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Janice Deakin and Julia Colyar — Introducing the new HEQCO Research Roadmap

Our appointments as CEO and Vice President just over a year ago turned out to be coincident with many things, some anticipated and others not! The need to develop a new strategic research framework to guide HEQCO’s activities for the next three years was top of mind for us; however the path to completion was […]

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Amy Kaufman — Ontario colleges at 50: Vive la différence

In 1967, then Minister of Education Bill Davis launched a network of Colleges of Applied Arts and Technology. It was kind of a radical idea. He envisioned a set of comprehensive institutions that would offer a wide variety of programs focused on skill development through hands-on training. The colleges would provide flexible learning options — […]

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It’sNotAcademic – The podcast: Episode six with Hamish Coates

Welcome to the latest episode of It’sNotAcademic: the podcast – education conversations from HEQCO. Last month, HEQCO invited experts from across Canada and the world to take part in a two-day workshop examining a big question: “How do you assess qualiy in higher education?” One of the participants was Hamish Coates, professor of higher education […]

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Harvey P. Weingarten – “Plans are useless but planning is indispensable.”

These are the words of former US President Dwight Eisenhower about how one plans for battle. One reason “I like Ike” is that his words capture HEQCO’s philosophy of planning. He understood that plans are useless when they get too specific, try to predict the future with certainty, and prompt fights over every comma in […]

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Harvey P. Weingarten – The challenge of change: advice from Keynes

In the preface to his book, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, John Maynard Keynes wrote: “The ideas which are expressed here…are extremely simple and should be obvious. The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping from the old ones, which ramify, for those brought up as most of us […]

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EduData – Ontario’s 20 Unique Universities

There’s good reason that Ontario is promoting differentiation in its higher education system. Differentiation – where institutions build on their specific strengths, mandates and missions – delivers real choice for students, better quality, and a system we can all afford to sustain and grow. Our visualization showcases the existing state of differentiation between Ontario’s 20 […]

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Harvey P. Weingarten – Goals vs. strategies: A postsecondary primer

In any policy initiative, it is important to distinguish between goals and strategies.  Goals are things you are trying to achieve – the outcomes you are seeking.  Strategies are processes and actions that can be employed to achieve these desired outcomes. Strategies are not ends in themselves.  Rather, they are tools.  Strategies have no inherent […]

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Martin Hicks – Extra, extra, read all about it

We’re gonna quote right out of the newspaper.  That way, you won’t have to worry that we’re making it all up.  These are verbatim quotes about the Ontario university funding model review.  The headline reads: “Sustaining Quality in Changing Times” “Persistent deficits and a growing debt burden limit the ability of governments at every level to […]

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EduData – Grad student ratios more diverse in western Canada

Ontario is working to transform its postsecondary education system through differentiation – where institutions build on their individual strengths. One component of differentiation is the graduate to undergraduate ratio. The above graph displays the institutional spread of graduate level enrolment by province. Newfoundland & Labrador and Prince Edward Island are single university jurisdictions and therefore […]