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Tag: Trends in PSE

The End of CREPUQ and its Implications

So, the Conseil des Recteurs et Principaux des Universites du Quebec (CREPUQ) died this week, after the number of institutions pulling-out of the alliance rose to eleven. The basics of the dispute are simple.  The big research universities are starving for cash; they’d prefer to get it from tuition fees if they can (students are a more dependable source of income than flighty governments), but they’ll take it via the funding formula if they have to.  From the Laval/Montreal perspective:

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May 3, 2013 No 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

An Avalanche of Nonsense

I wasn’t going to write about the ludicrous new higher education paper, released last month by the UK Institute for Public Policy Research, entitled, An Avalanche is Coming; I didn’t think it had enough exposure to warrant it.  But, since the Globe has now seen fit to publish an extract, I can go whole hog. It starts off with bog-standard, “sky-is-falling” stuff: the global economy is a mess (true, but presumably temporary), the cost of higher education is increasing faster than inflation (true since

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April 17, 2013 3 Comments

The New Normal: Students First, Institutions Last

There’s a new dynamic at work in Canadian higher education.  And it should scare the bejesus out of everyone who cares about the sector. Consider the following: In Alberta, where the Conservative Government last week cut operating budgets by nearly 7%, and institutions have been told to forget about offsetting through tuition fees, the student aid budget rose by almost a quarter. In Ontario, the Liberal Government won re-election last year on a platform of no more money to institutions

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March 14, 2013 2 Comments

The Future of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs)

The extent to which MOOCs will be a genuinely revolutionizing force in higher education is going to depend on three things:  their pedagogy, their ability to convert learning into useful credentials, and their business model.  At the moment, it’s hard to see how MOOCs are succeeding on any of those criteria. Take pedagogy.  The techno-fetishist crowd wants people to believe that, just because a course is online, it must be interactive.  But this is simply false.  Though some MOOCs are

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February 28, 2013 2 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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