By Alex Usher. You know what?  We at HESA Towers can help with that!  Evidence-based analysis is what we do!  Let’s see if we can’t save the cash-strapped government of New Brunswick a few bucks and do some of this analysis for them, gratis. More...

By Alex Usher. Among those legislative and oversight offices abolished last week was that of the French Language Services Commissioner, which is widely – and correctly – viewed as a key pillar supporting minority language rights in the province.  Ontario francophones – and to some degree francophones in Québec as well (see Patrick Lagacé’s forceful piece  in English (!) in yesterday’s La Presse) are rightly angry. More...

By Alex Usher. Higher education strategy in the Canadian north is tricky. Challenges include from the huge distances, the tiny populations, and the responsibility to support Indigenous populations with specific cultural, educational and scientific needs. More...

By Alex Usher. Last week Tony Bates, arguably the doyen of Canadian digital education, posted an intriguing little article called Why Canada Needs Five New Digital Universities on his blog at the Contact North website. Basically, Bates’ argument is that the future of learning is hybridized learning – that is a mix of face-to-face and online learning – though we don’t yet know exactly how best to mix those two to achieve best results for different learners at different levels in different subjects. More...

By Alex Usher. Now I’ve written a little bit about Wānangas before, and they certainly are an interesting model.  New Zealand has three of them: the largest of the three (Te Wānanga o Aotearoa) has over 20,000 students in 80 or so locations across New Zealand (they’ve largely avoided getting bogged down in campus infrastructure), with a set of program offerings not entirely unlike those of Canadian polytechnics. More...

By Alex Usher. We are coming up on the first anniversary of the implementation of free first-year fees at New Zealand universities and colleges, and so naturally people want to litigate about what happened, is it working, etc.  Generally, New Zealand has *excellent* data on post-secondary education.  Nevertheless, its current debate on “did free first-year work” is a bit disastrous, mainly because people there can’t seem to agree on the terms of the debate. More...

By Alex Usher. During my brief trip to Asia, I spent a fair bit of time chatting with people who one way or another are in the international education business.  Two somewhat connected thoughts:

1. Canadians Continue to be Not Very Good at the Whole International Campus Thing.

  I spent a couple of days in Dubai, where there are now somewhere on the order of 100-odd institutions operating, a substantial portion of which are international.  The only “semi”- Canadian one is an outfit called the “Canadian University of Dubai”, which is a fascinating little organization. More...

By Alex Usher. Yesterday, I discussed the need to change culture in Indian universities to make them a bit more focused on output and less focused on the employment privileges of their faculty.  There is one trick the Modi government has used in this respect, the National Institutional Ranking Framework (NIRF).  That’s right – in India, the government ranks its institutions. More...

By Alex Usher. First up, India, which has maybe the world’s most complicated higher education system (which I detailed in a three-parter back in 2014, here, here, and here – this blog will probably make more sense if you read them first).  Stripped to its essentials, India has the world’s second largest public higher education system, and the world’s largest system of private education. More...