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Category: Teaching & Learning

Are Teaching Costs Increasing at Canadian Universities?

On Wednesday, someone took me to task in the comments section of the blog for part of my analysis on the financial situation of higher education, saying: “The HE sector has hiked tuition up far faster than inflation citing “Increased teaching costs”. They have been unable or unwilling to provide proper costings for this.” Is this true? Well, it depends how long a time-frame you choose to use. Let’s look at the data. To look at “teaching costs”, we need to use

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April 15, 2016 1 Comment

Can Universities Judge Themselves?

One of the more difficult problems to unravel in the world of higher education is the fact that universities are responsible both for delivering teaching and judging whether or not a student has learned enough to get a degree.  To most reasonable minds, this is a conflict of interest.  Indeed, this is the conflict that makes universities unreformable: as long as universities have a monopoly on judging their own quality, no one external to the system (students, governments) can make realistic comparisons between

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February 9, 2016 7 Comments

Yoga

Many of you may have already seen this piece from the Guardian last week entitled “My students have paid £9,000 and now they think they own me”.  The details are obviously England-specific, but it’s basically a riff on that oft-heard complaint: if the cost of education gets too high, and students start thinking of themselves as – shock, horror – consumers, then higher education is definitely dead, bring back the dark ages, etc., etc. Now, without denying that there are probably some students who

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January 13, 2016 12 Comments

Class Size, Teaching Loads, and that Curious CUDO Data Redux

You may recall that last week I posted some curious data from CUDO, which suggested that the ratio of undergraduate “classes” (we’re not entirely sure what this means) to full-time professors in Ontario was an amazingly-low 2.4 to 1.  Three quick follow-ups to that piece. 1.  In the previous post, I offered space on the blog to anyone involved with CUDO who could clear up the mystery of why undergraduate teaching loads appeared to be so low.  No one has taken

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November 24, 2015 5 Comments

Curious Data on Teaching Loads in Ontario

Back in 2006, university Presidents got so mad at Maclean’s that they stopped providing data to the publication.  Recognizing that this might create the impression that they had something to hide, they developed something called “Common University Dataset Ontario” (CUDO) to provide the public with a number of important quantitative descriptors of each university.  In theory, this data is of better quality and more reliable than the stuff they used to give Maclean’s. One of the data elements in CUDO has

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November 17, 2015 2 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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