Dr Sam Grogan
Pro-Vice Chancellor, Student Experience University of Salford
Introducing our Event Chairman
Prof. Mohammad Dastbaz Deputy Vice Chancellor
University of Suffolk
Prof. Peter Francis Deputy Vice Chancellor Birmingham City University
Prof. Jackie Labbe Deputy Vice Chancellor University of Gloucestershire
Prof. Julie Sanders Deputy Vice Chancellor
Newcastle University Lyn Webb
Chief Information Security Officer The Open University
Mark Ferrar
Chief Information Officer Newcastle University
Dr Paul Marshall Prof. Kathleen Armour Steve Humber
Higher Education Partnership Network
7th - 8th December, Horwood House, Milton Keynes
Recovery - Sustainability - Collaboration
Dr Harriet Dunbar-Morris Dean of Learning and Teaching
University of Portsmouth
Katy Willis
Pro-Vice Chancellor, Student Success Plymouth Marjon University
Dr Cassie Wilson VP, Student Experience
University of Bath
Prof. Ale Armellini Dean of Digital and
Distributed Learning University of Portsmouth
Alison Whaley Director of Student Experience
Cranfield University
Simon Arthurs Director of Finance and IT Plymouth Marjon University
Dr Ken Powell Director of Curriculum Canterbury Christ Church University
Prof. Andrew Turner Associate Director,
Teaching and Learning Coventry University
→ The event chairman - HEPN is chaired by Dr Sam Grogan.
Sam will bring his wealth of knowledge and experience in framing and guiding the event across the two days.
Higher education institutions are increasingly having to balance delivering an outstanding student experience whilst remaining efficient and cost-effective. Add to that an incredibly demanding and difficult period for the sector which has changed the way we think
about and access higher education, the opportunities to find new solutions to drive transformational change have never been more of a priority for universities.
Higher Education Partnership Network provides HE senior leaders with a unique
opportunity and a safe space to share experiences and to learn about solutions from some of the sector’s most innovative suppliers.
Introduction
→ Networking sessions - throughout the event we host a networking lunch as well as a dinner and drinks reception to give you ample opportunity to connect with your peers and suppliers over the learnings from the event.
→ Presentations - HEPN features a fantastic agenda of presentations from HE senior leaders who are at the forefront of innovation, transformation and improvement in the sector. Over 2 days, you’ll hear from our speakers on everything from student experience to distance learning.
→ Dragons’ Den - a quick-fire pitch session featuring all of our sponsors.
Each supplier delivers a 90-second elevator pitch about their solution - giving you an opportunity to earmark suppliers and solutions you are most interested in.
→ Sponsor presentations - main room and breakout sessions giving you the chance to hear from the sector’s most innovative suppliers and discover solutions that will help you address the pressing challenges in your trust.
→ Business meetings - pre-arranged 15 minute meetings with suppliers who are offering solutions most relevant to your challenges.
Day One
8:10 - 8:50 Registration
8:50 - 9:00 Chairman’s opening remarks
Dr Sam Grogan Pro-Vice Chancellor, Student Experience University of Salford
Has online access enhanced the interaction between our staff and students?
A lack of face-to-face interaction throughout the pandemic could have easily broken down the communication between staff and students, but with our seismic shift to digital comes a whole host of opportunities to collaborate remotely. Is it now easier to co-create new initiatives with students? Are we now hearing more valuable feedback as a result?
In this session, we will look what online access has enabled us to do.
Dr Sam Grogan, Pro-Vice Chancellor, Student Experience, University of Salford Alison Whaley, Director of Student Experience, Cranfield University
Dr Cassie Wilson, VP, Student Experience, University of Bath
Katy Willis, Pro-Vice Chancellor, Student Success, Plymouth Marjon University
9:00 - 9:45 Student Experience Panel Discussion
10:05 - 10:55 Dragons’ Den - Speed Presentations
11:00 - 12:00 Coffee Break and Business Meetings
9:45 - 10:05 Sponsor Presentation
Day One
12:05 - 12:25 Presentation
Mark Ferrar Chief Information
Officer Newcastle University
12:30 - 12:50 Sponsor Presentations
HE After COVID
Picture this: we have navigated the COVID years and it’s become part of our new normal. ‘Blended’ has settled down into a standard pedagogical term (it shed its negative connotations a while back). Staff have successfully incorporated technology and the virtual into their pedagogy and in-person teaching routinely relies on students having prepared via asynchronous sessions that they easily recognise as part of their contact hours. We have settled on an agreed distinction between the ‘remote’, the ‘online’, and ‘distance’. We have effective and mutually beneficial partnerships with Further Education, and students are empowered to learn at their own, individualised pace. In this session, we will explore the validity of this future scenario and whether we think it is 5, 10, or more years away—and why.
