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.

Professor Judy Raper CEO of TEDI London joins the podcast to describe how an alliance of research power houses Arizona State University, UNSW and Kings College are reconceiving design and engineering education in a start up in London. A staff cohort with no lecturers delivering problem based learning in industry partnerships, using the most advanced pedagogy and learning technologies, with no distractions of research, is this experiment a pointer toward the decoupling of the teaching-research nexus and the future of professional education?

Professor Colin Stirling Vice Chancellor of Flinders University in Adelaide outlines the positioning of Flinders to Be Fearless in its focus on combining world class research with student success through new physical infrastructure. He responds to the renewed prospect of SA university mergers following the election of Premier Malinauskis. And he explains an approach to differentiating in the increasingly regulated, publicly funded landscape where being fearless is a way to become noticed.

Vice Chancellor Professor Deborah Terry AO of the University of Queensland outlines how a refresh of a Group of Eight university strategy in the depths of the pandemic got energised and inspired by the award of the Olympic Games to her city shortly before the strategy was to be finessed by university leadership after an engagement jam across staff students and external partners. It illustrates how a short-term trajectory during tough times can be amplified by a light on the horizon of a major global opportunity for a strategy that seeks to emphasise the local relevance of global excellence while harnessing national priorities for policy change in research commercialisation and digital short form courses for lifelong learning for domestic and international students.

Catriona Jackson the CEO of Universities Australia joins the podcast in the aftermath of the ministerial non-approval of 6 ARC Discovery grants, the tightrope walking around foreign interference and research partnerships, and as campuses reopen with staff and students, particularly women, having some reluctance of what they are returning to. Immediately following our first HEDx Live event on gender equity and culture, and with a federal election on the horizon, this episode raises the importance of robust, straight-talking for the future of the sector.

Professor Carolyn Evans VC of Griffith University and Chair of the Innovative Research Universities (IRU) group reflects on how having a new strategy coming into 2020 served her well in providing a true north to navigate the challenges of the disruptions of a pandemic. And as the IRU reflect on their distinctiveness as a group of universities, she reflects on how innovation has been made the necessity of the hour, and a means of guiding engaged staff in our universities through the cultural challenges of the current period, to serve a critically important broader community purpose.

Professor Jan Thomas VC for 5 years of Massey University and Chair of Universities New Zealand outlines the issues being faced in the different setting and context of NZ compared to her earlier experience of 5 years leading the University of Southern Queensland. She sees universities as beacons of hope if they can pull together, work in partnership with government, industry and communities, and work with people by engaging them in a positive and equitable agenda for the future. A great message of hope for universities across ANZ as we start 2022.