Category: Teaching & Learning

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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Robot-Proof

If you’re looking for a book that is not too heavy, analyzes how changing technologies impacts skills, and does a great job of sketching out some possible attractive responses from higher education institutions: have I got a book for you.  It’s called Robot-Proof: Higher Education in the Age of Artificial Intelligence by Joseph Aoun. You’re surprised, I can tell.  The book does have the kind of title that suggests it has a point of view that ordinarily would set me off on

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For Lifelong Learning, Time to Go Big

I have been thinking a lot lately about the need for greater adaptation to lifelong learning.  I am, as you all know, generally pretty skeptical of any “Fourth-Industrial-Revolution-sky-is-falling-right-this-instant” rationales for institutional change, but that’s not a reason not to think about big change.  First, because even in the absence of radical labour market change there are ways we can do a lot better at lifelong learning than we currently do, and second because given the length of time it takes

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The Advance of Online Education in Canada

There was a time – six years or so ago now – when people were talking about the death of universities and the rise of MOOCs. (A collection of my previous posts on MOOCs can be found here).  Among the many, many things this debate obscured was the fact that education delivered online was almost as old as the internet itself. Online education was mature, not some newfangled idea (in the Silicon Valley version of history, everything not invented in

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Ideal Academic Workloads

So, I got a bit of mail last week in response to my analysis of the COU data (as I usually do whenever I’m presenting data on academic loads) to the effect that I am being overly reductionist about the teaching loads and perhaps implying that profs aren’t working hard.  Generally speaking, these comments come in two varieties and I will take the time to answer each of them. The first line of critique has to do with unit of

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