If it’s your first time at the festival, you’re new to higher education, or just attending alone and want to meet some other delegates – grab a coffee and come along and meet the team, and find out how to make the most of your experience.

Just because planned regulation on free speech has been paused doesn’t mean that tensions on campus are reduced or that the complexity of the issues driving those tensions is any less. One person’s free speech is another’s threatening environment, and higher education institutions will continue to come under fire for being perceived to be drawing the lines in the wrong places. We’ll assess the situation and look at practical options for managing the unmanageable.

Libraries are at the heart of higher education institutions – vital to research and teaching, with a track record of supporting student experience and skills, and key spaces for cultural and community engagement. What could libraries become if we look forward a decade together, and think radically and creatively? This workshop will feature three short provocations to get us thinking, and then convene conversations about the brightest possible future for libraries in HE, and what we need to do now to get there.

Higher education institutions have big plans to change education – to prepare students for their future careers, for a more inclusive pedagogy and curriculum, for learning that engages and inspires students to express themselves. Wonkhe and Adobe’s work on skills, curriculum and assessment, and education change explores the way that using digital tools in learning and assessment can spark fresh thinking and novel approaches. This session will invite you to imagine and design a learning experience that uses multimodal assessment to deliver on vital student outcomes in authentic and meaningful ways.

Back by popular demand: the hard-thinking and straight-talking Selena Bolingbroke and Joe Cooper help you work up your best ideas for making higher education better and pitch against your peers for an investment of Wonkhebucks.

Working in higher education is very hard. It’s an endless stream of demands, challenges, opportunities, changing policy, and that nagging sense that it’s just impossible to find the capacity to day the day job. You’ve got wonderful publications like Wonkhe that go deep on the big topics but sometimes you need a bit more.

Wonkhe and Counterculture are working to bring ideas and policy solutions to even more higher education institutions. Bring your big challenges in work and we’ll work through a live workshop with other universities to bring you some clarity on what to do next.

You’ll leave this session with new ideas, new connections, and maybe even a new project that you want to commission some further work on.

The hype is easing and we’re learning a bit more about how students and university staff might use AI-assisted technology as part of legitimate learning and teaching activity. Preparing students for the reality of a world that is AI-infused and more likely to be automated, but still fundamentally requiring human intelligence requires understanding what AI makes possible in learning, where the risks are, and how can they best be navigated. How does the availability of AI tools reshape our sense of what learning is and what sort of productive activities contribute to it?

As students’ needs change, demographics shift, and policy coalesces around the skills agenda, patterns of provision will also change in many higher education institutions, with a greater focus on meeting the needs of lifelong learners. The Open University has been leading lifelong learning provision across the UK for decades – so what’s the secret of making it work?

Ask not what government can do for higher education but what higher education can do for government policy. This workshop will examine some of the core policy agendas of national governments and convene imaginative thinking about what evidence, bright ideas, and fresh thinking higher education could bring to the table.

This interactive workshop, a mix of presentation and activities, will introduce you to the application of design thinking in higher education and show how you can apply it to a key student experience challenge.