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Category: Teaching & Learning

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

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

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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

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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

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May 30, 2012 4 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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