Often overshadowed by other higher education behemouths in Europe like Germany, the Netherlands and France, central European universities still have high ambitions to be hubs for research that attract global talent. But competing with well-established systems nearby isn't the only challenge they face. Rising populism, brain drain and compartively low investment in innovation are often barriers to progress. 
 
Sara Custer speaks with THE's Europe reporter David Matthews as well as Jan Palmowski, secretary general of the Guild of European Research-Intensive Universities, to discuss the challenges and opportunities in the region. Tim Sowula head of content and engagement for THE's World Summit Series also sits in to talk about the upcoming Research Excellence Summit in the Czech Republic. 

THE podcast: Can central Europe catch up with the rest of the West?

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Katie Normington, vice-chancellor and CEO of De Montfort University, has proved to be adept at both leading by example and change management. Not only did she join the Leicester institution during Covid amid the longest lockdown in the UK, but in the three years she has led the institution she has overseen large-scale curriculum reform. De Montfort has moved most of its undergraduate and postgraduate courses from traditional curriculum structure to block plan, with significant boosts in student satisfaction.
The way that Normington talks about leadership demonstrates the very qualities she champions: clear strategic direction, communication and empowering others to lean into their strengths. She is a past winner of a Times Higher Education leadership and development award. This conversation covers her journey from aspiring ballet dancer to university head, early leadership challenges, and why higher education needs bold leaders, courage, creativity and agility as it faces global challenges.

Campus: How to lead a university from the front

Imagine a learning environment where an AI professor fields infinite student questions, where business students practise difficult conversations with an avatar that models an array of personas and reactions, where automated feedback is not static but dynamic and individualised. Artificial intelligence and XR tools are changing education and preparing students to live and work in an unpredictable world. 
In this episode of the Times Higher Education podcast, we talk to an expert in immersive technology, whose experience includes big tech companies such as Amazon and Meta, where she was head of immersive learning, as well as her current role in higher education.
Monica Arés is executive director of the Innovation, Digital Education and Analytics Lab at Imperial College London. In this conversation, she tells us about the evolution of edtech from the early days of virtual reality, immersive technology’s potential for unlocking curiosity (and the costs that come with it), and what she thinks teaching technology will look like in 2034. Hint: it’s a personalised, creative world with fewer screens.

Campus: The future of XR and immersive learning

For this episode of the Times Higher Education podcast, we talk with an academic, practitioner and policy commentator who uses phrases such as “burning platform” to describe the state of universities’ digital landscape.
Mark Thompson is a professor of digital economy in the research group Initiative for the Digital Economy (Index) at the University of Exeter, and his work focuses on the complexity and velocity of the digital economy. A former UK government policy adviser, he is recognised as one of the architects of digital service redesign of the UK public sector.
In this interview, conducted at Digital Universities UK at Exeter, Thompson shares his concern that the sector is drifting away from its true north of research, teaching and impact (he uses Jeff Bezos idea of “day one”), citing statistics that less than 40 per cent of university staff are academics. He suggests reasons for this and talks about the need for leadership at institutional and government level as well as the prisoner’s dilemma of whole-sector transformation.

Campus interview: Mark Thompson, professor of digital economy at the University of Exeter

What difference does human connection make to student success? Does it matter if students come to in-person lectures? And what if students turn to AI for help with academic tasks rather than asking libraries or someone in student support?
This episode of the podcast takes on these questions, ones that have driven headlines on Times Higher Education, to examine the topics of student attendance in lectures and whether students’ use of AI might be making them lonelier. We talk to two Australian academics who both touch on questions of human connection in their work.
Jan Slapeta is a professor of veterinary and molecular parasitology and associate head of research in the Faculty of Science at the University of Sydney. He first talked to THE in 2022 when his tweet of a photo of an empty lecture hall touched a nerve in the Twitter-verse. Here, he explains why he is feeling optimistic about in-person teaching in 2024. His insightsare insightful and heartening as are his tips for new teachers.
Joseph Crawford is a senior lecturer in management in the Tasmanian School of Business at the University of Tasmania. His paper, co-authored with Kelly-Ann Allen and Bianca Pani, both from Monash University, and Michael Cowling, from Central Queensland University, “When artificial intelligence substitutes humans in higher education: the cost of loneliness, student success, and retention”, was published last month in Studies in Higher Education. Our conversation ranged from what belonging and loneliness actually are to what happens when students turn to AI over real-life relationships.

Campus: Human connection and the student experience

In this episode of the Times Higher Education podcast, we talk to two experts – one in the US and one in the UK – about open access, the global movement that aims to make research outputs available online immediately and without charge or restrictions.
Heather Joseph has been an advocate for knowledge sharing and the open access movement since its earliest days. Based in Washington DC, she has been executive director of the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) since 2005, and is known for her policy work, leadership and international consultancy for organisations such as Unesco, the World Health Organisation and the World Bank. In 2021, she won the Miles Conrad Award, the National Information Standards Organization’s recognition of lifetime achievement in the information community, and her lecture as the recipient is a detailed history of the movement, its goals and strategies.
Steven Vidovic is the head of open research and publication practice at the University of Southampton in the UK. A palaeontologist with a passion for scholarly communication and knowledge exchange for public benefit, he is also chair of the Directory of Open Access Journals advisory board and Southampton’s institutional lead for the UK Reproducibility Network, and he is a member of Jisc’s transitional agreement oversight group.

THE podcast: Can central Europe catch up with the rest of the West?

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