Global Experts to Discuss Challenges and Transformations in Higher Education amid and post Pandemic
On March 3, a premier group of scholars representing world-renowned powerhouses in social and educational R&D will meet online for this year’s debut session by the Observatory for Higher Education Transformations. The special theme of the session is ‘The Changing Landscape of Higher Education: New Practices and System-Wide Trends.’
The HSE Institute of Education and the Observatory for Higher Education Transformations cordially invite you to an open expert session, ‘The Changing Landscape of Higher Education: New Practices and System-Wide Trends.’
Wednesday, March 03, at 15:00 Moscow time
For a link to join the Zoom meeting, please register at https://ioe.hse.ru/en/polls/446838523.html.
The headwinds of the global COVID-19 emergency have confronted every domain of life and have been as forceful and disruptive as barely in any other crisis of recent times. In education, the pandemic aftermath has defied much of what the sector had previously had firmly entrenched and had taken for granted since forever and a day.
For universities, perhaps just like elsewhere across the institutional realm, the new environment has prompted an urgent need to readjust their current operations and to reinvent a good deal of what academia was up to in a longer run. As many challenges academia faced in 2020 have persisted into 2021, there is all the more reason for everyone involved to leverage networking so we share at scale about how universities have been able to get into the swing of and navigate in a new reality, alongside what the post-crisis future will most likely hold for the system.
Heralding the first time for the Observatory experts to convene online in 2021, the upcoming session aims to foreground the following major topics:
- Taking stock of how the crisis environment has affected academia. System-wide responses and trends
- How HE has been rethinking goals and reinventing strategies amid new and dashing challenges that came about in the COVID aftermath
- System-wide challenges and nation-state implications
- Top priorities for universities to focus on as they seek to build resilience and sustained momentum in a novel reality.
The Observatory session will involve three presentations by the speakers, about 10 minutes each, followed by a brief Q&A and a subsequent expert discussion on the above topics.
Speakers
Emeritus Professor of the Practice; Distinguished Fellow (Center for International Higher Education) at Carolyn A. and Peter S. Lynch School of Education and Human Development, Boston College
Professor of Higher Education at the University of Oxford, Director of the ESRC/OFSRE Centre for Global Higher Education (CGHE), and Editor-in-Chief of the journal Higher Education
Professor of Higher Education, and Dean of the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto
Moderator
Distinguished Professor, Head of the Institute of Education, HSE University Moscow
About the Observatory
With its conception and imperatives essentially framed and put forth by IOE and Politecnico di Milano, the Observatory for Higher Education Transformation (OHET) was established in late 2020 on the ethos of empowering critical debate to better underpin research-informed policy and practice in the university sector. Drawing upon diverse expertise brought by its member institutions that are a superb cohort of globally recognized hubs for social and educational R&D, OHET provides a reinvigorating cross-border venue for various stakeholders and experts to:
- Share firsthand evidence of how university systems have been steering through headwinds of the altered reality
- Follow the changes that have been unfolding across the system domains
- Reflect on best-practice/most likely development scenarios going forward.
The OHET agenda primarily focuses on the following:
- Inequality in higher education (a challenge that has persisted through time and has only been growing more acute in the aftermath of the COVID-19 crisis)
- Internationalization: hurdles and incentives
- Student experiences and outcomes
- Rethinking policies in higher education financing and other dimensions of sector administration
- Fostering meaningful liaison and high-impact initiatives among stakeholders in academia.