Category: Institutions

Ford’s Francophone Fracas

FordLate last week, Ontario Finance Minister Vic Fedeli delivered a mid-year economic statement.  There wasn’t a whole lot of news in it, to be honest.  For the most part, it was a final government statement about how bad the previous government had been and a re-statement of actions taken to date.  There were repetitions about the need to get to a balanced budget and to reduce electricity rates, but no timetables for either were given.  But there were a few things

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Better Northern Higher Education Strategy

Higher education strategy in the Canadian north is tricky. Challenges include from the huge distances, the tiny populations, and the responsibility to support Indigenous populations with specific cultural, educational and scientific needs.  The fact that the North is divided into three different territories, each with its own college, fractures the system still further.  And then add on to this the fact that every college and territory also wants to hand out degrees as well, and you get a system which is

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New Digital Universities

Last week Tony Bates, arguably the doyen of Canadian digital education, posted an intriguing little article called Why Canada Needs Five New Digital Universities on his blog at the Contact North website. Basically, Bates’ argument is that the future of learning is hybridized learning – that is a mix of face-to-face and online learning – though we don’t yet know exactly how best to mix those two to achieve best results for different learners at different levels in different subjects.  Not only

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Canada’s Most Iconic University Building

Recently, someone asked me what I thought Canada’s most iconic university building was.  That is, which building is a) instantly recognizable and b) utterly representative of the campus on which it sits?  I put the question out on twitter and got some interesting answers from my excellent and disputatious followers. The question, of course, is to some degree an unfair one because to be instantly recognizable, the university itself needs to be fairly well-known.  That condition makes it difficult for

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Good Lord Cape Breton

Last week, I got an email from the Atlantic Association of Universities.  “Great news!” it said.  “Enrollment in Atlantic Canadian universities rose by 2.4% last year!”  That’s pretty good, I thought to myself,  given the demographic crunch and all.  So, I clicked through on the document to get to where I can see the institution-by-institution data (I always do this, because it’s always good to see how your clients are doing.) Hm…OK, NSCAD up 8.3%, that’s good (guess our work

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