The World of Higher Education Podcast Listen now →

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Category: Teaching & Learning

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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August 11, 2023 No Comments

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
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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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