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Category: Universities

Coursera Continues to Confuse

The big news Monday was that Coursera, MOOC provider extraordinaire, had a bit of a re-shuffle at the top.  Founders Daphne Koller and Andre Ng, and erstwhile President Laila Ibrahim, were joined by former Yale President Rick Levin, who is now the company’s CEO.  This, needless to say, got everyone quite excited.  A Big Name Has Joined Coursera!  It must mean… well, what does it mean, exactly? Coursera is a company which – from a growth point-of-view – has two huge positives

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March 27, 2014 2 Comments

Capital!

If you’re ever bored and playing around with CAUBO data (what do you mean, “no else does that”?) you may have noticed that in 2011 there was a significant (roughly 3%) decrease in university expenditures – which is weird, because no province significantly reduced funding to universities that year, and universities never voluntarily reduce their spending.  So what the heck is going on? The quick answer is: the Knowledge Infrastructure Program (KIP) ended, and so institutions lost a nice little source of

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March 21, 2014 2 Comments

Canadian Higher Ed Exceptionalism, Part 1 (An Occasional Series)

For awhile now, I’ve been writing about other national systems of higher education in our, “Better Know a Higher Ed System” series, in part to throw Canada’s own policy system into sharp relief. But sometimes it’s better to look at some things a bit more directly, so today I want to start exploring some areas where Canada really is an exception, globally.  And there’s nowhere we stick out more than in the way we admit students to university. There are

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March 14, 2014 2 Comments

Could We Eliminate Sessionals if We Wanted To?

Last week, when I was writing about sessionals, I made the following statement: “Had pay levels stayed constant in real terms over the last 15 years, and the surplus gone into hiring, the need for sessionals in Arts & Science would be practically nil”. A number of you wrote to me, basically calling BS on my statement.  So I thought it would be worthwhile to show the math on this. In 2001-02, there were 28,643 profs without administrative duties in

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March 10, 2014 6 Comments

A More Productive Debate on “Differentiation”

One of the big topics over the past three years in Canada – and particularly in Ontario – has been that of “differentiation”.  The idea of differentiation as a boon to the university system essentially traces back to Adam Smith.  Just as in Smith’s hypothetical pin factory production can be increased multi-fold, by having different workers work on different aspects of pin-making, so too can a university system  be made more productive by having institutions concentrate on different aspects of

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February 26, 2014 6 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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