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Category: Teaching & Learning

What could a new private university in Canada look like?

Yesterday I outlined why a major private university has never emerged in Canada.  But I also suggested that it wasn’t impossible one might pop up in the future if it were backed by someone with sufficiently deep pockets and an eye for strategy.  Here is what I mean by this: For a private university to be a success, it needs to be getting thousands of students.  Say 4,000 or so.  It’s not impossible to operate below that level, but it’s precarious. 

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October 25, 2016 2 Comments

Pedagogical Change: Why Waterloo and not McMaster?

In the field of higher education, Canada has two genuine claims to having been (at least at one-time) at the forefront of innovation: co-op education, which primarily stems from Waterloo’s Faculty of Engineering, and Problem-based Learning as practiced at McMaster’s School of Medicine.   This is a big deal: most universities never pioneer innovative pedagogical techniques, and here Canada has two of them.  Yet only one of these universities really gets credit for it.  Waterloo is known nationally (and to some degree

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October 13, 2016 2 Comments

MOOCs at Five

It was five years ago last month that Stanford set up the first MOOC.  MOOCs were supposed to change the world: Udacity, Coursera and EdX were going to utterly transform education, putting many universities out of business.  Time to see how that’s going. (Ok, ok: the actual use of the term MOOC was applied to a 2008 University of Manitoba course led by George Siemens and Stephen Downes.  Technically, using Downes’ taxonomy, the 2008 MOOC was a “cMOOC” – the

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September 22, 2016 6 Comments

Measuring Teaching Quality

The Government of Ontario, in its ongoing quest to try to reform its funding formula, continues to insist that one element of the funding formula needs to relate to the issue of “teaching quality” or “quality of the undergraduate experience”.  Figuring out how to do this is of course a genuine puzzle. There are some of course who believe that quality can only be measured in terms of inputs (i.e. funding) and not through outputs (hi, OCUFA!)  Some like the

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August 17, 2016 4 Comments

Taking Advantage of Course Duplication

I recently came across an interesting blogpost from a professor in the UK named Thomas Leeper (see here), talking about the way in which professors the world over spend so much time duplicating each others’ work in terms of developing curricula.  Some key excerpts: ” …the creation of new syllabi is something that appears to have been repeated for decades, if not centuries. And yet, it all seems rather laborious in light of the relatively modest variation in the final courses

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May 26, 2016 3 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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