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Category: Innovation

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

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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

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December 3, 2018 1 Comment

New Digital Universities

Last week Tony Bates, arguably the doyen of Canadian digital education, posted an intriguing little article called Why Canada Needs Five New Digital Universities on his blog at the Contact North website. Basically, Bates’ argument is that the future of learning is hybridized learning – that is a mix of face-to-face and online learning – though we don’t yet know exactly how best to mix those two to achieve best results for different learners at different levels in different subjects.  Not only

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November 19, 2018 1 Comment

The Return of Peter Nicholson

Peter Nicholson occupies a very odd place in Canadian policy circles.  There are not many people as smart as him who are as little known outside Ottawa as they are influential within the capital.  So, when he speaks it is always worth listening because you know the senior folks in Ottawa are doing so. Last week, Nicholson wrote a stem-winder of a piece for IRPP. You should read it in full, but let me give you the Coles notes version: Canada

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October 9, 2018 4 Comments

In Tech, We are All Maritimers

I got a bit of blowback for Friday’s blog criticizing that U of T/Brock piece on the alleged Brain Drain.  Nobody tried to argue that my critique of the methodology was wrong, but some argued that a) data on migration is always terrible and I was making the perfect the enemy of the good and b) I was ignoring the core truth that a lot of Canadian tech talent does head south and this makes things difficult for Canadian tech firms, and

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May 7, 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.

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