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Category: Innovation

Getting Serious about Apprenticeships

As I noted back on Monday, for a variety of deeply atavistic reasons, Canadian political parties have decided that the knowledge economy is out and some kind of 1960s economy based, improbably, on the construction industry, is in. And so, similarly, postsecondary students are out along with colleges and universities, while apprentices and skilled trades are in. Which, you know, whatever. Fine. But if we are going to do this, parties need to start developing policies which will improve our

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April 30, 2025 2 Comments

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 1 Comment

“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
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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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