Category: Colleges and Polytechnics

HESA’s AI Observatory: What’s new in higher education (Aug. 18th, 2023)

Spotlight Good morning, It’s been very encouraging to see the positive response to the launch of HESA’s Observatory on AI Policies in Canadian Post-Secondary Education over the last week. Thank you to those of you who have already shared with us the policies or guidelines that were developed by your institution. We will be populating the Observatory every week with new policies and guidelines with respect to AI that have been developed by higher education institutions across the country and

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HESA’s AI Observatory: What’s new in higher education (Aug. 11th, 2023)

Spotlight Good morning,  You might be wondering why you’re hearing from us in August. No, Summer is not over yet… but we wanted to try something new. As you may know, HESA has now hosted two Roundtable meetings on Artificial Intelligence (AI) policies in higher education. The success of these meetings (177 joined us for the first meeting, and that number climbed above 200 for the second one) proved the need for pan-Canadian inter-institutional collaboration for the development of comprehensive

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Ontario Colleges. Again.

Hi all.  Just a short note before getting into this blog post that we at HESA Towers are trying something a bit new.  On Thursday, we are hosting an online meeting for everyone across the country who is interested in institutional policies on teaching and learning with respect to AI programs based on Large Language Models.  Want to know how many institutions are seeing the issue mainly as a plagiarism problem and how many are seeing it as an opportunity

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College Finances 2020-21

Let’s catch up on some new Statscan data on college finances during COVID.  The big headline can be seen in figure 1:  Total income for colleges dropped by 8.4% in real terms during 2020-21.  About 40% of that fall was due to inflation, the rest was an absolute drop in income.  But break it down by source of income, and you see something different: income from governments was down by 2%, income from student fees by 11%, and income from

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Stacking and Micro-credentials

Just a short one today, on micro-credentials. In theory, micro-credentials can serve one of two purposes.  One is that they can be used as bespoke workforce-oriented training to fill very specific/niche labour market ends; the other is that they can be used – like credits – to stack towards large credentials such as diplomas, master’s degrees, and others.  If you draw up the policy framework for micro-credentials in the right way, they can achieve either or both of these goals

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