In the fall of 2011, Sebastian Thrun, a computer science professor at Stanford, began teaching a class. Part of it was in person. Part of it was online. The online portion had over 160,000 students. Some of them did better than the students who took the class in person. Out of this single data point, a legend was born. What grew up in the twelve or so months after this even was a sight to behold. Thrun left Stanford to
Big day at HESA Towers as it’s the return of our Academic Programs Team’s series Monitoring Trends in Academic Programming (MTAP), a project led by Jonathan McQuarrie. This edition is about programs which focus on Water, and you can read it here. It’s also the first MTAP with a co-author, Tiffany MacLennan. And if you like that, do read our previous issues on there are previous editions on programming in Health, programming in Agriculture/ Aquaculture and in the Humanities. The keen eyed among you
On Monday, I described some of the big changes of the past 18 months; yesterday I discussed the first big future trend (“Funding Challenges Forever”), and today I want to talk about the second, which I call “New Pedagogies and New Credentials”. The experience of learning online during COVID has divided both learners and instructors. A clear majority have a healthy dislike for it, and a few loath it. But a significant minority enjoyed the experiment. For students who never
So, it’s that time of year when I say farewell to faithful readers for a few months. This is the last blog of the academic year. Normal service will resume August 30th. Today also marks the end of this blog’s tenth year. Which, you know, is a bit terrifying. Because that means this blog is probably over a million words old. I’m sure my mother would have preferred I spent all that time on a doctorate. (You should think about
Agriculture faculties often sit oddly within the modern university. I mean this literally in the sense that they are usually off at one end of campus or in some cases several tens of kilometres away from it. Despite strong roots (heh) in the biological sciences, they get treated as separate entities for reasons that aren’t really evident from a scientific point of view. The rough analogy from the physical sciences is computer science, which, like agriculture, has a pretty high
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