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Event Interview Video

United Universities 5th Panel Discussion

Europe, 29 June 2021. The UUU Panel Debate n°5 has invited administrators of European University Alliances to talk about the “Powers of the Periphery. How networking empowers regions and fosters creativity.”

Watch the teaser: youtu.be/RYk4iSzYPSk

What is periphery? Is Brussels an appendix of Berlin? Is Berlin a suburb of Leipzig? Haven’t the inhabitants of the Capitals not always been the marginalised? Are the vitamins not in the skin of the apple, rather than in the core? Is Oscar Wilde right that only shallow people do not judge by appearances, and “the true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible…?″ The centre produces the periphery, and how free and diverse universities are, depends on their environment and history, their funding and their inter-relatedness with the world.   This discussion wants to learn about European University Alliances, a little what they are, and a lot how international networking might have changed the meaning of periphery in regard to innovation, science and social development.

Guests

Hannes Raffaseder, composer. He is also Chief Research and Innovation Officer, head of the Institute of Media production at Sankt Pölten University of Applied Sciences, near Vienna in Austria, and coordinator of the European University Alliance E³UDRES² led by his university.

Elena Theodoropoulou, Associate Professor at University of the Aegean in Greece in the field of philosophy of education. As Vice-Rector of Academic Affairs & Student Welfare she is academic coordinator on behalf of the UAegean in the ERUA Alliance. Elena teaches and publishes, among other things, about Education and Ethics.

Rónán Ó Muirthile, academic researcher and educator focused on original storytelling and facilitating others in developing the skills and abilities to tell those stories. He works at the Institute of Art Design and Technology in Dublin, Ireland, where he is also responsible for coordinating his school’s part in the European Universities Alliance for Film and Media Arts or FILMEU.

Audronė Telešienė, professor in sociology and communication at Kaunas University of Technology, Lithuania. She is the project scientific lead at KTU of the SMART-ER project, the virtual research institute for smart European Regions at the ECIU University. Her scientific interest lies on the topics related to public governance and sustainable development.

Eric Tschirhart, Professor of Physiology at the University of Luxembourg and Special Advisor to the rector for the university alliance UNIVERSEH and the Université de la Grande Région. Under the team leadership of Eric, the University of Luxembourg will focus on stimulating entrepreneurial skills among students through university-business cooperation, as well as strengthening the sustainability of the network and its communication. Of particular interest for our topic is the University of the Greater region (UniGR), a regional cross-border network of universities founded in 2008, where 7 universities in Belgium, Germany, France and Luxembourg work together.

Florian Schweigert, Vice President for International Affairs at the University of Potsdam, Germany, and coordinates the EDUC Alliance. In our recent interview about EDUC, a new university alliance including the universities of Masaryk, Pécs, Cagliari, Rennes 1, and Paris Nanterre, he explains the alliance’s focus on shared learning and teaching capacities, and short-term collaborative study programmes. ESNA interview, June 2021

Peter van der Hijden, independent higher education strategy advisor who lives in Brussels. He has worked 23 years for the European Commission where he became Head of Sector Higher Education Policy and contributed to the Erasmus programme, the Bologna Process, Horizon and ERA. He now supports European Universities and promotes micro-credentials.

Host: Tino Brömme, ESNA European Higher Education News, www.esna.tv

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Event Video

United Universities 4th Panel Discussion

Europe, 11 May 2021. European University Alliances are coming with a great promise: to make the ‘student-centred’ university happen, and to create courses and degrees for the 21st century.

As of today, there are 41 of these new alliances or networks across Europe testing co-operative models and involving students, researchers and administration. The European Commission funds these co-operations, and the newly created departments in the universities put them into practice.

4th UUU Panel Debate: “Degree design, competence frameworks, and horizontal mindsets

Watch the teaser: youtu.be/RYk4iSzYPSk

We have gathered for the 4th UUU Panel Debate to see how that actually works! – There is great demand in society to create quality jobs for many, a perspective for citizens of Europe, and an education preparing for a globalised world. What do the efforts look like that the University Alliances put into study programmes for people with a ‘horizontal’ mindset, able to think and work across academic disciplines and national borderlines?

