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Category: Innovation

Re-purposing Periodic Reviews

One of the things that drives me quite spare about higher education is the insistence that campus-wide pedagogical change is impossible, because of academic freedom or something like that. The result is that institutions cannot take serious collective steps with respect to pedagogical change, be it finding ways to increase Indigenous content, come up with coherent ways of adopting hybrid or incorporating AI in the classroom, etc. because every prof reigns over an independent kingdom of one and the number

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April 29, 2025 1 Comment

Innovation Without Borders: Galileo’s Networked Approach to Better Higher Education System

One of the biggest, but least remarked upon trends in European higher education in recent years is the growth of private for-profit, higher education. Even in countries where tuition is free, there are hundreds of thousands of students who now prefer to take courses at private for-profit institutions. To me, the question is, why? What sort of institutions are these anyway? Interestingly, the answer to that second question is one which might confuse my mostly North American audience. Turns out

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April 17, 2025 No Comments

“Anything Can Be Done With Anything”: Innovative Universities with Dara Melnyk

There’s an old joke about innovation in higher education.  It goes like this:  How many universities does it take to screw in a lightbulb.  Change?  Maybe that’s a bit unfair, but it’s unquestionable that the sector isn’t famed for welcoming change, in particular radical change.  One particular aspect is what is called isomorphism – the tendency of all institutions to look the same because they are copying some “ideal” model university (think Harvard or Oxford); indeed, that institutions which don’t copy the model

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April 3, 2025 1 Comment

Nobody is Coming to Save Us, But…

You may have heard me say once or twice that “nobody is coming to save us.” I’ve been told that this has become something of a catchphrase in Canadian universities over the past year, so much so that I kind of wish we’d done merch with that slogan. The phrase is still true; in fact, given the metastasizing national security crisis, it’s arguably truer now than it was a year ago. But given the chaos south of the border, it

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March 17, 2025 5 Comments

Higher Education’s AI Future

You may have noticed—via the odd banner ad on this blog over the past six months—that HESA held a fantastic event in Calgary last week on the use of Artificial Intelligence in Higher Education. We had a great time. There were 25 sessions, roughly 100 presenters and 400 delegates from 80 institutions. It really was a great, pan-Canadian exchange, and the first in Canadian higher education to look at AI. A really huge thank you to all of our partners

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March 12, 2025 3 Comments

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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