By Brent Epperson. Three months after the Shakespearean drama at the University of Saskatchewan unfolded and the initial media wave has died down, we have an opportunity for sober reflection on the ways our universities are governed. In particular, it’s a chance to talk about the uncomfortable relationship between corporate culture and collegial governance. More...
By Léo Charbonneau. Zombies have spread like a virus through popular culture. They’re also a useful, albeit fanciful, way to demonstrate how a real virus might spread in the human population, says Robert Smith?, an associate professor in the department of mathematics and statistics at the University of Ottawa (the professor spells his name with a question mark). He has become the go-to guy for the mathematical modeling of a zombie outbreak ever since the publication of his first paper on the subject in 2009. More...
By Natalie Samson. Most of the conversation around digital tools in Canadian higher education has been limited to the classroom, marketing and fundraising. But, according to Hamza Khan, there’s one department that’s been noticeably missing from this discussion: student affairs. Mr. Khan is working hard to change that as coordinator of Ryerson University’s recently unveiled student affairs creative team (he was digital community facilitator in the office of student life programs at Ryerson until this month). More...
The latest Scimago Institutions Rankings show that, when sheer quantity of research is considered, non-university research centres are increasingly important. For production of papers, the top three places go to the National Centre for Scientific Research in France, the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Russian Academy of Sciences while several government research centres, medical institutes and hospitals can be found in the top 100 of the Production indicator. Looking at the ranking of universities only, the top 20 for output of papers show that American dominance is becoming less pronounced while the Chinese presence is more noticeable.
There are eight US, four Chinese, three British and two Japanese institutions among the top 20 universities with one each from Canada, Brazil and France. The first five places go to Harvard, Tokyo, Toronto, Sao Paulo and Tsinghua.
Source SCIMAGO Institutions Rankings.
By Ben Etherington. FEDERAL parliament sits next week and on the menu is Christopher Pyne’s reform package for higher education. There will be a debate, but from the perspective of many who care about universities, it will be a pseudo-debate. It will concern not the framework of policy, but the mode of distribution of resources within a conception of higher education provision on which the two major parties have long been in agreement. More...
HEFCE welcomes the new streamlined guidance for the Transparent Approach to Costing (TRAC) published by the TRAC Development Group (TDG). This will apply for reporting from the academic year 2014-15 onwards.
See the new TRAC Guidance. More...
In November 2013 we sent ‘Recurrent teaching grant from 2015-16’ (HEFCE Circular letter 30/2013), to notify institutions of our proposals for distributing recurrent teaching grant from 2015-16 onwards. Our aim was to simplify the process that had been in place since 2012-13 to manage the transfer of a sizeable proportion of higher education funding from HEFCE grants to student fees. We invited comment on our proposals, which informed the plans that were put to the HEFCE Board. More...
How can we benefit from OEP and an increasingly multilingual and culturally diverse society? What does this imply for policymaking? And what are the issues that need our further attention?
Open Educational Resources (OER) in less used languages: a state of the art report . OER for less used languages. More...
The webinar will address the challenges of the use of Open Educational Resources (OER) for less used languages.
The webinar, organised by the LangOER project in cooperation with the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, will take place on 19 September from 14:00h-15:00h (CET). OER for less used languages. More...
Google has announced that Google Classroom, their latest addition Apps for Education, is available for all. Google Classroom is a product designed in collaboration with teachers to help them save time, keep classes organised and improve communication with students. Google Classroom. More...
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