Let’s also ask how education policy evolves – in order to support such a highly complex practice, to create competence frameworks and quality assurance standards coping with diverging national regulations and an uneven economic and cultural pace across the European Union!

Guests

Robert Wagenaar, Professor of History and Politics of Higher Education, Director of the International Tuning Academy in Groningen, and author of “REFORM! TUNING the Modernisation Process of Higher Education in Europe. A blueprint for student-centred learning” (2019)

Antonella Forlino, Professor of Biochemistry, and Prorector of International Relations at the University of Pavia, member of the EC2U Alliance. ESNA interview on Deutschlandradio,15.06.2020

François Taddei, Director of the Center for Research and Interdisciplinarity (CRI) in Paris, advisor to the CIRCLE.U alliance, and author of “Learning in the 21st century” (2020). ESNA interview, 30.03.2020

Maria Gravari-Barbas, former Vice-President for International Relations at Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne, and Chair of the Cultural Heritage Focus Area of the Una Europa alliance

Host: Tino Brömme, ESNA European Higher Education News, www.esna.tv

 

Credits

‘The Graduate’ CREDITS: Embassy Pictures (1967). Cast: Anne Bancroft, Dustin Hoffman, Katharine Ross. Director: Mike Nichols. Producer: Lawrence Turman. Screenwriters: Calder Willingham, Buck Henry

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Event Project News Video

United Universities 3rd Panel Discussion

Europe, 13 April 2021. Mingling among journalists, authors, strategy advisors, university administrators, researchers, students — to gain deeper insights into higher education policy in Europe. The initiative ‘United Universities of Europe’ has gathered distinguished guests to discuss the current state of European University Alliances, their recent past and imminent future.

This 3rd UUU Panel Debate navigates between past and future. What’s the status quo of European University Alliances? What did they achieve so far? How did Corona and Brexit affect them? What are their current challenges? What will the future look like for them? Will they change the European higher education landscape or disappear?

Journalist Tino Brömme from Berlin, and higher ed strategist Peter van der Hijden from Brussels, discuss it. A special light on the damage inflicted by Brexit on British and Continental universities is being cast by journalist Anne Corbett, Paris, and Nenad Zrnić, vice-rector of the University of Belgrade.

What does the future hold? — Pedro Marques talks about his research on university-society interaction in science-fiction literature, and European students reflect on their utopia of the future university, before Brömme/van der Hijden consider what the upcoming decisions of the European Council mean for European Universities.

Guests:

Anne Corbett is a Senior Associate at LSE Consulting with long-standing experience in the field of higher education and Europe as a researcher, a journalist and a contributor to public policy. She holds a PhD in political science and a BA in History. Her work has appeared in the education press and British dailies. She continues to write for University World News where she recently published A mercantilist approach to higher education post-Brexit. Her books include Universities and the Europe of Knowledge.

Pedro Marques is specialised in regional development, innovation and governance in peripheral regions of the EU. He works at ingenio, a research institute affiliated with the Technical University of Valencia, a member of the European University Alliance ENHANCE. Not only is he a Ramon y Cajal fellow but also a principal investigator in a Innovative Training Network funded by the European Union. He is co-author of the research paper Fiction lagging behind or non-fiction defending the indefensible? University-industry (et al.) interaction in science fiction.

Peter van der Hijden is an independent strategy advisor, helping European University Alliances on the design and further strategic positioning of their proposals. He has worked for the European Commission where his main experience lied in higher education and research: the Erasmus Programme, the modernisation agenda for universities, the European Higher Education Area (Bologna Process) and the European Research Area. His latest article, Mitigating brain drain by connecting universities, discusses a policy report of the European Commission.

Nenad Zrnić is Vice-Rector for International Relations at the University of Belgrade, a member of the European University Alliance Circle U. He is a full professor in the field of material handling and logistics, a corresponding member of the Academy of Engineering Sciences of Serbia. Since 2015 he is a coordinator of one of the working groups for preparing new Serbian Law on a Higher Education.

