Category: Colleges and Polytechnics

Not the Traveling Wilburys

Late last week, two Ontario colleges—St. Lawrence College ( in Kingston, with a substantial presence in Cornwall and Brockville) and Sir Sandford Fleming (in Peterborough)—announced their intent to “integrate as equal partners.” Many people (including me) at first thought that meant the two schools were merging. However, on closer reading of the announcement, I am not sure this is quite the case. Let me quote here from the quite extraordinary announcement: “We are committed to ensuring that students have the

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HESA’s AI Observatory: What’s new in higher education (May 16, 2025)

Spotlight Happy Friday to all readers,  This AI blog will be the last of the current academic semester, before we take a bit of a break until the next academic year. It will also be a bit of a longer one, to properly wrap the year… So sit comfortably and enjoy the ride! Last month, we hosted a virtual AI Roundtable to reflect on learnings from AI-CADEMY, discuss remaining challenges, and try to identify concrete steps for institutions to consider

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Two Ideas Long Overdue for Adoption

Two mini thoughts today rather than one long one. But they are both ideas which I think deserve to be taken more seriously than they currently are. Mergers that Make Sense You may recall that a few months ago, I skewered the idea that institutional mergers were a useful path to take for the purpose of cutting costs. But the more I have been thinking about it, there may be a pretty good case—at least in a few places—of mergers for

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HESA’s AI Observatory: What’s new in higher education (March 16, 2025)

Spotlight Wow. It’s already been a week since AI-CADEMY, and I’m still hung up on all the vibrant discussions that happened in Calgary, the insights shared by all, and the palpable eagerness to learn and collaborate. If you haven’t already, make sure to read Alex’s Wednesday blog for a quick summary (and if you attended, there are more post-event follow-ups coming your way soon) – but on a more personal note, I want to express how much of a privilege

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HESA’s AI Observatory: What’s new in higher education (January 31, 2025)

Spotlight Due to technical issues, the Friday blog remained in the cue and was not sent out. Here it is! Happy Friday! There were a few notable AI-related releases since my last blog, but the main one was most probably the International Scientific Report on the Safety of Advanced AI that was released earlier this week (you might recall that I had previously shared here the interim report, which was published in May 2024). Chaired by UdeM’s professor Yoshua Bengio,

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