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Category: Universities

HESA’s AI Observatory: What’s new in higher education (Dec. 8th, 2023)

Spotlight Good afternoon all,  In today’s newsletter, we share articles about governance structures to coordinate institution’s response to GenAI, student perspectives on the use of GenAI, the need to train students on ethical uses of AI, ways in which GenAI can support student wellbeing, the need for better data training of AI tools, and more. Also, we are starting to plan our Winter 2024 AI Roundtables. If you’d like to suggest any topic or guest speaker, please reach out to

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December 8, 2023 No Comments

Curves and Formulas

Time for a quick economics lesson. Every class in a post-secondary institution has a cost curve.  It looks something like this: Once an instructor is assigned to a class, that class has a set cost to the university regardless of how many students enroll, shown above as the Cost Curve (CC).  It’s mainly a function of the instructor’s salary and materials costs, which are very low in lecture courses, higher in laboratory courses, and highest in clinical courses.  That CC

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December 5, 2023 2 Comments

The Why and How of Holistic Admissions

A few universities in Canada are currently considering introducing holistic admissions.  But what does that mean, exactly?  And is it a good idea?  Making selections “holistically” is simply making decisions on things in addition to secondary school academic results.  In most of the world, this idea is pretty heretical.  Secondary school results (or matriculation exams such as China’s gaokao or the French baccalauréat) are the be-all and end-all where university admissions are concerned.  In these countries, there is a deep

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December 4, 2023 1 Comment

THE Impact Rankings: A Tale of Canadian Dominance

Yesterday, we talked about the Shanghai Subject rankings.  Today I want to switch over to the Times Higher Rankings.  Not their flagship World University Rankings, because those are basically a slightly more sophisticated version of ARWU’s bibliometrics with a popularity survey attached (plus a little bit of institutionally-supplied data about research income and internationalization).  And from a Canadian perspective they always provide pretty much the same story: Toronto 1, UBC 2, McGill 3.    I want to focus on a more

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November 28, 2023 No Comments

Rankings Round-up (1): The Shanghai Subject Rankings

It’s been awhile since I’ve looked at Global Rankings in any depth, so this week I am going to take a look at three sets of rankings which are either had notable methodological changes or contain data that is of particular interest to Canadians.  I’ll start with the Shanghai Rankings.  Not the Academic Rankings of World Universities, which is a bit boring from a Canadian point of view.  Nothing ever changes much on that front because ARWU, by design, is

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November 27, 2023 No Comments

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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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