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Tag: Online Learning

MOOCs vs. Learning Outcomes

If you’ve been paying attention at all to higher ed stories in the past year or so, you’ll recognize that, apart from cutbacks, people are mainly talking about two things: Massive, Open, Online Classes (MOOCs), and Learning Outcomes. MOOCs weren’t invented to respond to cutbacks, but policymakers sure seem to treat them as if they were.  The idea that someone out there is giving away courses for FREE just seems like manna from heaven.  Good someones, too: Harvard, MIT, Duke,

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February 26, 2013 3 Comments

Barking Up the Wrong Tree

I haven’t written about MOOCs in awhile, mostly because I’m finding the whole discussion pretty tedious.  They’re an interesting addition to the spectrum of continuing education offerings, and they’ll exist so long as venture capitalists and large, big-brand universities feel like subsidizing the hell out of them. Period. The supposed “value” of MOOCs is that they deliver the same old lecture-driven process at a cheaper price.  But what should be our real priority right now: Making education cheaper, or finding

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December 21, 2012 1 Comment

More Korean Lessons

Higher education is an inherently conservative industry – it’s extremely rare to come across something genuinely new and unique in the field. Which is precisely why Korea’s so interesting: it has a number of genuine system innovations, particularly in lifelong learning, from which a lot of countries could learn. Koreans have what some commentators call “education fever”; as in many Confucian countries, the sacrifices families make to ensure their children get an education are almost incomprehensible to North Americans. But

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October 19, 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

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

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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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