Category: Institutions

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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Les Quinze Glorieuses: Understanding the History of Québec Universities (Part 3)

(There is no point in you reading today’s piece if you missed Monday’s and Tuesday’s installments on the history of Québec Universities. Catch up on Part 1 and Part 2.) After the original four campuses of the UQ network—Montreal, Trois-Rivieres, Chicoutimi and ENAP e system—opened in 1968, the UQ system continued to grow at a healthy clip. The Rimouski campus opened in 1969. Abitibi-Témiscamingue and Hull got “centres d’études universitaires,” which didn’t end up becoming universities until the early 1980s

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Les Quinze Glorieuses: Understanding the History of Québec Universities (Part 2)

(If you didn’t read yesterday’s piece, you’re going to be lost. Catch up with Part 1.) It’s 1960. Québec has six universities—three English and three French—all of them private, and the French trio explicitly clerical (all the Presidents were priests). But the Union National regime has fallen, replaced with a technocratic Liberal government with a mandate to move Québec in a modernist direction. And although it wasn’t an explicitly nationalist government, it certainly had national concerns on its mind (René

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Les Quinze Glorieuses: Understanding the History of Québec Universities (Part 1)

Over the past few months I have been reading quite a lot of history about Québec universities. And I am pretty blown away by the way that the entire system transmogrified itself in a very short space of time between (roughly) 1960 and 1975. Though expansion in that period was obviously substantial in other parts of Canada, I would argue that nowhere else was there anything like the degree of systemic change in the nature of universities that took place in

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HESA’s AI Observatory: What’s new in higher education (January 17, 2025)

Spotlight Welcome back, readers!  2025 is most definitely starting on a high AI-wise, because we’re only two weeks in, and there are already some major new releases worth taking a look at. I’m sharing a TL;DR with you all below for two of these, in case you are still catching up with the start of the new semester and have not had a chance to keep up with everything happening in the sector.  The US Department of Education’s Office of Educational

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