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Category: Teaching & Learning

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.

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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

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May 3, 2012 No Comments

New Economies, New University

Yesterday, we looked at how the economy was being increasingly divided into a successful, productive globally-traded goods sector, and a more sheltered mostly public-service focused sector. I also noted how certain parts of the university such as engineering, computer science, biomedicine, and finance/management have tended to adopt the views of people involved in the first group of industries, while arts, education, social work, etc., align with the second. This matters because, increasingly, governments are getting concerned about productivity. Due to

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April 27, 2012 No Comments

So, Competency-Based Education, Then

Competency-based education is not rocket science; demonstrate mastery over a particular set of material and you get a credential. This approach is common in informal education: badges for swimming and Guides, belts for martial arts, etc. Red Seal apprenticeships also operate this way. Formal systems of education are more leery of this approach. In K-12, it is assumed that time served is more important than demonstrated skills in moving students from one level to another. Undergraduate education in North America

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February 10, 2012 1 Comment

Why MITx Changes Very Little

Just now, there are a lot of interesting online educational experiments popping up, like Sebastian Thrun’s Udacity, or the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s MITx project. But there’s a huge barrier to this happening, and that barrier is credentialism. People who focus on higher education don’t always get this, because they really care about learning. And because of this, they tend to focus on learning content rather than on the pieces of paper one gets at the end of it. But

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February 9, 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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