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Category: Innovation

Are We Lacking AI-mbition?

If you’ve been following the latest developments on artificial intelligence (AI) in recent months, you’ve probably seen that higher education institutions all around the world are more and more aggressively starting to incorporate GenAI into their ways of doing. We’ve all seen Arizona State University announce its partnership with OpenAI at the beginning of 2024. The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, on its end, has started to invite artificially generated ‘academics’ to teach to students in between lectures from real-life instructors, and

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May 7, 2024 2 Comments

Are We Out of Ideas?

I was prepping yesterday for my podcast interview with Australian higher education expert Andrew Norton on the subject of the Australian Universities’ Accord (watch for it a week tomorrow) and while reading the report—which is a competent one, as these things go—it occurred to me: my God, this is boring. Used to be you could count on the Australians to come up with at least one or two cool ideas that would make you think” “really? We can do that?”

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March 20, 2024 No Comments

Ball State vs. Stanford

When higher education wants to talk about itself in positive terms, the story it likes to tell is a story like the one of Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. You can read about Stanford’s history in books like Annalee Saxenian’s Regional Advantage and to a lesser extent Rebecca Lowen’s Creating the Cold War University: The Transformation of Stanford. The story goes something like this: “we do lots of great scientific work here, and businesses interested in our Intellectual Property

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February 14, 2024 2 Comments

The New Model University

You may have heard once or twice about Arizona State University and how innovative it is. You probably don’t know the half of it. Today I am going to rectify that because it may be the institution from which Canadian universities need to learn the most over the next few years. A lot of the initial attention to what ASU was doing differently focused on the way that faculties got rearranged in the early 2000s. The university still runs traditional

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February 7, 2024 5 Comments

Steeples of Excellence and How to Achieve Them

Every so often, terms crop up and it seems like no one knows where they came from.  One of my favourites is “Steeples of Excellence”.  Except that this one actually has a known origin: the Stanford of the 1950s and its provost, Frederick Terman. The term “steeples of excellence” tends to imply some focus on certain fields of study.  It’s a handy complement to the oft heard “we can’t be everything to everybody” (possibly the most overused phrase in higher

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November 1, 2023 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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