Category: Institutions

The Future of French Language Universities in Ontario

Before the Ford government came to office in Ontario, the province had exactly zero French-language universities.  This might seem strange in a province with something close to a million French speakers, a third of whom use it as a first language.  After all, Manitoba – which has a similarly-sized francophone population in proportional terms – can maintain Université de St. Boniface, so why couldn’t Ontario? The answer is that at the time Ontario had two very good bilingual universities in

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Student-Teacher Ratios

This is a full-on data nerd blog on faculty numbers and ratios.  Normally, we would put this stuff in The State of Postsecondary Education in Canada, but StatsCan took its sweet time delivering me the data and I missed the publication of the data.  But hey, better late than never, so let’s dive in. Before we get to the numbers, some methodological notes (I told you this was for nerds).  Annoyingly, StatsCan counts teachers by “Principal Subject Taught”, which is

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HESA’s AI Observatory: What’s new in higher education (Sept. 29th, 2023)

Spotlight Good afternoon all, Thanks to those of you who joined us for our AI Roundtable on Pedagogy and curriculum last Tuesday, and for sharing your knowledge and experience in the chat.  It was interesting to learn more about the possibilities of GenAI in developing teaching and learning materials. From drafting learning objectives and lesson plans to building rubrics and drafting quizzes, there are clearly a lot of ways GenAI could support instructors. However, many questions remain, notably with respect

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HESA’s AI Observatory: What’s new in higher education (Sept. 22nd, 2023)

Spotlight Good afternoon all, If you’ve been reading our AI-focused emails in the past few weeks, you’ll know that we’ve been noting that higher education institutions are mainly focusing their policy efforts on developing guidelines about generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) in teaching and learning (T&L), while staying relatively silent on how to (or not) integrate AI in business operations. However, the lack of guidance doesn’t mean AI isn’t being increasingly used for operational purposes in institutions. We’ve already shared many

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Education at a Glance 2023

The OECD’s annual Education at a Glance (EAG) report came out last week.  It’s a One Thought tradition to go through this report in detail for the latest international comparisons on institutional income and participation rates, but I’m going to mostly forego that this year.  That’s partially because I have a doozy of a piece coming out on finance in a week or two, but also because this year’s EAG contains some interesting special topics worth looking at, particularly with

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