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Category: Teaching & Learning

A New U

When it comes to education and the labour market, universities (well, the bits outside the professional schools, anyway) like to say they are in the business of preparing students not for their first job but for their fifth, or (more grandiosely), “preparing them for life”.  There are some powerful reasons for and assumptions behind that statement, and on the whole this view has served universities and their graduates well over the past few centuries.  But in a world where experience

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January 11, 2019 No Comments

The Future of the Master’s Degree

Go back a few years and all the “in” talk among higher education fad merchants was how online education was going to disrupt universities, put 9/10ths of them out of business, yadda yadda.  It was all nonsense of course – most of the predictions were predicated on the idea that undergraduates were prepared to forego a primarily social experience in favour of a mostly solitary, online experience.  This was always palpable nonsense peddled by people who seemed to think that

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January 8, 2019 1 Comment

LinkedIn and the Future of New Credentials

One of the many unrealized promises of the last decade or so has been the idea that the types of credentials available to student – micro-credentials, stacked credentials Coursera-style “specializations”, whatever – would proliferate.  Certainly, the world would probably be a better place if there more alternatives to diplomas, bachelor’s degrees and master’s degrees, but the problem is that for a new credential to gain traction, it must have a labour-market value (otherwise why would students pay money to obtain

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December 5, 2018 1 Comment

HEQCO’s Intriguing Skills Report

HEQCO produced a fascinating report on skills last week, which I want to explore in depth.  Unfortunately, it has put a few people’s backs up because of a couple of poorly-chosen sentences in a covering press release, which I will also explore.  But let’s focus on the first bit, because simply putting this study took an enormous amount of effort that needs to be acknowledged and celebrated. (Actually, they released two intriguing reports: one on literacy and numeracy and one on critical thinking. 

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December 4, 2018 1 Comment

Skills not Research

The Logic, a new subscription journalism outlet dedicated to Canadian innovation and tech policy, had a couple of great stories about a month ago that are worth highlighting simply to remember the general poverty of the standard U-15/Universities Canada line about higher education and economic growth.  (The articles are behind a paywall, so you’re going to have to trust me on what they say). The first article had a worrying headline, “Ottawa has a plan to build 10 tech companies

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December 3, 2018 1 Comment
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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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