Category: Universities

Accepting Failure and Trying Something New

If there is one thing that drives me to despair about Canadian universities these days, it is how poor many federal government relations (GR) strategies are.   I can boil the issues down to three specific aspects. Too many cooks.  30 years ago, I am fairly sure no university in Canada had a permanent independent GR presence in Ottawa (apart from the two schools located there).  Now there are a couple of dozen who do.  Much of what they are trying

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HESA’s AI Observatory: What’s new in higher education (Oct. 13th, 2023)

Spotlight Good afternoon, It has now been 2 months since we launched our AI Observatory and started sending these AI-focused emails. Thanks for tagging along! We’d appreciate if you could take a couple of minutes to fill this short anonymous survey. We’d love to hear from you to gauge if it’s been helpful, and how we could better support your institution moving forward. Thank you! Fill the short survey Next Roundtable Meeting Date: Tuesday, October 24th, 2023 Time: 12h00-1h00 PM

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HESA’s AI Observatory: What’s new in higher education (Oct. 6th, 2023)

Spotlight Good afternoon all, It’s great to see the 1,4k of you that opted-in to receive these AI-focused emails. If you know someone who’d like to receive them, please send them this link. We love to see the numbers growing. Quick update – We recently added a sub-section ‘Recommendations’ under ‘News & Research’ on our AI Observatory, where we gather recommendations on how to respond to GenAI from various types of organizations, including governments, coalitions of higher education institutions, interest-based

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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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