Tag: Australia

Australia is Better than Canada

…at least as far as thinking through the implications of globalization on education.   And I’m not talking just about the trivial matter of attracting more students to study at their universities. About a week ago, the Australian government released a forward-looking White Paper called Australia in the Asian Century which charted a set of strategies to improve Australia’s chances of benefiting from the continuing Asian economic boom.  Some of those strategies were education-related; one was to get ten Australian universities into the world’s

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Too Much Peer Review?

One way in which Canada stands out internationally in higher education is our ultra-reliance on individual peer review as a means of allocating research funding. While peer review is in many ways the “gold standard” of research assessment mechanisms, it has the drawback of being incredibly time-consuming, both for the applicant and for the assessors. What’s the alternative, though? Well, as Paula Stephan points out in her quite excellent book How Economics Shape Science, there are a number of ways that

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