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Category: Innovation

If Canada Were Serious About Higher Education (Part 2)

If you missed yesterday’s blog, we’re spending the week talking about how to improve higher education in Canada by acting less complacently.  Now you’re up to speed. Onwards! Let’s start our discussion of higher education improvement at the top of the food chain: provincial governments (if, for some reason, you think the top of the food chain is the federal government, feel free to spend some time perusing the blog archives). Governments fund universities and colleges.  Apart from Ontario, they

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April 9, 2019 3 Comments

If Canada Were Serious About Higher Education (Part 1)

Canada is a vast and largely self-satisfied land.  And when it comes to higher education, we do pretty well.  Depending on the measure of access one chooses, we’re either above average or top of the pack.  We have the biggest and best-funded college system in the world, one which is highly regarded for its innovativeness.  On research, we punch at or above our weight.  Our faculty – the full-time ones, anyway – are the best-paid of any in the world

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April 8, 2019 3 Comments

It’s Quiet Out There…Too Quiet

Whatever happened to good old-fashioned fads?  Great big, often stupid, enthusiasms about things that were going to change higher education completely.  Seems like we don’t hear about them anymore. Remember MOOCs?  They were going create tsunamis of change.  Many people said a lot of incredulous things about MOOCS and higher education, maybe none more so than Trent University’s Chancellor, Don Tapscott.  (Remember this gem of futurology, about the week “higher education as we know it “ended”?  Maybe not as bad

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April 1, 2019 1 Comment

Building a Nation of Innovators

OK, so I was going to share with you some interesting research from Europe and elsewhere on Individual Learning Accounts, which everyone in Ottawa seems to think are going to be A Big Deal in the upcoming budget. However, that will have to wait because yesterday the Innovation Minister, Navdeep Bains, speaking yesterday to what was no doubt a packed room at the CD Howe Institute in the middle of a full-on Toronto white-out, released a fantastic new piece of

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February 13, 2019 1 Comment

British Innovation Lessons

I’ve been reading David Edgerton’s new book The Rise and Fall of the British Nation, which presents a bracingly contrarian view of Britain’s 20th Century.  It is, I think, particularly intriguing concerning whether the British left actually more nationalist than socialist (a question which I think might also be usefully asked of Canada’s own left).  In the middle of the book, it presents some fascinating information on the mid-century role of science and innovation in the British economy and suggests

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January 30, 2019 1 Comment

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.

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