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Category: Teaching & Learning

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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April 4, 2023 3 Comments

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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February 15, 2023 3 Comments

Reducing Work

Recently, I asked my Twitter followers who taught in universities about the part of their job they liked the least.  I asked because I am pretty convinced Canadian higher education isn’t going to get through the next decade or so without some reasonably big changes in the way faculty spend their time. Here’s my basic assumption: as I noted back here, we’re on the brink of a pretty big increase in youth numbers. The best guess is that the number

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February 14, 2023 3 Comments

The Meaning of Applied Research

Time was – say, for the thirty years or so after Vannevar Bush wrote Science: The Endless Frontier – everyone had a pretty good understanding of what was meant by the term “research”.  Basically, it was the stuff that pointy-headed people did in labs and was the opposite of “development”. Figure 1: Ancient Understanding of Research But then, people on the development end got a bit snippy.  They, too, did research, it just had a more focused sense of practical

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September 20, 2022 No Comments

Pivot

One of the more interesting higher ed books I’ve read so far this year is Pivot by Mark Lombardi and Joanne Soliday.  It’s not a brand-new book – it came out a few months before COVID – but its tales of small institutions transforming themselves (usually) in the face of overwhelming enrolment and financial pressures are still very fresh and reading their stories is worth anyone’s time. The four institutions covered in this book are, with one exception, places few

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May 16, 2022 2 Comments

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One Thought to Start Your Day is our founder and CEO Alex Usher’s popular daily blog, brimming with up-to-the-minute insights and informed opinions on today’s higher education industry.

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