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Tag: Online Learning

The Future of the Master’s Degree

Go back a few years and all the “in” talk among higher education fad merchants was how online education was going to disrupt universities, put 9/10ths of them out of business, yadda yadda.  It was all nonsense of course – most of the predictions were predicated on the idea that undergraduates were prepared to forego a primarily social experience in favour of a mostly solitary, online experience.  This was always palpable nonsense peddled by people who seemed to think that

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January 8, 2019 1 Comment

New Digital Universities

Last week Tony Bates, arguably the doyen of Canadian digital education, posted an intriguing little article called Why Canada Needs Five New Digital Universities on his blog at the Contact North website. Basically, Bates’ argument is that the future of learning is hybridized learning – that is a mix of face-to-face and online learning – though we don’t yet know exactly how best to mix those two to achieve best results for different learners at different levels in different subjects.  Not only

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November 19, 2018 1 Comment

The Advance of Online Education in Canada

There was a time – six years or so ago now – when people were talking about the death of universities and the rise of MOOCs. (A collection of my previous posts on MOOCs can be found here).  Among the many, many things this debate obscured was the fact that education delivered online was almost as old as the internet itself. Online education was mature, not some newfangled idea (in the Silicon Valley version of history, everything not invented in

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January 31, 2018 4 Comments

The Minerva Project

The Minerva Project, an intriguing concept which bills itself as the world’s “first online Ivy League University”, has been making some news lately.  The idea, in a nutshell, is this: the Minerva will all be taught online, with curricula designed by “the world’s top professors” (yawn), but classes taught by some of America’s many talented, but underemployed (and hence cheap) sessionals.  We aren’t talking MOOCs here – these classes will be limited to 25 students each, so as to maximize

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April 30, 2013 1 Comment

Offshore Education: MOOCs in Africa

If you’ve been reading the OTTSYDs lately, you’ll know that I’m more than a little skeptical when it comes to most claims about MOOCs, and the way they are going to change (or “disrupt”, in the current argot) undergraduate education.  The reason for this is simple: the MOOC value proposition assumes that higher education is about human capital development, not signaling.  This is fundamentally mistaken; for most undergraduates, signaling is enormously important, and obtaining a degree from a real, established

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March 7, 2013 No 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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