By Alex Usher. Yesterday I looked at the situation at Purdue University in Indiana and noted that one of the things permitting the “miracle” of frozen tuition was the significant increase in state appropriations over the last few years. More...

By Alex Usher. The Government of Saskatchewan delivered its budget yesterday which means that all ten provinces are now in – much earlier than usual (there’s usually one irritating May holdout).  And guess what?  It’s another year of (on aggregate at least) barely keeping up with inflation. More...

By Alex Usher. Late last week the Business Higher Education Roundtable published the results of a survey of its members (big Canadian businesses) on the issue of skills.  The results were…intriguing. More...

By Alex Usher. Our usual annual round-up of provincial budgets will come Wednesday, right after Saskatchewan posts its numbers, but as I was writing a draft of the piece I realized it makes almost no sense to talk about national trends in provincial funding without looking at what is going on in Ontario, because to a large extent it drives the national numbers. More...

By Alex Usher. Then yesterday, I examined what lessons the Minerva had for the rest of academia in terms of building curricula.  Today I want to turn to pedagogy and assessment. Assessment, in particular, is ripe for a deep re-think and overhaul. More...

By Alex Usher. Following on from yesterday’s discussion of the Minerva model (you might want to refresh your memory by re-reading yesterday’s entry, as detailed in the book Building the Intentional University: Minerva and the Future of Higher Education, I wanted to get into a bit more detail about whether the Minerva curriculum is a foretaste of things to come, a weird one-off, or an evolutionary dead-end. More...

By Alex Usher. I’ve recently been reading a fascinating book entitled Building the Intentional University: Minerva and the Future of Higher Education which essentially is an operating manual for the Minerva Schools (if you have never heard of, or have forgotten Minerva, I did a write-up of it back in 2013). What everyone remembers about Minerva is the sizzle – students move across seven cities in four years (San Francisco for a year, followed by one term in each of Seoul, Hyderabad, Berlin, Buenos Aires, Taipei and London) and all classrooms are electronically-mediated. More...

By Alex Usher. For giggles, every once in awhile I start looking at institutional enrolment data.  This weekend, I started looking specifically at community colleges.  I noted back here that enrolment in colleges nationally has been pretty flat for the last five years, but that’s a national picture only. More...

By Alex Usher. A few years ago, when the Government of Canada released its “Strategy for International Education”, I gave the document a lot of stick because it wasn’t really a strategy, possessed no serious logic model and generally didn’t link resources to expected outcomes.  It was more of a laundry list of things attached to a relatively arbitrary target more than anything else. More...