By . You may have read recently about how Canada is really sticking it to junior researchers. Dalhousie’s Julia Wright recently wrote about Canada haemorrhaging early-career research capacity and she has a point – just in the last seven years, the proportion of Canadian faculty aged 40 or less has fallen by a third, from roughly 22% to just over 15%. More...
By . Though it didn’t get a whole lot of ink/pixels, the Council of Ontario Universities launched a new lobbying campaign last week. It’s called Partnering for a Better Future for Ontario and its focal point is a document of the same name – you can read the short version of the report here (yes, I know, only in academia could the short version of a lobbying report be 44 pages long). In fact, it’s accompanied by a wide variety of supporting documents which are available on the campaign website. More...
By . One minor Canadian publishing event of note this fall was the release of Anthony Lacavera’s How We Can Win (or possibly, Kate Fillion’s How We Can Win, since it’s fairly clear she’s the one who actually wrote it). Lacavera is a minor celebrity in Canada for having been a serial CEO, most notably of WIND Canada, which briefly challenged the Bell/Telus/Rogers telecom oligopoly. More...
By . In the last couple of weeks, I have discovered an entirely new category of book: ones which you enjoy reading and contain plenty of fantastic information and insightful observations, but whose central thesis is demonstrably wrong and does not hold up to scrutiny. More...
By . Now, census data isn’t usually something that drives big headlines. You usually have plenty of notice about things like “people getting more educated than they used to”, so the census isn’t a big source of surprises unless something really bad happens in data processing. For instance, there’s that famous story (possibly apocryphal, I’m not vouching for its veracity) about how a coding error in the 1971 census led Statscan to report the existence of over 1,000 Yiddish-speaking Inuit in Canada. More...
By . The big news in Canada last week was the unveiling by the governing Liberals of a “National Housing Strategy”. Housing is a good policy file to watch for higher education policy types, because housing and higher education share a lot of qualities. More...
By . The Open University of Catalonia has produced a short (3 minutes 45 seconds) YouTube video of me talking (in English) about how open content will change the role of instructors. More...By . 2017 was a very interesting year for me, if not for online learning as a whole. I have a very different interface with online learning these days from most people, more that of an observer than as a participant, which has both advantages and disadvantages, but it does give me a somewhat wider perspective, so first, here’s what I did, then second what I learned from my experience. More...By . I have just completed two sub-reports on the 2017 national survey of online learning in Canadian post-secondary institutions. The first was on the responses from Ontario institutions, and the second on responses from institutions in British Columbia (also to be available shortly on the survey web site). More...By . The Open University of Catalonia has produced a slightly longer (6 minutes 17 seconds) YouTube video of me talking (in English) about how educational institutions should rethink their organization in an global world. More.../https%3A%2F%2Fprofilepics.canalblog.com%2Fprofilepics%2F1%2F0%2F1076071.jpg)
