Category: Teaching & Learning

HESA’s AI Observatory: What’s new in higher education (Aug. 25th, 2023)

Spotlight Good afternoon, With back to school around the corner (or already behind for some of you), higher education institutions are facing increasing pressure to come up with proper policies or guidance surrounding the use of generative AI. HESA’s Observatory on AI Policies in Canadian Post-Secondary Education is here to help institutions find guidance in the development of their institutional response to this complex issue. We have already begun to receive policies and guidelines from institutions across the country. Thanks

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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

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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

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Micro-credentials: The Path of Least Resistance

Last month, Andreas Schleicher, the head of the OECD’s Education Directorate, gave a lecture to the Higher Education Policy Institute in London  and made a series of statements around micro-credentials which were both accurate and at the same time seriously naïve.  Basically, he accused universities of stifling microcredentials because for them, life was “actually very comfortable. You bundle content, delivery, accreditation – you can get a quite nice monopoly rent.” There was, he continued, little incentive for universities to change because

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Improving Quality Without Increasing Professional Workloads

Yesterday, I spoke about the desirability of changing the nature of academic work – specifically, dividing the assessment part of the job from the instructional part by creating a group of employees that focus on assessment – to use resources more efficiently.  Today, I want to talk about how to further tweak the academic job description and deploy academic resources to significantly improve the student learning environment, without (hopefully) increasing the burden on professors. The over-riding goal is to make

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