The World of Higher Education Podcast Listen now →

The World of Higher Education Podcast Listen now →

Category: Teaching & Learning

Complements or Substitutes?

One of the fastest ways to get into an argument at a university is to suggest that there is some necessary trade-off between research and teaching.  Really.  The words will hardly be out of our mouth before someone comes charging at you, claiming the opposite.  It’s not an empirical argument or anything, but an article of faith.  Frankly, you wouldn’t want it to be an empirically testable position because if it was, someone might start asking some pretty difficult questions.

Read More »
June 1, 2021 3 Comments

Customers

On the off chance you’re wandering through the halls of academia (non-COVID halls, anyway) and feel like picking a fight with another wanderer, the best advice I can give you is to use these three words: “students” “are” “customers”. See?  Half of you probably want to fight me right now.  But what I want to argue today is that while there are circumstances where that three-word statement is untrue, for the most part it is not untrue in the way

Read More »
May 18, 2021 3 Comments

Short Courses and Continuing Education

A few weeks ago, Statistics Canada released a paper profiling graduates of community colleges who already held bachelor’s degrees.  A significant number of these were graduates of foreign universities – immigrants who came to the country with a degree and then found they needed a Canadian credential.  But there were also a substantial number – fully 8% of all college graduates – who already had a degree from a Canadian university.  In the 1990s, when colleges first started pointing out this

Read More »
May 11, 2021 1 Comment

Fall 2021

I see some institutions are starting to make decisions about the Fall 2021 term.  Warning: my take is probably going to upset some people.  But for reasons I will describe below, I believe very strongly that Canadian PSE institutions will likely look ridiculous if they do anything other than a near-complete return to in-person teaching for the fall. I know, I know, I was one of the voices pushing ultra-caution last year.  And I know, people feel like it’s still

Read More »
February 17, 2021 4 Comments

Amateur Hour

This week, in between negotiating computer crashes, dealing with angry university finance people and the usual grind, I managed to read a new book on the history of university teaching in the United States called The Amateur Hour by Jonathan Zimmerman.  It is pretty innovative in its way: there are histories of higher education in abundance, but most of them end up being histories of institutions (or institutional types), or sociological histories of the student body, or whatever: focussing on what was

Read More »
February 11, 2021 No Comments
Load More

One Thought to Start Your Day

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.

Subscribe

Search Posts

Search Publications

Social Media

Linkedin Youtube Spotify

Recent Posts

More thoughts on...