She is no doubt some kind of genius but Coursera chief Professor Daphne Koller doesn’t inhabit some other-worldly dimension in which the enigmatic and the ambiguous are essential vocabulary. She talks common sense, and she talks it good. Coursera has been in the MOOC business since 2011,...
An amazing event happened this week that simply could not have been conceived of in any practical sense in previous eras. It took place, along no doubt with many other splendid things, big and small, amid the business-as-usual tragedy and turmoil that haunts our planet....
It’s been called “the challenge-driven university” – a new model of higher education that emphasises a different approach to student learning. Traditional methods such as lectures and exams are spurned in favour of team work focused on practical problems, with businesses often sponsoring projects and...
In recent decades higher education has become a major economic force around the globe. But have university managers correspondingly become sufficiently business-like? Well, there may be room for improvement according to one opinion this week. But first, the scale – it’s big. According to a Deloitte Access...
The ever-perceptive Simon Marginson posed an intriguing question in a recent speech to the Association of Southeast Asian Institutions of Higher Learning conference in Taiwan. It was - Will higher education become as commonplace as mobile phones? While he didn’t outright answer his own question, the...
Here’s a thing. In this digital age of tablets, handy mobile devices, laptops and other technological must-have accessories, guess what is one of the most popular places on any university campus anywhere in the world? It’s the university library. In the words of the UK’s Society...
Higher education commentators spend a lot of time opining about what universities should, could or ought to do in the relentless drive for change and improvement. This is all legitimate: higher education is our passion - we think it’s great, and we want it to...
Recently Thomson Reuters proclaimed that we are now living in the most innovative age in human history. Analysing global intellectual property data and tracking global scientific literature publications, TR found that overall levels of innovation had sped on at record pace, with global patent volume...
News from the UK of a proposal to allow new degree-granting start-up universities to compete against existing institutions had me thinking: what would you need to start a new university from scratch? Well, you would want a decent (or more likely indecent) amount of money; some...
Tucked away in the stories accompanying the release of the THE World Reputation Rankings 2016 is a thought-provoking comment from Paul Blackmore, professor of Higher Education at King’s College London’s Policy Institute. Reflecting on the strong performance of Asian universities in their continuing climb up the rankings,...