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Category: Teaching & Learning

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,

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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

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January 11, 2013 2 Comments

Modularization vs. Learning Outcomes

If you’ve been near education conferences in the last year or so, the chances are that you’ve heard at least one of the two following propositions. 1)      “Modularization is the Future”.  People don’t need full degrees, they need knowledge in bite-size chunks, and they need it “on-demand”.  That means that learning needs to come in tiny little bits, and certification for learning needs to come in tiny, bite-size pieces, too.  This is partly what’s pushing the enthusiasm behind certain MOOCs and ideas like “Open

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November 9, 2012 No Comments

Maybe It Is Time to Pay Attention

As I noted yesterday, the strong likelihood is that to whatever extent higher education does move online, it will be dominated by a few strong players associated with strong brand names. The problem is that institutions with strong brand names are the ones least likely to risk those brands by messing around with alternative degree-granting mechanisms. That’s why, to date, all the institutions participating in either EdX or Coursera have been very firm about keeping everything on a non-credit basis. If

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September 12, 2012 No Comments

Airline Models?

Some of you may have seen Thomas Klassen’s piece in the Ottawa Citizen last week. It’s a nice short piece which succinctly lays out the “bricks vs. clicks” argument in higher education, and why the former is better than the latter. That said, I think his central premise – that universities are becoming more like airlines – is mostly wrong. Here’s his exact quote: The emerging business model of many universities is that pioneered by airlines. That is, a group of

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September 11, 2012 1 Comment

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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