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Category: Teaching & Learning

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

If Canada Were Serious About Higher Education (Part 3)

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

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April 10, 2019 No Comments

Skills Accounts: Singapore

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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March 14, 2019 1 Comment

Curricular Change and The Decline of Poland

Sometimes Canadian universities drive me up the wall.  Mostly, it’s when they start lobbying for other people to take action in areas where the clearest problems lie within their own wheelhouse.  I speak in particular of Study Abroad and Work-Integrated Learning.  To be clear, I am all for more study abroad and more work-integrated learning. They’re both straight-up great ideas.  But it seems to me that if you’re going out to lobby for money to improve something, you might want to

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March 6, 2019 1 Comment

New Theories on Skills and Growth

One of the things post-secondary education does poorly is questioning its orthodoxies, particularly when it comes to the value of what it is the sector produces.  I’m talking in particular about graduate skills.  I mean, forget about the possibility that we could measure outcomes and relate them to specific skills and change curricula on that basis – that’s crazy talk (in universities, anyway).  I mean just the basic question: do skills matter?  This sounds like heresy, but it’s a serious

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March 1, 2019 No 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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