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Jesse Brown: How to get a university education without paying tuition—or changing out of your PJs

The proliferation of online courses means anyone can get a world-class education for free. It’s all about upending the fusty old lecture hall model, and it’s about time

By Jesse Brown | Illustration by Steven Murray

I’m studying sociology at Princeton in my spare time. I’m also taking game theory at Stanford, computer programming at the University of Toronto and equine nutrition at the University of Edinburgh. I attend class in my underwear, watch cartoons during lectures and cheat on tests with help from some of my hundreds of thousands of classmates. The classes I’m enrolled in are called MOOCs—Massive Open Online Courses, available for free to knowledge-hungry students of life like myself through the educational website Coursera.

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The Informer

Features

January 28, 2013 | 10:45 am

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The Audit: bank bonuses, the Blue Jays’ payroll and the month’s other notable numbers

Total increase for the 2013 Toronto Police Service budget, notably less than the $21.4 million Chief Blair requested.

Monthly fee to read the Toronto Sun’s “premium articles,” a designation that includes the Sunshine Girl but not breaking news.

$77

Cost for a six-pack of Westvleteren XII, a rare beer previously sold only at the Belgian abbey where it’s brewed. At the Yonge Street and Queens Quay LCBO, all 120 cases sold out in four minutes.

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Features

December 4, 2012 | 1:00 pm

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50 Most Influential 2012: nine formidable Toronto power couples

Individually, they’re among Toronto’s biggest bigwigs. Together, they’re unstoppable. Here, a look at the Toronto power couples defining the city today.

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People

November 23, 2012 | 9:45 am

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Q&A: Amjad Tarsin, U of T’s new Islamic chaplain, on Gaddafi, TIFF and moving to Toronto

Amjad Tarsin, a 28-year-old law school dropout with a fondness for fantasy lit, is the new Islamic chaplain at U of T
Interview by Chris Selley | Photography by Norman Wong

U of T’s Muslim Chaplaincy hired you in September after a lengthy search process. What will your role be?
I’m essentially a counsellor who has a religious background. The concept of the chaplain was originally a Christian idea, but nowadays you have all kinds of chaplains—Jewish,
Buddhist, Muslim.

You’re 28. Was youth something the search committee was looking for?
I’m not sure. I have a master’s degree in Islamic studies, and I worked for a year as chaplain at Fairfield University in Connecticut, but it also wasn’t that long ago that I was at university myself, so I can relate to the students. My focus in undergrad was English, Arabic and Islamic studies, and then I did two years of law school at the University of Michigan.

Why did you leave law school?
I enrolled for the wrong reasons. In undergrad, I’d get into arguments about all kinds of things, and at some point I thought I should be a lawyer. But Islamic studies were where my
heart was.

How would you describe your upbringing?
My parents are very religious. They emigrated to the U.S. from Libya in the early 1970s to escape political persecution under Gaddafi. They were very involved in speaking out against
his dictatorship.

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Features

November 12, 2012 | 12:45 pm

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Eight portraits of the affluent, educated professionals flocking to Toronto from around the world

By Carolyn Morris | Photography by Dave Gillespie

As the global economy fizzles, our city is being inundated with a new cohort of foreign professionals. They’re coming for the stable economy, the chart-topping livability and the promise of a steady job. Meet the new refugees.

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Features

October 22, 2012 | 3:00 pm

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What Toronto Needs Now: Richard Florida offers a manifesto for a new model of leadership

The city’s great period of growth won’t continue if we don’t enlist the best and brightest minds from Bay Street, the universities and the public sector

By Richard Florida | Photograph by Markian Lozowchuk

Richard Florida believes Toronto should take a cue from innovative city-building strategies in Silicon Valley and Chicago

In 2007, when my wife and I moved here from Washington, D.C., Toronto was ascendant. I’d been offered a job at the University of Toronto’s Martin Prosperity Institute, a think tank investigating the competitiveness of cities. Toronto, it seemed to us, was an open, tolerant place offering a superb quality of life for its wide range of citizens. It was a destination of choice because of its thriving, stable economy, world-class banks, medical centres and cultural institutions, safety and livability, and diverse neighborhoods. It appeared a model of social cohesion, where people from across the globe were attracted to the prospect of a better future. Toronto’s best days were ahead.

