Category: Policy

HESA’s AI Observatory: What’s new in higher education (April 5th, 2024)

Spotlight Good afternoon all, In this week’s AI newsletter, you’ll find articles about the various ways specific institutions and jurisdictions are responding to GenAI in higher education – coming from Canada, the US, Hong Kong and Mauritania. You’ll also find articles about the constant tension between AI technology providers, and academic publishers and scholars. Finally, we included a couple of opinion pieces on what differentiates AI from human skills, and on where AI is headed in the not-so-distant future. We

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Are We Out of Ideas?

I was prepping yesterday for my podcast interview with Australian higher education expert Andrew Norton on the subject of the Australian Universities’ Accord (watch for it a week tomorrow) and while reading the report—which is a competent one, as these things go—it occurred to me: my God, this is boring. Used to be you could count on the Australians to come up with at least one or two cool ideas that would make you think” “really? We can do that?”

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A Skills Agenda is an Infrastructure Agenda

Since it is budget season, and I am increasingly depressed about the prospects for better higher education funding, I thought I should share some musings I have had recently about how to make a better case for funding. I think there is a better story available than the one the sector has been using. And it even has the advantage of being true. Ready? Here it is. As a country, we are losing the skills race because we aren’t investing

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HESA’s AI Observatory: What’s new in higher education (March 10, 2024)

Spotlight Good morning all, In this unusually late AI-focused newsletter, we share articles highlighting new institutional innovations in the face of GenAI: including compulsory AI modules, new AI-specific degrees, and the enrollment of ‘student bots’ in courses. Additionally, a couple of articles encourage readers to adopt a more cautious approach to GenAI, praising institutions that ‘slow-walk’ and resist GenAI FOMO. A perfect collection of quick reads for a lovely Sunday, with a warm coffee in hand!  Also, ICYMI – HESA

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The Ontario Funding Announcement

Hi all. Today’s post is on last week’s announcement of a support package for post-secondary education by the Government of Ontario. I’ll be as descriptive as possible; more on the actual distributional impacts will follow. (For a longer version of all this, you may want to check into Monday night’s edition of The Agenda, in which I expound on this stuff along with Mike Schreiner, Peggy Sattler, and Shamji Adil. Fun times. Thanks to Steve Paikin for inviting me on.)

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