Category: Teaching & Learning

Work-Integrated Learning: We Can Do Better

You may have seen that late last week, the Business Higher Education Roundtable (BHER) rounded up a number of big names from colleges, universities and businesses to sign a letter to Finance Bill Morneau calling for the development of a National Work-Integrated Learning (WIL) Strategy as part of the 2019 Budget.  What should we make of this? On the one hand, it is certainly a sign that lots of people are taking WIL seriously.  And that’s a good thing.  Canada is

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Time to Talk Teaching Assessments

Something very important happened over the summer: The Ryerson Faculty Union won its case against the university in Ontario Superior Court against the use of student teaching evaluations in tenure and promotion decisions (it was silent on merit pay, but I’m fairly sure that’s because Ryerson academics don’t have it – as legal precedent I’m 100% certain merit pay is affected, too).  This means literally every university in the country is going to have to re-think the evaluation of teaching

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Designing a University from Scratch (III)

If you’re just joining us, on Wednesday I briefly reviewed some of the key aspects of the Minerva model as detailed in the book yesterday’s entry, as detailed in the book Building the Intentional University: Minerva and the Future of Higher Education.  Then yesterday, I examined what lessons the Minerva had for the rest of academia in terms of building curricula.  Today I want to turn to pedagogy and assessment. Assessment, in particular, is ripe for a deep re-think and overhaul. On the face of

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Designing a University from Scratch (II)

Following on from yesterday’s discussion of the Minerva model (you might want to refresh your memory by re-reading yesterday’s entry, as detailed in the book Building the Intentional University: Minerva and the Future of Higher Education, I wanted to get into a bit more detail about whether the Minerva curriculum is a foretaste of things to come, a weird one-off, or an evolutionary dead-end. Short answer: I certainly hope Minerva represents a new trend in curricula, but I see one big

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Designing a University from Scratch (I)

I’ve recently been reading a fascinating book entitled Building the Intentional University: Minerva and the Future of Higher Education which essentially is an operating manual for the Minerva Schools (if you have never heard of, or have forgotten Minerva, I did a write-up of it back in 2013). What everyone remembers about Minerva is the sizzle – students move across seven cities in four years (San Francisco for a year, followed by one term in each of Seoul, Hyderabad, Berlin, Buenos Aires, Taipei and London) and all

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