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Category: Innovation

The AI Challenge is Coming into Focus

Morning all. I have some thoughts today on how AI is likely to affect teaching and assessment in higher education. A few weeks ago, I was at an event hosted by RBC, which was kind of a fireside chat with Anthropic’s Head of North American Government Affairs, Brian Peters. This was shortly after Anthropic released this think piece on AI and economic growth that asked people to contemplate the prospect of 15% annual GDP growth thanks to the miracle of

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October 19, 2026 No Comments

Why Ottawa Can’t Do the Knowledge Economy

I have read two very interesting things in the past couple of weeks. One is Justin Ling’s excellent piece in the Toronto Star about the inner workings of the Carney PMO and what the government thinks it’s accomplishing (tl;dr: as efficient and business-like as the new PMO is, it isn’t actually trying to fix what’s broken in Ottawa because it often doesn’t know what the actual problem is). And the second is Jeffrey Ding’s excellent new book Technology and the

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October 7, 2026 No Comments

Lampedusianism at the University of Waterloo

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about a finance and governance experiment at Concordia. Today I want to talk about one that caught some headlines over the summer; namely, the re-organization of the Faculty of Arts at the University of Waterloo. The full details of the re-organization can be found here, but the basics of it are that where the Faculty used to have fifteen departments and two “schools”, it will now just have six schools. That sounds like a

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October 6, 2026 1 Comment

Concordia’s Quiet Revolution

Okay, so Canadian higher education is pretty cautious and risk-averse, and so perhaps the bar for calling something a ‘revolution” is pretty low. But everyone needs to take a look at what has been going on at Concordia this year, because if what has been happening there were to spread widely, I think you genuinely could call it a revolution. It’s big, bold, and has the potential to alter for the better some of the basic underpinnings of universities’ financial models. Concordia

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September 23, 2026 2 Comments

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 –

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September 8, 2026 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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