As part of the 3rd UUU Panel Debate, students of the Una Europa alliance were interviewed about the question: How is your ideal university of the future? They had just participated in Una Europa’s first Student Congress on February 24, 2021. — Their answers showed how aware today’s students are of flexible learning paths, of the world’s ever stronger interconnections and of their own potential to contribute to better learning and teaching environments? The participants are Emily Hartmann (Freie Universität Berlin), Giacomo Zanni (Università di Bologna), Hubert Jakub Bieniek (Uniwersytet Jagielloński), Luca Di Cunto (Università di Bologna), and Weronika Łukasińska (Uniwersytet Jagielloński).

Host:

Tino Brömme, a graduate in communication science and media consultancy, has worked for over 30 years as a journalist, publisher, moderator and event manager across Europe. He was the founder of the multilingual student magazine WORK|OUT, and the news agency ESNA. He publishes articles and multimedia content, mainly on science policy, and is currently preparing a documentary film about Universities in the 21st Century.

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Interview Video

United Universities – Is it science fiction?

Berlin and Valencia, 5 March 2021. Science fiction literature is a classic field for scientists to ask self-referential questions. A recent study follows this path, and Tino Brömme, host of the UUU Debate series, interrogates Pedro Marques about the paper he wrote as a co-author of Joaquín Azagra and Laura Salmerón.

This is interesting for an audience curious about spirit and knowledge, and in particular, about European University Alliances, those new, EU-funded university networks set up as experimental cross-border social laboratories.

ENHANCE is one of these European University Alliances, it includes the Universitat Politècnica de València, to which Pedro’s research is affiliated. How does society value science? How do citizens see the University? How does literature, as a segment of public perception, depict researchers? Are they in it only for money, fame and power? Are universities ivory towers of an arrogant elite? Do scientists work for the public good? — European University Alliances like ENHANCE are forced by the EU’s funding requirements to claim that they are working “for society” —, but how true is that?

The interview is part of the UUU Panel Debate series started in 2020 at the Berlin Science Week. It has been produced by ESNA European Higher Education News, moderated by Tino Brömme, recorded and edited by Tomas Rigoni, provided with a soundtrack by Ralf Briechle, and supervised by Caucaso Factory (www.caucaso.info) and StartupTV (www.startuptv.io).

Teaser

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Project News Video

UUU Panel 2 – Intermezzo: What is UUU?

Berlin, 8 December 2020. UUU director Tino Brömme, in an interview on the Crelle Market in Berlin-Schöneberg, answers what United Universities if Europe or UUU is about. The interview is part of the 2nd panel debate inquiring on “Vocations and Competencies in the Age of European Universities.”

Watch part 1 of the panel debate here, and part 2 here.

Guests:

  • Eva-Maria Feichtner, YUFE, Universität Bremen
    Vice President International and Diversity
  • Jörg Niehoff, European Commission, DG EAC
    Policy Coordinator University Business cooperation
  • Peter van der Hijden, higher education strategy advisor
  • Nadine Shovakar, Universität Potsdam, EDUC Project Manager
  • Katrine Moland Hansen, Universitetet i Bergen, Local ARQUS Alliance Coordinator
  • Magdalena Sikorska, Politechnika Poznańska, EUNICE Project Officer
  • Thibaut Skrzypek, EELISA, École des Ponts ParisTech, Work Package Leader
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News Video

UUU Panel 1.1 – YUFE & EC2U

Berlin, Brussels, Amsterdam, 3 November 2020. The first half of the 1st UUU panel debate — integral event of the Berlin Science Week 2020 — with Daniela Trani (YUFE), and Ludovic Thilly (EC2U). Host: Tino Brömme (ESNA)

See the second half of the panel here, and the intermission here

Good morning, Europe. Good morning, everybody. Welcome from Zagreb to Moscow, from Istanbul to Brest, welcome to the first public debate on European Universities. I’m very happy that we have this conversation here today at the Berlin Science Week, this is the first of a series that we want to repeat every month with new members of University Alliances.

Let’s start now with Daniela Trani. Welcome to our debate. You know, I’m mostly interested in examples, concrete examples. The YUFE Alliance is a very big alliance of ten universities who came together to work together. What can you do as an alliance that you cannot do alone as Maastricht University?