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The Goods

Street Style

September 28, 2012 | 11:00 am

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Street Style: 20 looks at campus style at the University of Toronto

Street Style: 20 looks at the style of U of T

By Frances McInnis | Photography by Jenna Marie Wakani

In movies, college students are usually dressed as die-hard spring breakers (tube tops, miniskirts, backwards caps) or exaggerated New England prepsters (argyle sweaters, pleated skirts, leather satchels). Happily, when we stopped by the U of T campus on a sunny September morning we found a much more eclectic array of looks. A perfectly proportioned swing coat with patterned tights, a hipster-meets-rockabilly ensemble and an RCMP coat from the 1960s all showed that a fully developed sense of personal style comes with thought and effort, not age.

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The Dish

Random Stuff

July 11, 2012 | 1:15 pm

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Go ahead and eat that banana: a local academic (and Margaret Wente) argues local food’s benefits are bunk

Fresh, local and environmentally foolish? (Image: Alfred Ng from the Torontolife.com Flickr pool)

In our exploration of foodie resentment last year, locavorism ranked high on the list of gripes. Now, the 100-mile diet backlash is making headlines again. Margaret Wente, who’s already taken her swipe at organics, took local-love to task in her latest Globe and Mail column. Sure, Wente enjoys her garden tomatoes as much as the next person and doesn’t mind shelling out “a dollar a carrot” at the farmers market—but she doubts it does any good for the environment or society at large.

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The Hype

Pretty Young Things

June 27, 2012 | 4:41 pm

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SPOTTED: Jake Gyllenhaal in…Scarborough?

Jake Gyllenhaal at UTSC (Image: Instagram)

That’s right! Jake Gyllenhaal is at University of Toronto’s Scarborough campus today, shooting An Enemy. Jakey G was spotted wearing his costume for the film, which includes a squared-off wool tie, and an untucked shirt. Kind of like a hotter version of Ryan Gosling in Half Nelson.

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Real Estate

June 14, 2012 | 3:49 pm

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GALLERY: See which Toronto buildings took home Pug Awards this year

This year’s Pug Awards, a kind of people’s choice awards for Toronto architecture, were handed out last night. After a month of online voting, the Centre for Green Cities at Evergreen Brick Works and 83 Redpath ended up with the prizes for the best new commercial and residential building, respectively. You may have missed your chance to pick the winners—and losers, since Pug identifies the bottom-ranked buildings in each category as well—but that doesn’t mean you can’t still have a look at all the prize-winning designs and let us know if you agree.

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Features

May 30, 2012 | 12:15 pm

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Editor’s Letter (June 2012): Sarah Fulford on the reasons to love Toronto

Sarah Fulford Last winter, on a week-long escape to Florida, I noticed something surprising: TD and Royal Bank signs along the highway near Sarasota, interspersed among the various Targets, Barnes and Nobles, and IHOPs. What was going on? It turns out Canadian banks have been aggressively expanding into the U.S. since the recession, snapping up struggling consumer banks. TD now has more branches in the States than it does in Canada. Everywhere I looked, it seemed, a little piece of Toronto was occupying the landscape—unexpected outposts of Bay and King planted along the strip malls of America. Perhaps because I’m so used to seeing American mega-stores colonizing the Toronto streetscape, I found the role reversal refreshing. A sign, I thought, of Canada’s new place in the world.

