The World of Higher Education Podcast Listen now →

The World of Higher Education Podcast Listen now →

Category: Teaching & Learning

Offshore Education: MOOCs in Africa

If you’ve been reading the OTTSYDs lately, you’ll know that I’m more than a little skeptical when it comes to most claims about MOOCs, and the way they are going to change (or “disrupt”, in the current argot) undergraduate education.  The reason for this is simple: the MOOC value proposition assumes that higher education is about human capital development, not signaling.  This is fundamentally mistaken; for most undergraduates, signaling is enormously important, and obtaining a degree from a real, established

Read More »
March 7, 2013 No Comments

The Future of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs)

The extent to which MOOCs will be a genuinely revolutionizing force in higher education is going to depend on three things:  their pedagogy, their ability to convert learning into useful credentials, and their business model.  At the moment, it’s hard to see how MOOCs are succeeding on any of those criteria. Take pedagogy.  The techno-fetishist crowd wants people to believe that, just because a course is online, it must be interactive.  But this is simply false.  Though some MOOCs are

Read More »
February 28, 2013 2 Comments

MOOCs vs. Learning Outcomes

If you’ve been paying attention at all to higher ed stories in the past year or so, you’ll recognize that, apart from cutbacks, people are mainly talking about two things: Massive, Open, Online Classes (MOOCs), and Learning Outcomes. MOOCs weren’t invented to respond to cutbacks, but policymakers sure seem to treat them as if they were.  The idea that someone out there is giving away courses for FREE just seems like manna from heaven.  Good someones, too: Harvard, MIT, Duke,

Read More »
February 26, 2013 3 Comments

How to Compare Salaries

One of the things that keeps popping up in labour relations is the salary comparison: a union at one institution says, “we deserve what professors at the University of X get”.  It’s a reasonable tactic, but making useful and accurate comparisons at the institutional level is much harder than it looks, and one needs to be alert to the possibility of cherry-picking comparisons. Academic salaries in Canada are, for the most part, based on three things: rank, years of service,

Read More »
February 12, 2013 1 Comment

The Curiosity of School

One book that got a little bit of attention, and a lot of Indigo/Chapters shelf space,  over the Christmas period was a little tome called The Curiosity of School, by Ontario freelance writer, Xander Sherman.  While the book does contain the occasional nugget (the bits on testing are kind of fun), it remains unquestionably the worst book I’ve ever read on education! The basic thesis here – from the home-schooled Sherman – is that School gets in the way of real education, and is

Read More »
January 11, 2013 2 Comments
Load More

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.

Subscribe

Search Posts

Search Publications

Social Media

Linkedin Youtube Spotify

Recent Posts

More thoughts on...