Category: Policy

HESA’s AI Observatory: What’s new in higher education (Aug. 18th, 2023)

Spotlight Good morning, It’s been very encouraging to see the positive response to the launch of HESA’s Observatory on AI Policies in Canadian Post-Secondary Education over the last week. Thank you to those of you who have already shared with us the policies or guidelines that were developed by your institution. We will be populating the Observatory every week with new policies and guidelines with respect to AI that have been developed by higher education institutions across the country and

Read More »

HESA’s AI Observatory: What’s new in higher education (Aug. 11th, 2023)

Spotlight Good morning,  You might be wondering why you’re hearing from us in August. No, Summer is not over yet… but we wanted to try something new. As you may know, HESA has now hosted two Roundtable meetings on Artificial Intelligence (AI) policies in higher education. The success of these meetings (177 joined us for the first meeting, and that number climbed above 200 for the second one) proved the need for pan-Canadian inter-institutional collaboration for the development of comprehensive

Read More »

PEI Election Manifesto Review

Today is election day in Prince Edward Island, and so that also makes it HESA Towers Manifesto Review Day.  Buckle up!  One of the things that makes PEI adorable is how tiny all its politics are.  Like, in other provinces, manifestoes might make a general nod towards K-12 capital spending, but on the Island, parties will make specific promises about renovations to specific junior high schools.   But then again, perhaps not surprising when the province is only barely larger than the combined staff/student population of the University

Read More »

Budget Commentary 2023

Hello all. As usual, HESA Towers has been hard at work to bring you our budget commentary, which is available here. While there is the odd good news story in here – like more money for applied research in colleges – in the main, this is probably the worst budget for the higher education sector in years.  An $800 million year-on-year reduction in money for student grants – long foreshadowed, not by any means a breach of promise (the injection

Read More »

Changes to Canada’s Innovation Landscape

Yesterday, I described a variety of different type of innovation organizations around the world and suggested that part of the problem in Canada is that the federal government has difficulty understanding any kind of innovation agency whose mission is not “give out more gobs of cash”, because in today’s Ottawa it is expenditure which indicates virtue, not the outcomes of those expenditures. So, given that, how do we evaluate two significant recent changes to the innovation ecosystem in Canada? The

Read More »