Daniela Trani Good morning to everyone who’s connected today, although we cannot see each other, hopefully in the next event organised by Tino, this would be possible. And thanks for inviting me to be part of the panel together with Ludovic and Peter. That’s a very interesting question, Tino. There is a lot that you can do as an alliance, which you would not do easily, as a single university. And I would give you an example that has to do with our educational activities. So, of course, the Erasmus programme has allowed our students already for the past phase to study across European countries. But what we are trying to build within YUFE and what we have launched is a pilot activity in July, is a framework where our students can choose their curriculum much more flexibly.
So we put together, for example, our educational offer, our educational expertise, give them the possibility to take these courses that will best contribute to shaping the curriculum that will allow them to achieve their professional and personal development goals. Our YUFE introduction offer that was launched at the end of July for a small group of students – because let’s not forget, we are in a pilot phase, so we are working with the relatively small numbers – we have had the first 200 students to take up two academic courses and one language course in the first semester. The courses offered by our Alliance are delivered by all the 10 universities that are part of our network. So I think this is unique and can be really a game changer in the future of higher education.

Well, this is an interesting point. You said the students are participating in creating the curriculum. Normally students, even when they leave the universities, they don’t know what they want to do. How can they create a curriculum or study plan for someone else? Is this a miracle?

Daniela Trani They are choosing for themselves, and of course, they do it also with supervision. But you actually touched upon a point that is still valid in our alliance because our students with their experience will contribute to co-create the programmes and education of the future. And in our next pilot activity, we will have the students enrolled, are actually sign up a appropriation agreements so that their contribution is not only real, but it’s also proven or they are all on track as well. So it’s not that they will be immediately deciding randomly which courses are added to the programmes, but they will have the possibility, because of their more flexible framework, to select what will be of added value for their training.

You have involved the students already in the YUFE application period (for the EU funding). So you have discussed with students about this. Do you have the impression that they had a good grasp of what are the necessary curricular topics of today? What was your impression?

Daniela Trani The students, indeed, participate already since the very beginning, since March or April 2018, as part of our core development group. And this group of students also grew over time, and currently we have a Student Forum of which I’m very proud of. That is composed of 30 students, three from each partner university. We have a good idea about what is needed for a resilient and relevant education. It can also very sharply make a connection with what is societally relevant and especially now at times of Covid, they bring in the perspective from the students who are brought in to a completely different context. They are not able to attend lessons always in the same way, and they provide each other with mutual support. But they can also advise on which tools would be relevant for the future, for our alliance, but also for individual universities.

You also have as a very core term of your project, a “virtual campus”. Now, I was wondering, I mean, MOOCs and remote learning are anything but new. You have Coursera, EdX, iversity, I think it’s German, and there are many non-commercial platforms, too, and companies use training online since ever. I mean, where’s the new element here or is it a political thing to make universities create independent non-commercial online structures? What’s the new element in this virtual campus?

Daniela Trani What we want to achieve with the virtual campus is to provide a single door to enter our university community, not only for the students, but also for citizens and for other stakeholders. For the students, we want to allow them to apply and enroll for courses that are delivered by different universities via this virtual campus. You would not need to go to the website of one university or the other, but they will have this, I would say, virtual education highway. And they will also have access for the non-academic activities that the alliance is building together with the non-academic partners, with the cities, the regions, the citizens. So it’s much more than just the website.

You mentioned, when we talked before, the YUFE Academy. This project has already started with some offers of lectures. How does that work? Can I make a degree there?

Daniela Trani The Academy is launching tomorrow with the first lecture. The topic that is addressed in this first academy is “European identity and responsibilities in a global world”. There are 20 lectures over five weeks until the 3rd of December, and it’s open to all students, citizens, staff. At the moment, it’s not that you will get a degree, it’s an activity that you will undertake voluntarily. But, of course, in the future there will also be something that can be connected to a citizen’s curriculum, for example.

When you have these different lectures – do they all speak in English? Do they speak in different languages? Are there language problems? I mean, this is an interesting fact in this concept of the University Alliance. How is the language question here?

Daniela Trani So the Academy in its first edition is in English. This is a very important point because, as I said, that we are targeting not only students whose English level is already at the certain level, but we are also targeting citizens that might not speak the language the academy will require. So in the future, of course, ideally we would like to have also multi-lingualism delivered. You could think of having subtitles, translations and we will be exploring some of these venues. But as I said before, we have to start from something. We launched this academy in English or this first version of the pilot. The next step, we have to be for sure to also investigate and test how we can effectively communicate in other languages.

