Yesterday we covered some aspects of how to create small classes on a budget (mainly: pay for them by having a few big ones). Today I want to delve into three other questions: are small classes actually better than large ones, can small classes be conjured up more cheaply, and what is the price we are all willing to pay for small classes? Let’s start with the question of the benefits of small classes. There is a massive amount of
One of the things that many people misunderstand about higher education is the way the economics of classrooms actually work; in particular about the relationship between enrolments, teaching complements, teaching loads, and class sizes. Today and tomorrow, I want to tease these out a bit. For this post, let’s take a faculty with 100 professors, which admits 500 students per year and has 10% attrition per year, which translates to 1720 students total. That means it has a student-professor ratio
One of the big buzzwords in higher education these days is “microcredentials”. Because this term means so many things to different people, it is worth unpacking this term a bit. One of the biggest challenges we have as a country is keeping adults skilled. Adults are far more expensive to train than young people because their labour has significant market value – it costs them money to take time off work, and their free time is limited due to things
Yesterday, we considered how provincial governments could get serious about higher education. Today, I want to start talking about institutions can get serious about their most important function: teaching. When it comes to provincial goal setting and making institutions accountable, measurement is the key to improvement. I am not convinced this is entirely the case with teaching, because frankly no one knows how to measure it holistically. There are things that can be learned by having students write tests like
Since it’s budget time next week and everyone I know thinks we are fated to have an announcement around Individual Skills Accounts (ISAs) I thought I would give a little bit of prominence to the two countries there that have been most active this area recently and talk about their experience. And so, today, I’ll be talking about Singapore and tomorrow, France. The reason Singapore is getting a lot of attention these days is because of something called SkillsFuture. This
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