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
Sometimes people ask me: “what would I change in higher education, if I could”? My answer varies, but right now my fondest wish is for everyone to just cut the BS around the teaching/research balance. Whenever a debate on teaching and research starts, there’s always people who either intimate how “unfortunate” it is that we have to talk about trade-offs, or people who claim that any deviation from the current trade-off means the death of the academic. But this is
An interesting little exercise in budget analysis: There are just under 5600 humanities professors at Canadian universities, and 7600 in the social sciences (excluding law, which is another 600 or so). On average, these people make about $108,000/year (slightly higher in social sciences, slightly lower in humanities). Add another 25% on that for payroll taxes, health, and pension, and the direct costs of employing these folks is about $135,000 per year. That comes out to about $1.85 billion in total.
This year was supposed to be the Year of the MOOC. With summer coming, it’s worth asking the question: how have they done and where are they headed? To me, the answer comes down to developments in three areas: Demand. This year, MOOCs have proved that i) there is lots of interest in free, continuing education out there – mostly from people who already have degrees – and ii) there are an awful lot of universities who think that catering
Remember when Coursera – the world’s largest purveyor of Massively Open Online Courses (MOOCs) – was going to disrupt higher education, and put hundreds if not thousands of public institutions out of business? I know it’s hard to cast your mind back all of eighteen months, but try. Actually don’t. Because it’s all over. Yesterday, Coursera did a weird strategy about-face by announcing that, rather than competing with public colleges, it’s going to start competing with Blackboard instead. We’ve been heading
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