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Category: Institutions

Better, not Cheaper

If there is one clear meme concerning higher education coming out of America during this recession, it’s this: “higher education is too expensive and it’s delivering a sub-optimal product.” Zeitgeist statements like this one have to be handled carefully.  Even if you don’t agree with this meme, failure to engage with it can expose one to charges of being “defensive,” or “part of the problem”.  So, for the moment, let’s accept this statement at face-value, and focus on how one

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January 14, 2013 4 Comments

A Country that Actually Does International Education

Countries interested in international education basically move through three phases.  International Education 1.0 is about moving people from one spot to another – usually from a southern country to a northern one: it’s old-style, clunky, and by necessity a minority pursuit.  International Education 2.0 flips this around and gets the institutions to bring the education to students in other countries, either via online education, branch campuses, or by curriculum licensing arrangements in other countries. (There’s an International Education 3.0, too

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January 10, 2013 3 Comments

Left Behind Again

One of the most interesting phenomenon in global higher education these days is a movement known as the Tuning Process.  And, surprise, surprise, Canada’s allegedly-globally-linked-in, ultra-internationalized universities are nowhere to be found. The Tuning Process is a process of detailing learning outcomes at the program-of-study level – a mostly faculty-driven process to determine what students should know, and be able to do, by the end of their degree.  What distinguishes Tuning from the kind of learning outcomes process we see

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January 8, 2013 5 Comments

Those Big, Bad, “American-style” Program Reviews

Hi everyone, and welcome back. The best education story of the winter break was almost certainly the Globe piece on program reviews at Canadian universities.  Despite an inane headline (when it comes to a policy’s unsuitability, nothing unites Canadian bien-pensants more than claims to an American origin), it’s an important piece about a useful process occurring at universities across Canada. HESA has directly contributed to two of these exercises (you can see some of our work, here), and with that experience I think

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January 7, 2013 No Comments

Barking Up the Wrong Tree

I haven’t written about MOOCs in awhile, mostly because I’m finding the whole discussion pretty tedious.  They’re an interesting addition to the spectrum of continuing education offerings, and they’ll exist so long as venture capitalists and large, big-brand universities feel like subsidizing the hell out of them. Period. The supposed “value” of MOOCs is that they deliver the same old lecture-driven process at a cheaper price.  But what should be our real priority right now: Making education cheaper, or finding

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December 21, 2012 1 Comment

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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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