This is a point I’m very interested in because I also studied languages. Well, I’d like to ask Ludovic something because his Alliance EC2U is also very interesting. Bonjour, comment ca va?

Ludovic Thilly Everything is very well, except that we are now under lockdown in France, but that’s a different story.

You cannot imagine how much my visit in Poitiers last February encouraged me to continue this exploration of the European University Alliances! I want to thank you for that again. The first point is your concept of your University Alliance, which entered the group of university alliances just this year – your name is Campus of City Universities. So there is a focus of the city and the university. I would first ask, what does this mean?

Ludovic Thilly Actually this whole story about the strong cooperation between the cities and universities is something that started a long time ago. It started actually under a different framework, to be more precise, it started under the Coimbra Group, which is a network of long standing comprehensive universities in Europe that I’m also chairing. But that’s, again, a different story. But this was based on a very long standing cooperation that some universities do have with their cities, in particular when they were created several centuries ago. With time, they really developed the sort of symbiotic relationship with their cities. And this is in particular the case in Poitiers. And this is how we arrived to this concept where we really create a framework, where there is a real policy discussion between the university and the city on all the fields where universities are playing.

So basically now we would call that the “knowledge square”. It was not called like that a few years ago, but this is clearly everything related to education, research, innovation and service to society, service to society being understood also in terms of bringing culture, bringing critical thinking to the citizens and so on. So this whole concept of very strong cooperation with the city was at the core of our alliance and all the seven universities that are in the alliance to have the same strong commitment to be in continuous contact with the citizens that are living very close to the campuses. But who are also actually participating in the many activities of the universities. So this is why this is basically the easy to use DNA.

I could imagine that you’re in close cooperation with the city, you can do it as Poitiers alone. I wonder what is the international cooperation adding here?

Ludovic Thilly Actually, you’re right in the sense that all our seven universities, they have already built some specific relationship, not always the same. By the way, sometimes there is a focus on something which is a bit more a sort of local specificity, if I may call it like that. But the other what we want to bring is all these strengths to really create – this is actually something that we are currently working on, on the another proposal that we are developing for the Horizon 2020 project. This idea of really building a sort of pan-European knowledge ecosystem where basically we would create a network of all these local ecosystems, which all together can really not only provide, let’s say, opportunities to the citizens to also learn what is going on at the different universities, but also all the other actors, typically the industries, the businesses, the SMEs can also work at the level of that network. So it’s really bringing new opportunities for all actors.

Ludovic, and this last thing with the different actors who cooperate with the university. Now that the EC2U alliance has been formed, can you give us an example?

Ludovic Thilly So actually, there are many, many things which were already started without waiting to be selected. But of course, everything will be much faster now that we are officially under the label of this initiative by the European Commission. What we are currently starting is really create also tools. And that’s an example of the things that we can not really do without the expertise of other partners. We are really building at the level of a lot of the alliance, some some joint tools, and one of them is called the EC2U Connect Centre, which will actually be the sort of series of platforms which will be not only useful to the internal life of the alliance – I’m talking here about managing the mobility of all these people, the students, the students, teachers, researchers, etc. but also making platforms where we can continuously be in contact with these other actors. So that would really boost the capacity to cooperate by having joint shared tools.
That’s a typical example. Another one would be that we are going to create a so-called Entrepreneurial Academy, which also will promote entrepreneurship amongst the students, but also amongst the other actors within the university, where there is not so much of this tradition about entrepreneurship, the researchers, sometimes the teachers as well. And we are really building on all the strengths of the seven partners here.

We have now over 100 participants on YouTube. I wanted to thank you all to be with us. … While I was listening, I was thinking about my friend, a researcher like you, who has always worries about intellectual property and these things. And there are different laws regarding higher education, as we have seen in Hungary. And there are also special safety mechanisms for researchers now with the cooperation across countries. If the countries get closer in their regulations about intellectual property, is this a good thing? Is this a progress? Where are the difficulties here and what this university alliances is, what they are doing in this field?

