Category: Policy

National Programs in Areas of Provincial Jurisdiction

Memory-lane time today. Because I just realized it was 25 years this week that the Canada Millennium Scholarship Foundation began inking deals with provinces to give away what turned out to be about $3.7 billion in scholarships. And I think there are some lessons that the folks in Ottawa who are fleshing out the (IMHO) poorly-conceived “national” school lunch program announced a few weeks ago.  The story of the Canada Millennium Scholarship Foundation is hard to explain to anyone who didn’t

Read More »

HESA’s AI Observatory: What’s new in higher education (April 19th, 2024)

Spotlight Good morning all,  We are soon approaching the end of our Winter 2024 series of AI Roundtables. After the one taking place next Tuesday (make sure to register here if you haven’t already), we only have one last session planned, in May. For that last session, we hoped to be able to talk about the important topic of GenAI and decolonization – in other words, how can we make sure that the growing use of GenAI tools don’t hinder

Read More »

HESA’s AI Observatory: What’s new in higher education (April 12th, 2024)

Spotlight Good afternoon all, You might have seen the latest federal government announcement on AI. Too little information is available out there at the moment to be able to assess how this will impact the higher education sector. We will keep an eye out, and keep you posted!  In the meantime, in this week’s newsletter, you will find an example of institutional guidelines for operational use of GenAI, coming from McMaster University. We also share some articles on how universities

Read More »

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

Read More »

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?”

Read More »