12:55 - 13:15 Main Room Presentation
Prof. Jackie Labbe Deputy Vice Chancellor
University of Gloucestershire
Day One
Civic Engagement as a strategy for growth
Plymouth Marjon University is a small but growing values-based institute in the north of the city. Like many Universities Plymouth Marjon is on a journey to transform whilst maintaining a strong position in the league tables. The University has been developing a number of interrelated strategies and relationships to unlock growth opportunities through alignment with key partners in the city and region.
12:55 - 13:15 Breakout Room 1 Presentation
Simon Arthurs Director of Finance & IT
Plymouth Marjon University
Delivering Industry 5.0 enterprise &
employability focused institutional transformation
In a year that made everyone reassess the future, UEL has intensified its strategies to become a world-class Careers-1st institution, supporting every student into a new world of work and increasing the diversity of the talent pipeline for a more entrepreneurial economy and the Fifth Industrial Revolution. From the Professional Fitness & Mental Wealth programme embedded throughout the UEL curriculum to our ‘Talent Hack’ approach that brings industry partners on campus to see students responding to industry challenges, we prepare students for a changing world of work. The launch of Careers Zone in 2019/20 embedded a support network across the curriculum and across all the University’s schools to help students and alumni grow and develop from enrolment to graduate level employment. In its first year, over 50 per cent of the total student body interacted with the Careers Zone while over 400 organisations signed our Careers-1st pledge. This session will explore the motivation behind the need to change, the challenge of delivering rapid
transformational change at scale (within a global pandemic) and the future barriers that need to be overcome to embed and drive forward necessary change.
12:55 - 13:15 Breakout Room 2 Presentation
Dr Paul Marshall Pro-Vice Chancellor, Careers and Enterprise
University of East London
13:15 - 14:00 Networking Lunch
Day One
14:00 - 14:20 Sponsor Presentation
Pedagogy and Politics through a Pandemic:
What next?
Using the University of Birmingham as a case study, this session will consider the pre-pandemic challenges we faced in modernising our pedagogy,
the changes we made through the pandemic, the outcome (spoiler: it wasn’t what we intended!) and our plans for recovery. Looking beyond the pandemic, we recognise that Politics will have a profound influence on our pedagogies as we adapt to the Government’s renewed emphasis on graduate employability and related metrics. So, using the convenience of digital platforms, we are planning for much closer partnerships with employers in all our degree programmes whether vocational or not. This is likely to present a range of political and pedagogical challenges for some of academic colleagues, busy employers, and staff development. Yet, there is the potential to use dynamic engagement with employers to spark new academic conversations between all parties - staff, students, graduates and employers – so we can help to shape the future instead of receiving it reluctantly (spoiler: I am an optimist!).
14:25 - 14:45 Main Room Presentation
Prof. Kathleen Armour Pro-Vice Chancellor,
Education University of Birmingham
Day One
Understanding students’ perceptions of the quality of learning and teaching
To understand differing student perceptions of the quality of learning and teaching in the context of blended learning during the Covid-19 pandemic, with a focus on how these perceptions differ by ethnicity, the universities of Portsmouth, Manchester Metropolitan, Nottingham, and Solent undertook a survey and focus groups with students on a comparable set of courses across the four institutions. This session will present findings from the QAA-funded collaborative enhancement project which was also designed to:
→ Add evidence to the sector regarding tackling the attainment gap and strengthening the voice of BAME students
→ Enable staff to adjust mechanisms for engaging and teaching for the 2021/22 academic year
→ Identify staff development needs
→ Inform curriculum development for the academic year 2022/23
→ Inform policy, notably institutional work related to Access and Participation Plans and Race Equality Charters
→ Create an open-access research tool.
