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Category: Teaching & Learning

Academic Freedom in a Pandemic

One of the things I am sure you have seen with respect to the transition to remote teaching for the fall is some kind of reassurance that institutions are doing all they can to ensure that the fall term will be the hunkiest-doriest term of all time. For instance, McGill says: that “students and their families can be assured we are planning for robust and high-quality teaching even if the modes of delivery will be modified for this term”.  Waterloo speaks

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May 26, 2020 7 Comments

In Pandemus Veritas

One of the most interesting things about the pandemic is the questions it raises about the price of education. Can institutions reasonably expect to charge what they normally charge, given that the quality of an online education is substandard compared to student expectations? Let’s start with the quality arguments.  There is an argument that the quality of an online experience can match a face-to-face one.  And that’s true – provided instructors have the time, money and inclination to build online

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May 25, 2020 1 Comment

How Open to Be

Last week saw a slew of universities “announce” their plans for the summer.  Some of them appear to be treating it as a strategic exercise in getting one over on competitors (“look how open we are!”), but with one or two exceptions, this exercise is probably a misreading of the situation: pretty much everyone is going to be massively online/remote for the fall.  Going remote, to be clear, is a good thing.  I know that some people like making distinctions

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May 19, 2020 1 Comment

Credit Hours

It’s hard to tell from the outside what universities are talking about these days, because there is this veil of secrecy up about what planning is happening.  But I’ve heard that, at a couple of schools at least, the focus is very much on the question of credit hours.  As in, “credit hours = contact hours, so if your course isn’t completely synchronous, how do we know students deserve three credits?” Sigh. There are short and long answers to this

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May 6, 2020 4 Comments

An Open Letter to Provosts and Presidents

Le français suit l’anglais Good morning, everyone.  Today’s blog is a bit different from the usual format.  I am here to ask you all to participate in an act of radical self-interest. A few weeks ago, I suggested that the biggest problem Canadian universities would face this fall was working out how to deliver those big, ugly first-year classes online.  I also suggested that many of those big first year-courses cover similar topics (e.g. Microeconomics 100, Introduction to Physics, etc.) and

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April 30, 2020 4 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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