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Category: Teaching & Learning

Time for a MOOC reckoning

Ah, MOOCs.  The decade’s most over-hyped higher education fad: indeed, possibly the most ludicrously over-hyped fad the sector has ever seen.  About three years ago, I chronicled the decline of MOOCs from the dizzying heights of 2012 onwards.  But in the last couple of weeks, there have been a few developments which suggest that the MOOC era may be well and truly dead. First up was the news that Arizona State University was letting its “Global Freshman Academy” wind down.  The Global Freshman

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October 10, 2019 4 Comments

International Students as a Labour Issue

I spent part of this week at College of the North Atlantic – Qatar in Doha.  Having had the pleasure of visiting in 2008, it was fascinating to see the evolution of the organization, particularly now that the institution is starting to pass from Canadian to Qatari control. One of the things we talked about quite a bit in the various sessions I attended and/or ran was the issue of delivering a Canadian curriculum to students whose secondary education was

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October 9, 2019 2 Comments

Managing Class Sizes (Part 2)

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

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September 19, 2019 No Comments

Managing Class Sizes (Part 1)

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

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September 18, 2019 1 Comment

Microcredentials

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

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June 6, 2019 No Comments

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.

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