The World of Higher Education Podcast Listen now →

The World of Higher Education Podcast Listen now →

Category: Innovation

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

Read More »
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

Read More »
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

Read More »
January 30, 2019 1 Comment

The Future of the Master’s Degree

Go back a few years and all the “in” talk among higher education fad merchants was how online education was going to disrupt universities, put 9/10ths of them out of business, yadda yadda.  It was all nonsense of course – most of the predictions were predicated on the idea that undergraduates were prepared to forego a primarily social experience in favour of a mostly solitary, online experience.  This was always palpable nonsense peddled by people who seemed to think that

Read More »
January 8, 2019 1 Comment

Skills not Research

The Logic, a new subscription journalism outlet dedicated to Canadian innovation and tech policy, had a couple of great stories about a month ago that are worth highlighting simply to remember the general poverty of the standard U-15/Universities Canada line about higher education and economic growth.  (The articles are behind a paywall, so you’re going to have to trust me on what they say). The first article had a worrying headline, “Ottawa has a plan to build 10 tech companies

Read More »
December 3, 2018 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.

Subscribe

Search Posts

Search Publications

Social Media

Linkedin Youtube Spotify

Recent Posts

More thoughts on...