By Alex Usher. First of all, we are getting a lot of new data at the international level.  There are two primary sources for this. The first is the THE rankings – in particular their new European Teaching Rankings, which use surveys to look at student engagement and the student experience.  This is excellent.  It’s not the first time this has been attempted – U-Multirank has done this for a couple of years now – but THE taking up this data brings this approach into some of the world’s largest universities (THE also did something similar in its US rankings). More...

By Alex Usher. On Friday, I talked a little bit about rankings which looked at universities’ “Third Mission”.  This is a new term for many North American readers, but it’s not much different than when we use “service” at an institutional level rather than an individual level.  But the notion of “service” is itself a pretty slippery one, so perhaps it is of interest to delve into this topic a bit. More...

By Alex Usher. While national rankings were old hat, the Shanghai Rankings’ global nature was something genuinely new.  The sadly-defunct magazine Asiaweek had tried doing a regional ranking in the late 1990s but it failed because – like US News and Maclean’s – they relied on a methodology which required institutional participation and once a few big institutions say no, the whole thing fell apart. More...

By Alex Usher. One of the many unrealized promises of the last decade or so has been the idea that the types of credentials available to student – micro-credentials, stacked credentials Coursera-style “specializations”, whatever – would proliferate. More...

By Alex Usher. HEQCO produced a fascinating report on skills last week, which I want to explore in depth.  Unfortunately, it has put a few people’s backs up because of a couple of poorly-chosen sentences in a covering press release, which I will also explore. More...

By Alex Usher. The Logic, a new subscription journalism outlet dedicated to Canadian innovation and tech policy, had a couple of great stories about a month ago that are worth highlighting simply to remember the general poverty of the standard U-15/Universities Canada line about higher education and economic growth. More...