By . As you will recall, the Government of Ontario is rolling out a plan to provide enough grants to fully offset tuition in most university and college programs for students from families with incomes of less than $50,000. That’s going to happen by 2017-2018. But the really interesting thing they want to is what they call “net billing”. It’s going to roll out sometime in early 2018 for students starting in the 2018-19 year. More...
By . On the day of the Ontario budget, I half-sarcastically lamented on twitter that since the budget adopted so many good ideas that I (among others) had pushed over the years that, what was there left to write about? But having now had a few days to think about it, it’s occurred to me that there is still a lot of room left to innovate in student aid. More...
By . The goal of this research is to investigate Canada’s use of and capacity in digital and online education, but since it was commissioned by Global Affairs Canada, its focus is primarily on the potential of online and distance learning for attracting international students. Nevertheless this report provides the most extensive data-based analysis to date of online and distance learning in Canadian universities. More...
By . Probably of all the developments in online learning at the moment, competency-based learning is the hottest. The U.S. Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan (2011), praised giving college credit for competency-based learning. President Barack Obama has also spoken in favour of competency-based programs in his proposals to reform higher education (White House Office of the Press Secretary 2013). The U.S. Department of Education is actively encouraging colleges and universities to offer competency-based programs (Field 2013). Many universities, particularly in the USA, are moving in this direction. More...
By . This is the second post on the topic of technology, alienation and the role of education, with a particular focus on the consequences for teaching and learning. The first post was a general introduction to the topic. This post focuses on how technology can lead to alienation, and provides a framework for discussing the possibility of technology alienation in online learning and how to deal with it. More...
By . I live a 30 minute drive from the U.S. border, and like many of my fellow Canadians (and many U.S. colleagues) I have been watching with a mixture of disgust and horror the Donald Trump presidential campaign gathering increasing momentum. However unlike most Canadians, I am not surprised at Trump’s growing success. More...
By Michael Feldstein. Amy Collier was kind enough to post the video and notes from a recent keynote she gave. (For those of you who don’t know Amy, she is the Associate Provost for Digital Learning at Middlebury College and well worth following. She doesn’t blog that often, but when she does, she has interesting things to say.) A central element of her talk was on the “learnification” of education; that is, how the teacher disappears from the conversation about “good” education and the whole thing gets reduced to learners gobbling up little learning objects to get their competency level-up, like a human game of Pac-Man. More...
By Phil Hill and Russ Poulin. A coalition of consumer groups, legal aid organizations and unions object to the state of New York joining an agreement that would change how colleges offering distance education courses in the state would be regulated. As coalition members asserted in an Inside Higher Ed article, the state would be ceding its authority to other states. More...
By Michael Feldstein and Phil Hill. Periodically, we write “full disclosure” posts describing our work and how it relates to our blogging, mostly so that readers can judge any conflict of interests we may have. They are usually not particularly fun or interesting posts, but we feel they are important nevertheless. More...
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