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Category: Teaching & Learning

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

Time to Talk Workloads

No one wants to be the first one to say it, so I will.  Regular academic workloads are going to have to be re-arranged for the Summer and Fall Terms.  In most cases drastically. This is simple math.  Providing quality teaching in the fall is going to require – in part – significantly smaller classes.  This will not only be true if the fall is fully online.  It will also be true if – as the currently fashionable musing has

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April 27, 2020 1 Comment

Coronavirus (18…or so) – Positioned to Pivot

So, last week I suggested that the Fall term was likely both to start and finish online because of practical difficulties in pivoting halfway though in most institutions.  There are many reasons for this, but the main one is that most pivot scenarios assume that students who will start off learning at home are able to drop everything and find local accommodations with very short notice, and not all students are in a position to do that.  This would leave institutions either

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April 21, 2020 No Comments

Coronavirus (17, I think? Yes, 17) – The Future of Online Learning

Let’s talk about the future of online learning. Short term, we have the following problems:  1) The Fall term is going to be online.  2) Most institutions are not good at online.  3) The effort to go online is immense. 4) The cost of not going online is immense. 5) Institutions are already facing a $ crisis.   So, given this, who pays the cost? This is a really good question, and one that does not have a simple answer, mainly because

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April 20, 2020 3 Comments

Coronavirus (14) – The Re-opening Conundrum

Most people want to know how the heck we get out of this mess.  Not dates, necessarily, but the process.  We have to see big declines in the number of new cases before we can start to unwind the physical-distancing measures are now in place.  How few cases do we have to see before the maximum gathering moves from five people (where it currently is in Ontario, YMMV), to ten?  To fifty?  A hundred?  When can we stop having to

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April 13, 2020 5 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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