made a measured and sober case for optimism about this summer and, by implication, the fall.  I am going to quote the start of it because it is

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May 20, 2021 4 Comments

All Hands on Deck

Alberta wasn’t the only province to release a report on post-secondary education last Thursday.  Out in St. John’s, the three commissioners of the Independent Review of the Post-Secondary Education System in Newfoundland and Labrador finally, after much delay, published its report, pithily entitled All Hands on Deck.   Just to give you a rundown on the province before we get into the report: Newfoundland and Labrador has two multi-campus institutions, Memorial University of Newfoundland (MUN for short) and the College of the

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May 4, 2021 No Comments

That Alberta PSE Strategy (Finally)

Last Thursday, the Government of Alberta finally released the long-awaited Alberta 2030: Building Skills for Jobs strategy, optimistically subtitled “a 10-year strategy for post-secondary education”.   So, after all the hullaballoo of the last year or so, what does it all mean for the province’s universities and colleges? Let’s get the process stuff out of the way first.   The province did kind of publish some of the background research McKinsey did for $3.5M.  It’s incorporated in this 217-page power point (no, I am not kidding).  Conceivably, this

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May 3, 2021 1 Comment

Micro-credentials in Ontario

The word “micro-credential”, precisely because remains relatively undefined, is absolute catnip to politicians.  It’s tabula rasa: you can tell politicians the word means damn near anything and not only will they believe you, but no one can contradict you because no one can contradict you.  Here is a list of things at least one provincial education minister/ministry appears to believe about micro-credentials. In other words, nearly everything about micro-credentials is down to design details rather than being automatic properties.  But this

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April 28, 2021 1 Comment

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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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