Category: Policy

HESA’s AI Observatory: What’s new in higher education (October 4, 2024)

Spotlight Good afternoon all,  About a month ago, the U15 released its guidance on the use of AI in academic teaching and learning (finally, dare I say): Navigating AI in Teaching and Learning: Values, Principles and Leading Practices. While nothing in there is truly groundbreaking – which might make one (me, for starters) wonder why it took them so long, two elements caught my eye.  1) The U15 emphasizes the importance of Building trust, saying “As we learn and gain

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The Workload Conundrum

One of the weirdest things about Canadian academia is how workload is defined. You’ve probably heard somewhere that professorial workload is “40-40-20”, that is, 40% teaching, 40% research, and 20% “service.” But this is not an actual description of anyone’s actual workload, which can vary enormously from year to year, it’s more a kind of general rule of thumb, like the Chinese Communist Party’s adage that Mao was 70% good and 30% bad. It’s meant to be taken seriously but

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Marc Miller Strikes Again

On Monday last week, the Liberals got humiliated in a pair of by-elections in Quebec and Manitoba. In response, the Liberal party decided it needed to regain some popularity and that the best way of doing so was to kick universities and colleges a bit. And so the Minister of Immigration (and unofficial National Minister of Higher Education) Marc Miller announced a set of changes to study visas and post-graduation work visas. (How do I know this was a sudden, unplanned

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Eating the Future

As anyone who was alive at the time knows, if you want to pick a decade when Canada was at its nadir, it was the 1990s. We managed to have a currency crisis, a fiscal crisis, a national unity crisis, and a recession which basically lasted seven years. It was bleak, bleak, bleak. But in one very important way, it was better than today. Because at least, even though we were broke (both Saskatchewan and Newfoundland flirted with bankruptcy in

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HESA’s AI Observatory: What’s new in higher education (September 6, 2024)

Spotlight Good afternoon all,  Sandrine Desforges here. I am a Research Associate at HESA and have been leading the work on our AI Observatory since its inception. I’ve had the pleasure of popping into your inbox every Friday or so during the past academic year to share ‘AI in Higher Ed’-related news, as well as hosting our monthly AI Roundtables (if you’re new here, you can catch all the recordings online). After a productive summer break (we have some exciting

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