HEDx

University of Surrey, UK Vice Chancellor and President Max Lu shares his experiences of putting in place a transitionary 3-year strategy to traverse the combination of Brexit and pandemic recovery to address the student experience, increase research impact and build an operational platform for future growth, together with launching a focussed philanthropic campaign to raise funds to support equitable student access. Some parallels with his prior experience as Provost and DVC R at University of Queensland with lessons for leaders elsewhere.

Professor Renee Leon reflects on her first year as Vice Chancellor at Charles Sturt University by contrasting leadership practices and culture between universities and the public service.  She reflects on how what she has learnt from the public service can be applied to improve culture and leadership in universities and how she has brought this to bear on the turnaround of her university and its new strategy.

Australian Entrepreneur of the Year for 2022 Linda Brown as CEO of Torrens University Australia johns the HEDx podcast. She shares her thoughts on the opportunities for private universities in Australia and globally to utilise EdTech and partner with connected employers. She advocates Torren's success in plugging the gap of industry relevant higher education for global customers, at scale. The episode highlights her experience of having established Torrens as the first new greenfield university in Australia for many years. It has been our fastest growing for a decade and has come from nowhere to be the 4th largest provider of international education in Australia as a US-owned private institution.

Maria Spies as Co-CEO and Co-Founder of Holon IQ shares an update to their report on 5 scenarios for the future of higher education  by 2030. She outlines the priorities for the innovation agenda for universities for the path ahead and the need to keep moving at the same or faster pace as competitors to be positioned for disruption and transformation ahead.

Rick Shangraw, after 20 years at ASU, describes how their success story is founded on using enterprise to allow inclusive access to excellent education and research that serves end user purpose and communities.  He then articulates, as CEO of ASU startup Cintana, how that model is being taken to up to 50 partner universities around the world in seeking to democratise education for the benefit of society including his role as President of the American University of Kyiv in the Ukraine. These are lofty and differentiated strategic goals for sure.

Betty Vandenbosch joins the HEDx podcast as Chief Content Officer of Coursera to outline her vision of how the landscape of global higher education will have changed by 2030 and what Coursera and global universities can best do to prepare for that vision. She sees a clear picture of hybrid learning combining with hybrid working and stackable and flexible packages of learning being accessed on global platforms to serve growing lifelong learning needs.

CEO of EdPlus at Arizona State University, Phil Regier explains the background to how online students have grown to close to 84,000 across all disciplines in major partnerships with employers in Starbucks and Uber in partnership with the global EdTech community. The journey to online education becoming core to the whole university and to all students who make their own choice of how, when and where to gain access to inclusive excellence is a pointer to the future for hybrid education at scale.

Cadmus CEO Herk Kailis joins the podcast to outline how EdTech companies have emerged to provide support services to help individual universities focus on what they want to be great at. He describes the importance and scope for technology innovation and adoption in the narrow area of student assessment and the broader areas of learning. He gives pointers to the extraordinary levels of investment that are happening in B2C EdTech plays and their threat to disrupt the sector.

President Michael Crow approaches 20 years as President of ASU ranked as the most innovative US university for seven years running. He shares a clear message of the need for distinction and differentiation and of ASU's mission to democratise higher education for the world. He measures the ASU strategy by the students they include and building pathways for all to succeed. Their technology-enabled strategy is breaking the mould of global higher education. When will others follow? The biggest risk might be in not doing so.

Professor Malcolm Press CBE joins the podcast as the VC of Manchester Metropolitan University. He shares insights into his commitment to his staff and students and the commitment Manchester Met has to its civic setting in a major city in the UK. He shares lessons from a 200 year history of an institution that is pioneering degree apprenticeships and design education among other things and illustrates the importance of authenticity and trusting teams in exercising effective leadership.