Category: Media

When the Times Higher Education Rankings Fail The Fall-Down-Laughing Test

You may have noted the gradual proliferation of rankings at the Times Higher Education over the last few years.  First the World University Rankings, then the World Reputation Rankings (a recycling of reputation survey data from the World Rankings), then the “100 under 50” (World Rankings, restricted to institutions founded since the early 60s, with a methodological twist to make the results less ridiculous), then the “BRICS Rankings” (World Rankings results, with developed countries excluded, and similar methodological twists). Between actual

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The Future of MOOCs: Coursera and EdX

We saw yesterday that Udacity is leaving the higher education field in order to focus more on contract training.  In some ways, this is no surprise.  Udacity was always the weakest of the Big Three MOOC providers because, in addition to being a private platform, it was also trying to develop much of its own programming, which is quite costly. Coursera, on the other hand, outsources course production to big prestigious institutions – 70-odd of them at last count, including Canada’s

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Udacity has Left the Building

There was a big story in MOOC-world last week, which the mainstream press has surprisingly yet to pick up on; namely, that Udacity, one of the three big corporate MOOC players, has just left the building. Udacity, if you recall, was created by one Sebastian Thrun, a computer scientist at Stanford.  It was he who kicked off the current MOOC craze by opening up one of his computer science classes to the world, and then finding out that 160,000 people

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And the Winner is…

OK, all that data I gave you last week was fun, but let’s get back to the serious business of snark.  I know you’ve all been waiting to hear the winner of the “Worst Back-to-School Story” competition.  And so, without further ado: Stories reporting on the CIBC World Markets report about how students were choosing the “wrong” subjects received nominations from a number of you.  However, while these were indeed irritating, I don’t feel that they really achieved the level of

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Affordability

At some point in the next week or so, Statistics Canada will be releasing its annual statistics on tuition fees.  Hopefully it will be less of a fiasco than last year, when they released data a few days after the Quebec election, but didn’t bother to note that the planned tuition fee hike was being reversed. What I want to do today is to put the inevitable “rising fees” stories that always accompany the Statscan release into some sort of

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