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Category: Teaching & Learning

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

Udacity has Left the Building

There was a big story in MOOC-world last week, which the mainstream press has surprisingly yet to pick up on; namely, that Udacity, one of the three big corporate MOOC players, has just left the building. Udacity, if you recall, was created by one Sebastian Thrun, a computer scientist at Stanford.  It was he who kicked off the current MOOC craze by opening up one of his computer science classes to the world, and then finding out that 160,000 people

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November 18, 2013 7 Comments

Teach for Canada: Attack of the Kielberger Colonialists

I see the Globe has given some laudatory coverage to something called “Teach for Canada”.  The brain-child of a couple of Bay Street types (who have never themselves taught a class), the idea here is to shamelessly rip-off Teach for America (TFA) and apply its methods to the problem of low achievement among the country’s Aboriginal youth. This is a terrible idea.  And here’s why: TFA recruits top university graduates right out of their undergraduate program, to do two years of teaching

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November 6, 2013 5 Comments

Revisiting BS

Seems I hit a nerve last week when I wrote about Teaching v. Research. Between the emails and the twitter chat afterwards, I can safely say I’ve never received as much feedback on a piece as I did on that one.  As a result, I thought I should respond to a few of the key lines of discussion. Interestingly, few critics seemed to have picked up on the fact that I was attacking the hypocrisy and sanctimony around the teaching/research

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September 23, 2013 No 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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