juin 2019

Statistics Canada released a couple of papers in the last month which unfairly got zero play in the general media, so thought I would pick them up and amplify them here. More...

Ontario is a weird place sometimes.  One month ago, the government announced that it was implementing a performance-based funding plan which – if you took the government’s half-thought-out comments seriously – raised the possibility that hundreds of millions or perhaps even billions of dollars currently projected to be spent on institutions might be snatched away if institutions failed to hit some ill-defined targets in a type of contract-based funding system. More...

Who deserves to go to university?  Particularly the prestigious ones with selective admissions?
It’s easy enough to say “everyone”, or “anyone with the ability to benefit from it”, but when it comes to any specific institution, usually the demand for spaces exceeds the supply.  When that happens, some type of rationing procedure comes into play.  In nearly every country in the world (Canada is a rare exception), this rationing gets done either partly or completely on the basis of a set of standardized exams. More...

On the higher education front, the line between the two parties was clear.  The coalition under Abbott tried to cut grants to universities while allowing them to recoup funds through a program of radical de-regulation.  Those plans foundered in the Senate, where the government did not have a majority and could not convince the smaller parties to support the plan. More...

By Tony Bates. I have argued in earlier posts that universities and colleges (everywhere, not just Canada) need to move more quickly into digital learning for two separate but linked reasons:

• to develop the knowledge and skills needed in a digital age
• to enable students to know how better to manage and control the digitalization of their lives.

Although Canadian institutions are moving in the direction of more digital learning, it is still a relatively marginalised movement. We need to move to the point where almost all courses include a mix of digital and face-to-face learning, or are fully online, within the next five years. More...

By Tony Bates. This is the second in a series of posts on this topic. The first post looked at external developments that will influence Canadian post-secondary education in the future. In this post, I focus particularly on the Canadian context. More...

By Tony Bates. MOOCs are an interesting and useful development, but they have settled into a niche for continuing education and corporate training rather than disrupting the current system. More...

By Tony Bates. Even though institutions are currently in the process of collecting and returning data for the 2019 survey of online learning in Canadian post-secondary institutions, we (the Canadian Digital Learning Research Association) are still working through some of the 2018 data. More...

By Tony Bates. The short (13 pages) paper by Lomas and Ashburn is required reading for AVP’s Teaching and Learning and for Directors of Online Learning programs. Although clearly focused on the USA, it is also directly relevant here in Canada. More...