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One Thought to Start Your Day
One Thought To Start Your Day is our founder and CEO Alex Usher’s popular daily blog, brimming with up-to-the-minute insights and informed opinions on today’s higher education industry.
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Alberta in a Nutshell (2026)
Morning all. A couple of weeks ago, I told you I’d be spending a good number of blogs this year looking at provincial higher education systems and how they are doing. I’m going west-to-east and today it’s Alberta’s turn. As figure 1 shows, overall enrollment in Alberta post-secondary institutions is
Focus Friday: Oct 30
Hi everyone, Thank you so much to everyone who joined us for our last Focus Friday on October 16th. Today, I’ll be joined by Dr. Brenna Clarke Gray, Coordinator, Educational Technologies and Assistant Professor, Learning Design and Innovation at Thompson Rivers University, for a conversation about AI inevitability discourse and
The Fifteen: October 23, 2026
Hi all. A big one this week, with education-related protests in at least half a dozen countries. Let’s get started. That’s all for now. The blog is off next week – we’ll see you back here on November 13 for the next edition of the Fifteen.
Inside Italian Higher Education: Excellence, Affordability and Change
This podcast basically comes in three flavours. In one, we interview authors of new and interesting books. In the second, we talk about current events in one country or another. And in the third, we talk about specific countries’ higher education systems and what makes them interesting and/or distinctive. In
BC Election Manifesto Analysis 2026
I shouldn’t have to write this blog. This Saturday’s provincial election is completely unnecessary. But we’re having it anyways because the galaxy-brains around Premier Dave Eby couldn’t figure out in time that a catastrophically divided opposition might just become less catastrophically divided if faced with the threat of an imminent
Interprovincial Student Mobility
I haven’t looked at the state of interprovincial student mobility in Canada in awhile (last time was back here in 2021) and today seems like as good a time as any to catch up on the latest data. Ready? Let’s go! First, a quick methodological note here: this data does
The AI Challenge is Coming into Focus
Morning all. I have some thoughts today on how AI is likely to affect teaching and assessment in higher education. A few weeks ago, I was at an event hosted by RBC, which was kind of a fireside chat with Anthropic’s Head of North American Government Affairs, Brian Peters. This
Focus Friday: Oct 16
Hi everyone, Thank you so much to all those who attended and participated in our last Focus Friday on October 2nd. Today, I’ll be joined by Simon Bates for a conversation about learning management systems (LMS) and their role in higher education. We’ll be talking about what these platforms are
New Zealand’s Higher Education Crossroads
As I think I’ve mentioned before, New Zealand has one of the most fascinating higher education policy scenes anywhere in the world. Hardly a year goes by where they aren’t making huge changes to research policy, tuition fees, student aid, or international student rules. Must be exhausting to live there.
British Columbia in a Nutshell (2026)
Morning all. A few years ago, I did a series of pieces on provincial higher education systems (for example, back here). I thought I would return to these five or so years later to see what has changed. I’ll be running these periodically over the next eight months or so,
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