By . Allow me to draw everyone’s attention to a piece last week in the Huffington Post called “How the Liberal Party Plans to Innovate the Way We Innovate”. The piece was written by a Liberal-connected PR/GR flack named Greg MacNeil who works at “public affairs” (read: lobbying) firm Ensight Canada. More...
Diverse Sacrifices, Diverse Rewards, Diverse Policies
By . One of the trickiest things about developing smart higher education policy is that its clients are unbelievably diverse: privileged private-school educated 18 year-olds, first-generation students, working adults, etc. And the returns to education are equally diverse: strong for Bachelors’ and Master’s Degrees but less so for Doctorates, often strong in professionally-oriented fields and less so in Arts. More...
Massification Causes Stratification
By . Once upon a time, higher education was small. Really small. Only a very few people could enter it, and the value of a degree was enormous. Not just in terms of skills/knowledge acquired, or the credential, but also social status. If you’re a fan of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels, just look at the leap in social status and life chances that Elena experiences when she makes it to the Scuola Normale in Pisa (which, by the way, I’ve not quite figured out – why didn’t her teachers route her to the Università degli Studi di Napoli?). More...
What Ottawa Spends
By . The Parliamentary Budget Officer did everyone a solid yesterday by publishing a really helpful compilation of federal government expenditures on higher education. According to the publication, the Government of Canada in 2013-14 spent $12.3 billion on post-secondary education (not including money for apprenticeships, training programs or labour market agreements; that includes $5.1 billion for “human capital measures”, which is mostly Canada Student Loans and Tax Expenditures of various kinds, $3.5 billion for research, three-quarters of which is from the granting councils and the remainder through various departmental programs, and $3.7 billion through the Canada Social Transfer, which is a theoretically earmarked. More...
Normal service will be resumed shortly
By . I have done no blogging over the last month or so as my wife and I have been taking a long vacation which included a spell of 12 days without any Internet connection while I was sailing in a small ship across the Atlantic from San Juan in Puerto Rico to Malaga in Spain. The rest of the time has been spent in Seville in Spain, Paris, France, and ending in England, where I am visiting family. More...
Culture and effective online learning environments
By . Within every learning environment there is a prevailing culture that influences all the other components. In most learning environments, culture is often taken for granted or may be even beyond the consciousness of learners or even teachers. I will try to show why faculty, instructors and teachers should pay special attention to cultural factors, so that they can make conscious decisions about how the different components of a learning environment are implemented. More...
A Retrospective on Implementing Common Course Management Systems
By Phil Hill. At e-Literate we mostly avoid blogging about our consulting work through MindWires Consulting, but we have an opportunity with our work for California’s Online Education Initiative (OEI) to share information with the higher education community on a topic of growing importance. More...
We Have Personalization Backwards
By Mike Caulfield. I drive my oldest daughter to high school every day. She goes to a magnet STEM school in the district that’s on the campus where I work. I’ve been brainwashing her into liking indie rock one car ride at a time using carefully planned mix CDs. More...
The Battle for “Personalized Learning”
By Michael Feldstein. So here we go again. Another terminology war. First there was the battle for open. Then the battle for MOOCs. Somewhere in there was the battle for edupunk. More...