14:25 - 14:45 Breakout Room 1 Presentation
Dr Harriet Dunbar-Morris Dean of Learning and
Teaching University of Portsmouth
Day One
Measures to support a sustainable portfolio
Universities are faced with the need to balance a varied and rich portfolio of awards with a range of potential course models for each award. Developing a framework to support academics in understanding the range of complexity which can be supported, alongside key metrics to understand the efficiency and sustainability of the resulting portfolio gives a useful infrastructure within which to situate these issues.
This talk presents an overview of the process of developing such an
Academic Framework at Canterbury Christ Church University and suggests four KPIs to measure sustainable efficiency:
→ Portfolio efficiency
→ Design efficiency
→ Sharing efficiency
→ Group size efficiency
14:25 - 14:45 Breakout Room 2 Presentation
Dr Ken Powell Director of Curriculum
Canterbury Christ Church University
15:15 - 16:30 Coffee Break and Business Meetings
14:50 - 15:10 Sponsor Presentations
17:35 - 17:55 Closing Keynote
Prof. Peter Francis Deputy Vice Chancellor
Birmingham City University
Day One
17:55 - 18:00 Chairman’s Closing Remarks
18:00 - 20:00 Hotel Check-in / Free Time
20:00 - 22:00 Drinks Reception & Networking Dinner How can we better protect our data and systems?
Many factors have resulted in an increased level of cyber threats; shifting to online platforms, poorly configured remote access, and the conflict between ease of access and security.
What tools can we use to protect our data and systems? Are we ensuring our users know what a cyber threat looks like? Do we know what we would do in the event of a cyber breach?
In this session, we will explore what an effective protection and recovery strategy looks like.
Mark Ferrar, Chief Information Officer, Newcastle University Lyn Webb, Chief Information Security Officer, The Open University Steve Humber, Chief Digital Information Officer, Coventry University
16:35 - 17:20 Cyber Security Panel Discussion
17:20 - 17:40 Sponsor Presentations
Day Two
8:30 - 8:35 Chairman’s opening remarks
8:35 - 8:55 Presentation
Horizons, sunrises and other worlds: Taking the long view in HE
Using the case study of Futures Group work at Newcastle University, this talk will consider some of the project-based, issue-led thinking the HE sector is now engaged with: from climate consciousness and social responsibility, community and civic engagement, digital transformations, and the “new global” to the importance of approaching everything with students at the centre of our thinking and doing. I will share just some of ways we are engaging with these questions as a whole community at Newcastle in an effort to focus us all on some longer term horizons and, if possible, to appreciate the view.
Prof. Julie Sanders Deputy Vice Chancellor
Newcastle University
8:55 - 9:15 Sponsor Presentation 9:15 - 9:35 Industry Presentation 9:40 - 10:00 Sponsor Presentations
Challenges and Opportunities for Learning and Teaching in a post-pandemic environment
The COVID-19 pandemic presented the HE sector with significant challenges in delivering and assessing their programmes. Clearly, both lessons and
opportunities have arisen as the result of the pandemic. It also seems that there is very little appetite for us to return to the delivery methods we had, and the question is what next. We used the pandemic to run a pilot, changing our entire delivery model, and I will be presenting some of the findings of the pilot, the challenges we had and what we are going to do next.
10:05 - 10:25 Presentation
Prof. Mohammad Dastbaz Deputy Vice Chancellor
University of Suffolk
Day Two
10:30 - 11:45 Coffee Break and Business Meetings
Higher Education in the digital era:
Opportunities, challenges, and creativity
Every university is responding to digital disruption, but do current
approaches to learning and teaching, and assessment, and more specifically digital learning and digital technologies, get the best out of all students? Are we as creative as we would like to be?
This Panel Discussion will explore with participants, the opportunities and challenges, and provoke discussion around opportunities to be creative in Digital Learning.
Dr Harriet Dunbar-Morris, Dean of Learning and Teaching, University of Portsmouth Prof. Ale Armellini, Dean of Digital and Distributed Learning, University of Portsmouth Prof. Andrew Turner, Associate Director, Teaching and Learning, Coventry University Representative from AULA Education
11:50 - 12:30 Learning Technologies Panel Discussion
13:10 - 14:00 Networking Lunch
12:30 - 13:00 Keynote & Chairman’s Closing Remarks
Dr Sam Grogan Pro-Vice Chancellor, Student Experience University of Salford
Secure your spot in the future of networking and
collaborating in the higher education
sector
+44(0) 1293 661 044 hepn-uk.com
