Category: Institutions

Steeples of Excellence and How to Achieve Them

Every so often, terms crop up and it seems like no one knows where they came from.  One of my favourites is “Steeples of Excellence”.  Except that this one actually has a known origin: the Stanford of the 1950s and its provost, Frederick Terman. The term “steeples of excellence” tends to imply some focus on certain fields of study.  It’s a handy complement to the oft heard “we can’t be everything to everybody” (possibly the most overused phrase in higher

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Canada’s First National Minister of Higher Education

Last Friday’s, Marc Miller, the Minister of Immigration, Refugees and Canadian Citizenship (IRCC), announced three changes to the International Student Visa program (link here).  You may have seen a small news alert about it (see here or here).  But it seems that almost nobody caught the full import of the announcement.  The announcement started out ok, with Miller again swatting down rumours of a cap on international student visas and comparing the idea to “performing surgery with a hammer”.  Miller

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Visible Minority Students in Canadian Post-Secondary Education

Kudos today to Statistics Canada, which is gradually producing useful information using its new Education and Labour Market Longitudinal Platform (ELMLP).  Last Thursday it put out – weirdly, in conditions of almost total secrecy – a new set of tables looking at visible minorities and ethnicity in Canadian post-secondary education. This dataset required linking individual record data from the Post-Secondary Student Information System (PSIS), which does not record any data about ethnicity, with individual record data from the census, which

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HESA’s AI Observatory: What’s new in higher education (Oct. 20th, 2023)

Spotlight Good afternoon, Next Tuesday, we’ll have the pleasure of discussing with five students from across the country to hear their perspectives on GenAI in higher education: Beatriz Moya, PhD candidate, Werklund School of Education, University of Calgary Justin Saint, Chair of Computing and Academic, BCIT Student Association Ken Hilton, Vice-President Academic, University of Toronto Engineering Society Laurence Mallette-Léonard, President, Fédération étudiante collégiale du Québec Tala Abu Hayyaneh, Vice-President Academic, Students’ Association of Mount Royal University Join us on October

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AI in Canadian Higher Education-An Update

Good morning. As you probably know, we at HESA have been paying a lot of attention to Generative AI over the past few months.  We launched our AI Observatory during the Summer, have been organizing monthly AI Roundtables with the help of a super group of volunteers from across Canada, and began putting out our Friday AI-focused emails. Today, as we approach the first anniversary of the release of ChatGPT, we wanted to share some observations about the state of play in GenAI

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