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Category: Teaching & Learning

Two Studies to Ponder

Sometimes, I read research reports which are fascinating but probably wouldn’t make for an entire blog post (or at least a good one) on their own.  Here are two from the last couple of weeks. Research vs. Teaching Much of the rhetoric around universities’ superiority over other educational providers is that their teachers are also at the forefront of research (which is true if you ignore sessionals, but you’d need a biblically-sized mote in your eye to miss them).  But

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February 21, 2017 No Comments

A Puzzling Pattern in the Humanities

Big news in Alberta the other day: the University of Alberta has decided to cut fourteen (14!) programs, in the humanities. That’s on top of a programs cull just two years ago in which seventeen programs – mostly in Arts – were also axed! Oh my God! War on the humanities, etc, etc. Or at least that’s the way it sounds, until you read the fine print around the announcement and realise that these fourteen programs, collectively, have 30 students

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January 23, 2017 10 Comments

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

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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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