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Category: PSE Outcomes

Barking Up the Wrong Tree

I haven’t written about MOOCs in awhile, mostly because I’m finding the whole discussion pretty tedious.  They’re an interesting addition to the spectrum of continuing education offerings, and they’ll exist so long as venture capitalists and large, big-brand universities feel like subsidizing the hell out of them. Period. The supposed “value” of MOOCs is that they deliver the same old lecture-driven process at a cheaper price.  But what should be our real priority right now: Making education cheaper, or finding

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December 21, 2012 1 Comment

Access to Opportunity

There’s been a fair bit of talk over the past few months about the practice of articling in Ontario.  Specifically, the problem is that there are too many law school graduates for too few articling positions.  The situation has deteriorated to the point where the Law Society of Upper Canada has released a major report outlining an “alternative work experience,” in order to deal with the surplus of students who don’t get “real” articling positions.   For what it’s worth, I tend to

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December 5, 2012 No Comments

Modularization vs. Learning Outcomes

If you’ve been near education conferences in the last year or so, the chances are that you’ve heard at least one of the two following propositions. 1)      “Modularization is the Future”.  People don’t need full degrees, they need knowledge in bite-size chunks, and they need it “on-demand”.  That means that learning needs to come in tiny little bits, and certification for learning needs to come in tiny, bite-size pieces, too.  This is partly what’s pushing the enthusiasm behind certain MOOCs and ideas like “Open

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November 9, 2012 No Comments

The Other Demographic Challenge

Okay, so everyone knows that demography’s an issue in higher education. Fewer students means more competition. More old people means more pressure on pensions and health care and hence more competition for public subsidies. Tough times ahead for higher ed, right? Well, yes. But there’s another impact of demography which I don’t think anyone’s really absorbed yet. It’s the impact of a shrinking or stagnant labour market, and in many ways, it could be the most significant demography-related challenge of

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October 15, 2012 1 Comment

Core Curricula, Better Outcomes

The core problem of ensuring that university students get the general employability skills they want and need to succeed in the labour market isn’t that universities think it’s the wrong thing to do. Rather, the problem is that they think it’s flat-out impossible. To be clear, this isn’t because they think that competencies acquired in general arts and sciences are antithetical to those in demand in the labour market (in fact they seem to believe the opposite). Rather it is

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May 30, 2012 4 Comments

One Thought to Start Your Day

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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