The World of Higher Education Podcast Listen now →

The World of Higher Education Podcast Listen now →

Category: Teaching & Learning

Overhyped Higher Education Meme, Summer 2012 Edition

I’d be remiss not to mention the latest round of educational techno-fetishist whooping that has accompanied recent announcements from EdX and Coursera. To recap: Berkeley has crashed the Harvard-MIT party at Edx (formerly MITx), a system for providing free online courses. Meanwhile, online education company Coursera has signed up a large number of universities – including the University of Toronto. Coursera and EdX are both providing free, non-credit courses to worldwide audiences; the main difference is that EdX is a

Read More »
July 30, 2012 5 Comments

Counting Faculty, Counting Students

Though amateur higher education statisticians are addicted to it, there is virtually no statistic less useful than the student-staff ratio. There are basically two reasons why this is the case. The first is that not all students are alike. Some are full-time, some are part-time. This problem is reasonably easy to solve by creating a method for calculating full-time equivalency. But for this, the number of credit-hours students take must be transparent. The second is that not all professors are

Read More »
June 6, 2012 2 Comments

Core Curricula, Better Outcomes

The core problem of ensuring that university students get the general employability skills they want and need to succeed in the labour market isn’t that universities think it’s the wrong thing to do. Rather, the problem is that they think it’s flat-out impossible. To be clear, this isn’t because they think that competencies acquired in general arts and sciences are antithetical to those in demand in the labour market (in fact they seem to believe the opposite). Rather it is

Read More »
May 30, 2012 4 Comments

Student Stereotypes in Four Graphs

We all know about stereotypes when it comes to students: computer science students resemble characters from The Big Bang Theory, arts students are inordinately fond of hackie-sack, etc. But is there any truth to this? Well, there is some, as it turns out. About a year ago we asked our CanEd Student Research Panel a series of questions about their attitudes toward academic challenges. The answers we got were interesting because of the way they broke down by field of study.

Read More »
May 4, 2012 3 Comments

Chasing a Buck

There are a lot of institutions facing a demographic challenge over the next few years. Outside the GTA and the B.C. lower mainland, the youth population is in decline, and that means institutions in these regions are either going to have to start increasing their yields or find some new markets to exploit. (Or, I suppose, cut their budgets a bit, but that seems to be a last resort.) Though I can’t claim to have a lot of granular detail

Read More »
May 3, 2012 No 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.

Subscribe

Search Posts

Search Publications

Social Media

Linkedin Youtube Spotify

Recent Posts

More thoughts on...