What are the big questions in Tertiary Education?

Here in Wales - we will shortly being having significant change (see: summary-of-the-tertiary-education-and-research-wales-act.pdf (gov.wales))

One of big changes is about having an education system that create "Cohesive communities" - but how do we do it?

I was reading some of the work of the Associate of Colleagues in the UK and I came across this webpage that I think it is core that this should be our big priority.

We need to make sure we educate future generations in a way that does not destroy the environment!

I think there is a lot of focus on young students on a conveyer belt but how do we deal with the fact that more and more older workers are existing the work force in their 50s creating an economic problem?

What can TE do to solve this problem?

Authentic assessment is undoubtedly a way of breathing life into a module, but it can also be

1. risky for students,
2. time-consuming to mark,
3. need additional explanation for verifiers, regulators, etc
4. change progression/retention/award gap stakes (hopefully positively, but you can't always know that ahead of time).

So how do we scale it, support learning, and ensure it aligns with policy and best practice?

Don't get me wrong, this can be an issue relating to poor lecturing, but it seems that this is a sector-wide issue: our students aren't seeing the value of physically coming to campus to engage with on-campus delivery.

How do we chance that?

OR

Do we need to change what we do/how we deliver to meet students where they are?

Not sure we were ever cool to begin with but universities have fallen out of favour with wider society. Whether that be the erosion of trust in experts, the belief we are bunch of 'woke lefties', or we are teaching 'mickey mouse' degrees the wider public just do not like the notion of higher education.

How as a sector do we move back to a position of acceptance? a position of respect for what we do for those around us?

How do we integrate so that society fights for us, fights for all to have the opportunity to progress their education and opportunities?

Do we need to move away from our (but not totally) our grand ideas of saving the world and more to saving our communities?

It seems clear that interdisciplinarity is going to be increasingly important for a variety of fields. Nobody needs to be an expert in it all, but STEM needs some arts and humanities and vice versa. How can we incentivise this within module teams (so that it happens!) and ensure students take the importance of interdisciplinarity seriously?

Here in Turkey we are heavily regulated and I know same in other countries - how do you create new things in these conditions?

Being embedded as a further and higher education provider in a community means supporting more non-traditional students who are less likely to achieve the desired outcomes of government in terms of retention, attainment and high levels of graduate employment due to their personal circumstances, for example student parents who wait till their children are a bit older to pursue a "graduate level career" so miss the 15-month graduate outcomes judgment.

This creates the perception of low-quality courses as no value added is taken into account.

There is a serious risk of not being able to deliver courses which have an impact on the wider community and provide an opportunity for non-traditional students by being coerced in to delivering what the government deems high quality based on a largely traditional student or traditional university provider.

How do we balance this to provide value as a provider while delivering for our students as the core stakeholder?

When teaching across SCQF Levels 4-11, including FE, HE, Masters level and schools courses the priorities of different programmes mean staff are constantly being asked to contribute to all the different priorities. How can this be better managed to avoid burn out?

Although we don't want a system that is simply about skills training that surely has to be a part of it?

In big complex systems like this - how do we build meaningful partnerships with private enterprise and make sure that there is not a mismatch between education of today and needs of tomorrow?