Then I returned home and was bombarded by talk of the new age of austerity. Ontarians are being told that the next decade will be characterized by tough decisions about education, old-age benefits, health care. We’ll have to decide what we value most, where we want to spend and what we can cut, and we’ll have to cook up some new revenue sources, like casinos. And yet I’m having a hard time squaring all this austerity talk with what I see in Toronto. All around me are signs that the boom times are back.

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People

May 17, 2012 | 1:00 pm

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Q&A: Daniel Debow, the $292-million man that hit the jackpot—twice

He made his first splash with Workbrain before recently selling Rypple, a social media program based a shockingly simple idea: people like feedback

(Image: Mark Peckmezian)

Rypple purports to bring the performance review into the social media age. Employees can receive recognition on a Facebook-style wall and ask for feedback via private messages. What was wrong with the traditional, pen-and-paper performance review?
What was right with it? It’s slow, inefficient and way too formal. Rypple makes feedback fun and social, and it reaches an employee right away, rather than six months after the fact. It uses real language, too. No one says, “You exhibited the competencies of leadership and decisiveness.” They say, “You were a rock star. You kicked ass on that deal.”

Rypple users can give each other badges that say “You’re #1!” and “Thumbs up,” which seems goofy. Do people really crave that kind of hyper-positivity at work?
Yes! People aren’t robots. Recognition means a lot. People care a lot about money, of course, but once they reach a certain compensation level, salary ceases to be a significant motivator. Coaching, recognition and relationships with management matter more.

In 2007, you sold Workbrain, a workforce management company, for $227 million, and you just sold Rypple for $65 million. What do you know that the rest of us don’t?
Nothing. I’m just willing to take some crazy risks and fail a lot along the way.

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The Informer

Politics

May 11, 2012 | 2:06 pm

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Find out how far you’ll have to schlep to watch the Pan Am Games in Toronto

(Image: U.S. Army)

Since council freaked out over the rising price tag of the 2015 Pan Am Games—because mega sporting events usually come in under budget, right?—organizers are at least trying to keep costs down. Today, they unveiled a new venue plan, which features a clustering strategy to cut down on security costs and transit problems (though the Globe and Mail’s Marcus Gee suggested a different motivation). The revised plan will see more sporty happenings in 11 municipalities and three universities, compared with the original 2009 bid, which spread the events over 16 municipalities and 40 venues.

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The Informer

Politics

April 12, 2012 | 4:19 pm

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A report recommends three safe-injection sites in Toronto, but the province doesn’t agree

Researchers from St. Michael’s Hospital and the University of Toronto took four years to produce a hefty report on safe injection sites, which recommends three such facilities in Toronto. Ontario Health Minister Deb Matthews took only minutes to reject the idea, illustrating that the facilities can be a tough political sell. For instance, though Gord Perks threw his support behind the report (he called it “good solid Canadian evidence” that safe injection sites could save lives and health care dollars), Doug Holyday worries the sites would attract unsavoury types who wouldn’t otherwise come to Toronto. Meanwhile, Public Health board chairman John Filion, wouldn’t answer a question about whether he’d let a site open in his ward. As the debate continues, we expect this question of where the sites would go to be at the centre of the discussion. Read the entire story [Toronto Sun] »

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Random Stuff

April 9, 2012 | 10:35 am

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QUOTED: U of T president David Naylor explains why Toronto is just like Woody Allen

(Image: Blaise Alleyne)

—University of Toronto president David Naylor, telling residents to give the self-deprecation a rest and start talking loudly about how awesome Toronto is (just ignore the fact that the rest of Canada loves to hate on it). Naylor, who was amply quoted in Marcus Gee’s column in the Globe and Mail this weekend, provides some numbers to prove that Toronto is kicking butt: globally, the city ranks third for livability, fourth as an innovation hub and sixth for business competitiveness, and—despite an insane real estate market—Toronto is only the world’s 59th most expensive metropolis. Naylor even offers up a new city slogan: “It’s all here” (which, though brash, is a whole lot better than “Detroit Junior”). [Globe and Mail]

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