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Category: Teaching & Learning

Teaching Loads, Fairness, and Productivity

It’s been a long time since I’ve been as disappointed by an article on higher education as I was by the Star’s coverage of the release of the new HEQCO paper on teaching and research productivity.  A really long time. If you haven’t read the HEQCO paper yet, do so.  It’s great.  Using departmental websites, the authors (Linda Joncker and Martin Hicks) got a list of people teaching in Economics, Chemistry, and Philosophy at ten Ontario universities.  From course calendars, Google

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March 13, 2014 16 Comments

Could We Eliminate Sessionals if We Wanted To?

Last week, when I was writing about sessionals, I made the following statement: “Had pay levels stayed constant in real terms over the last 15 years, and the surplus gone into hiring, the need for sessionals in Arts & Science would be practically nil”. A number of you wrote to me, basically calling BS on my statement.  So I thought it would be worthwhile to show the math on this. In 2001-02, there were 28,643 profs without administrative duties in

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March 10, 2014 6 Comments

Sessionals

The plight of sessional lecturers (or, as they call them in the US, “adjuncts”) is possibly the only issue in higher education that generates even more overblown rhetoric than tuition fees.  Any time people start evoking slavery as a metaphor, you know perspective has flown the coop. Though data on sessional numbers in Canada are non-existent, no one disputes that their numbers are rising, and that they are becoming an increasingly central part of major universities’ staffing plans.  In large

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March 6, 2014 15 Comments

Intelligent Deployment of MOOCs

Since the likelihood is that venture-capital funded MOOCs are going to fade out, and (in one way or another) the format is going to come more closely under the control of universities, it’s worth thinking more about where exactly MOOCs can be of greatest use within higher education systems. The basic challenge is that MOOCs are individual courses, but what matters for most students is a degree.  The only way MOOCs genuinely make sense as part of a higher education

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November 20, 2013 3 Comments

The Future of MOOCs: Coursera and EdX

We saw yesterday that Udacity is leaving the higher education field in order to focus more on contract training.  In some ways, this is no surprise.  Udacity was always the weakest of the Big Three MOOC providers because, in addition to being a private platform, it was also trying to develop much of its own programming, which is quite costly. Coursera, on the other hand, outsources course production to big prestigious institutions – 70-odd of them at last count, including Canada’s

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November 19, 2013 6 Comments

One Thought to Start Your Day

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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