Employer: “Kid, everyone has a high school diploma. What else you got?” —over a century ago, a high school diploma meant something, but this is what it’s worth today. Part of what made a college degree valuable was scarcity—not everyone had one. Once government made high school “free” for everyone, our kids left high school […] … learn more→

Online learning is expanding in Canada at a rate of about 8.75 per cent every year. This shift to online environments has redefined the format of education. Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), for example, have become wildly popular, with more than 700 universities offering 6,850 courses to 58 million students in 2016. Universities promote online […] … learn more→

When I started lecturing full-time a little over five years ago, I knew what everybody does: that we all learn better by doing. I knew that “active learning” – literally doing anything apart from just talking through a PowerPoint presentation – is the way to go. I’d also been introduced to the “flipped classroom” concept, […] … learn more→

Academic conferences can be full of networking opportunities and professional wisdom. For me, last month’s Society for the Study of Social Problems international conference was brimful of both. I had the privilege to attend talks given by prolific scholars and senior editors from across the country. I also had the opportunity to have one-on-one conversations […] … learn more→

Eleven years ago today, the Department of Education released the culminating report of its Spellings Commission on the Future of Higher Education. That report, spearheaded by then-U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings, laid out a bold vision for greater accountability and transparency in the postsecondary education system. But over a decade later, few of the […] … learn more→

In a healthy, growing economy, one group should not be gaining at the expense of others. A rising tide is said to lift all boats, but does it? Consider where things stand in the US today. The aggregate US GDP may have grown over the past 40 years, but increasing income inequality has resulted in a very large […] … learn more→

Although I got reasonable marks for my creative essays in high school, literary criticism was never my strong suit. One of the issues with my analytical writing was that I didn’t really understand how to use verbs. It wasn’t until I nearly finished my masters degree that I found out that verbs function in academic […] … learn more→

Educational psychologist Dr Benjamin Bloom wanted to understand how people learn. So in 1965 he and his colleagues created Bloom’s taxonomy: a system for identifying, understanding and addressing learning. They came up with a system that’s composed of two elements: thinking and the ability to apply knowledge, and then feelings and emotions. When a student […] … learn more→

As the student loan debt is now getting closer to 2 trillion dollars than 1 trillion dollars1, it’s time to consider how it happened. “Cargo Cult” refers to religious splinter groups that kept forming among the stone-age tribes in the Pacific as they encountered modern civilization, during the 20th century. The best book to discuss […] … learn more→

While some of my esteemed colleagues are heralding the imminent arrival of robot teachers, stating that current advances will bring “the greatest revolution in education since the printing press”, I have to disagree. This is not because I am a latent technophobe. Regent’s University London, for example, is currently investigating the very latest assistive technologies, including how […] … learn more→