Ludovic Thilly I think that here we are really exactly touching upon what is the global objective of this initiative. It started by boosting more the education part of it, because it has been funded by the Erasmus programme, and basically what we are going to develop in all the 41 alliances is really a mapping of all the obstacles that we are currently facing. But there are also opportunities that we can really grasp: on building new ways of teaching amongst the different partners, how to create the so-called European degree, etc. So this requires, actually, to identify all the obstacles which are sometimes due to the differences in regulations within the old European countries. And the same goes with the research and innovation where – although (the exchange of) research and innovation is something already more developed on the level of the whole European Union, there are still some national limitations in sharing intellectual properties, etc. So this is typically where we want to go all together to identify within all the different activities, because when you look at the end with the 41 alliances, there will be hundreds of initiatives, which will not be all the same. So with this, we will have a full mapping of all the opportunities and obstacles that we need to solve. So I think this is exactly what the whole initiative is aiming at.

I would like also to ask Daniela on this point, you are also easy to you develop online platforms for teaching, for instance. But like a more political question, are these virtual infrastructures that the Universities Alliances are building genuinely European solution? Or is this something where public institutions build infrastructures which are independent from commercial infrastructures like Zoom and Google and so on? Is this part of the plan or is this just my interpretation?

Daniela Trani Of course, we want to build the tools in this case, which you are mentioning these technology tool for education, but also for society and engagement that should be as open as possible. So what you witnessed is that for many activities currently the tools available are paid tools. But I strongly believe that we have to be able to the expertise and continue to cooperate so that online learning and online knowledge availability is inclusive, open and can really be put to the service over as many learners and citizens as possible. Of course, there are a number of issues that need to be taken into account. So it’s not trivial to build a virtual platform or virutal campus.

There are security issues, there are GPDR issues. So it’s a complex, a very complex topic. And like Ludovic was saying, working with such a big partnership allows us to have access to a multitude of expertise, of human resources, not only financial resources. We can discuss that later, because obviously what we are starting to be able with our 42 alliances is something extremely complex that will also financially require a certain degree of stability for the pilot phase and beyond. That is very key for the success of the initiative. And when you start talking about I.T. and online technology, that’s also something that has a major cost that are not always affordable for a single institution. So it gain another opportunity for major problems within an alliance.
Their approach is a wonderful example of how universities can be, in Europe, more than anywhere else in the world, in the future, the engine of a society that is based on knowledge, on innovation and that can be more cohesive. (These universities) can form citizens, like Ludovic was saying, who can be critical – since we see also the spreading of fake news nowadays. And we believe that it is our responsability as universities to contribute to a citizenship where individuals are able to distinguish truth fom false information.

I like this answer. In fact, it’s a good, good point to come to the end of the first half of our encounter here.

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News Project News

United Universities 1st panel discussion


Berlin, 3 November, 2020
. Since 2017, hundreds of universities have formed “European University Alliances”. Will they become sustainable structures in the European higher education landscape? – They receive EU and national funding in order to reorganise student and staff mobility, to experiment with new course formats and create new collaboration models. Digitalisation, micro-credits, cross-border synergies, UN Sustainability Goals are some of the catch phrases of this quiet revolution.

A virtual round table has been set up to learn more about this new phenomenon, “European University Alliances”. To explain and discuss, what they are and what they do. In this first debate of a monthly series, journalist and host Tino Brömme asks: Can they make higher education better and give meaning to European citizenship? – He has invited five experts who are deeply involved in this process.

United Universities of Europe?
How European University Alliances transform higher ed

Berlin Science Week 2020
Online panel discussion + performance

Tuesday, 03 November 2020, 11.00h – 13.00h.
Bülowstr. 90, 10783 Berlin    Registration here

Panelists:
• Vanessa Debiais-Sainton, Head of the Unit B1 Higher Education of the European Commission
• Kees Kouwenaar, Coordinator of the AURORA university alliance
• Daniela Trani, director of the YUFE university alliance
• Ludovic Thilly, coordinator of the EC2U university alliance
• Peter van der Hijden, higher education consultant

Find out more about the particpants here

Host: Tino Brömme, ESNA European Higher Education News

Schedule
• 11.30 – Intro
• 11.40 – Panel 1
• 12.10 – News Break
• 12.20 – Panel 2
• 12.50 – Q&A