Category: Universities

HESA’s AI Observatory: What’s new in higher education (Jan. 12th, 2024)

Spotlight 2024 is off to a flying start, and with that comes a second round of AI Roundtables! Thanks to everyone who participated in our sessions in the Fall, and to those of you who shared your ideas and feedback with us.  We listened to you! In the new year, we’ll aim to make these sessions as “roundtable-y” as possible, and provide more opportunities for all participants to engage.  In the upcoming months, we’ll be diving into various topics that

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Global McGill

Welcome back, everyone.  Let’s jump in. You will recall that last fall the Legault government, reeling from a by-election loss to a suddenly resurgent Parti Québécois, decided to parade its nationalist bona fides by giving an unprovoked kicking to some major anglophone institutions: to wit, McGill, Concordia and Bishop’s.  This kicking – which was imposed on all universities but clearly had a disproportionate impact on the three anglo schools – consisted of two separate policies. Imposing a minimum $17,000/year tuition

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HESA’s AI Observatory: What’s new in higher education (Dec. 14th, 2023)

Spotlight Good afternoon all,  2023 is soon coming to an end, and this is already the last AI-focused email of the year.  Since HESA launched its AI Observatory in August, we noticed that the pace at which institutions have been releasing policies, guidelines and statements around the use of GenAI in higher education seems to have slowed down. Has the feeling of urgency passed? Have other issues emerged that forced institutions to focus their energy elsewhere? Or is the current

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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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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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