Category: Worldwide PSE

Brazilian Higher Education

Hello. I’m Alex Usher and this is the World of Higher Education podcast. Brazil’s higher education system is a lot like the country itself. Big. Complicated. Riddled with inequality. And above all – still growing fast. In some ways it’s a fun-house mirror of the American system. It’s highly stratified, but the prestigious institutions for the most part are public and free rather than private and expensive. There’s a huge chunk of the system which is access-driven, but it is

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HESA’s AI Observatory: What’s new in higher education (Sept. 29th, 2023)

Spotlight Good afternoon all, Thanks to those of you who joined us for our AI Roundtable on Pedagogy and curriculum last Tuesday, and for sharing your knowledge and experience in the chat.  It was interesting to learn more about the possibilities of GenAI in developing teaching and learning materials. From drafting learning objectives and lesson plans to building rubrics and drafting quizzes, there are clearly a lot of ways GenAI could support instructors. However, many questions remain, notably with respect

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Higher Education in India

Hi everyone. I’m Alex Usher and this is The World of Higher Education podcast. It’s something of a cliché to think of India as a “sleeping giant” when it comes to higher education. But in some ways the term fits. India is capable of truly impressive feats of applied science and Engineering – last month’s Chandrayaan-3 moon landing, put together by the Indian Space Research Organization on an absolute pittance is perhaps the example that comes to mind most readily.

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HESA’s AI Observatory: What’s new in higher education (Sept. 22nd, 2023)

Spotlight Good afternoon all, If you’ve been reading our AI-focused emails in the past few weeks, you’ll know that we’ve been noting that higher education institutions are mainly focusing their policy efforts on developing guidelines about generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) in teaching and learning (T&L), while staying relatively silent on how to (or not) integrate AI in business operations. However, the lack of guidance doesn’t mean AI isn’t being increasingly used for operational purposes in institutions. We’ve already shared many

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Confessions of a Minor Bureaucrat at a Chinese University

Hello everyone. I’m Alex Usher and this is the World of Higher Education Podcast. One of the hardest things in comparative international higher education studies is getting a sense of how other countries’ systems actually work. If you look at statistical compendiums – say, OECD’s Education at a Glance – there is a tendency to imagine all systems as identical because they all in one way or another push out a similar palette of outputs: bachelor’s degrees, master’s degrees, doctorates,

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