By . People are always nattering on about skills for the new economy, but apart from some truly unhelpful ideas like “everyone should learn to code”, they are usually pretty vague on specifics about what that means. But I think I have solved that. More...
By . The father of modern university rankings is James McKeen Cattell, a well-known early 20th-century psychologist, scientific editor (he ran the journals Science and Psychological Review) and eugenecist. In 1903, he began publishing American Men of Science, a semi-regular rating of the country’s top scientists, as rated by university department chairs. He then hit on the idea of counting how many of these scientists were graduates of the nation’s various universities. More...
By . You may recall that a few weeks ago I profiled the higher education/science/youth proposals of the various Conservative Party leadership hopefuls. More...
By . Anyways, my take on this is basically that you need to take into consideration several centuries worth of history to really get the Canada-US difference. Well into the nineteenth century, the principal model for US higher education was Cambridge and Oxford, which were residential colleges. More...
By . One of the rallying calls of part of the scientific community over the past few years is how under the Harper government there was too much of a focus on “applied” research and not enough of a focus on “pure”/”basic”/”fundamental research. This call is reaching a fever pitch following the publication of the Naylor Report (which, to its credit, did not get into a basic/applied debate and focussed instead on whether or not the research was “investigator-driven”, which is a different and better distinction). More...
By . You know how it is when someone tries to make a point about Canadian higher education using data from American universities? It’s annoying. Makes you want to (verbally) smack them upside the head. Canada and the US are different, you want to yell. Don’t assume the data are the same! But of course the problem is there usually isn’t any Canadian data, which is part of why these generalizations get started in the first place. More...
By . This conference was a bit different for me as I was heavily engaged in a number of different activities, including:
By . This is the first national snapshot of online and distance learning for both colleges and universities in Canada but its value will be much enhanced by a more longitudinal set of studies. The research team is working with potential sponsors to establish a stronger organizational structure, more secure long-term funding, and a more representative steering committee for the survey. I will be reporting back as these developments evolve. More...By . I’m in Barcelona for a conference on innovation in teaching in higher education, organized by the Open University of Catalonia (UOC). As I worked at UOC for a while between 2003-2009, I have many good friends here. By . Hi, everyone, and welcome back. I hope you all had a great summer. As many readers will know, I am leading a team conducting a survey of online and distance learning in Canadian public post-secondary educational institutions. You can get more general information about the survey from earlier posts:
Building a national survey of online learning in Canada, (2 December, 2016)
Update on Canadian survey of online learning (27 May, 2017)
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