Global Insights Conference offers future-focused understanding of international HE

QAA's inaugural annual Global Insights Conference took place online on 19-22 October.

QAA's Director of International Policy & Engagement Shannon Stowers welcomed delegates to our 2026 conference as "an annual touchpoint for colleagues engaged in international work" to share learning and facilitate collaboration – and introduced our keynote speaker, Dr Janet Ilieva, founder and director of Education Insight.

Dr Ilieva's perspective on the international higher education landscape explored the major developments and challenges shaping the sector. She observed that, while higher education is expanding across the world, its expansion is unevenly distributed, as more countries beyond the big four recruiters attract intentional students and as students have increasing access to study in their own territories and within their broader geographical regions. She stressed the importance of ensuring that this expansion is delivering opportunities which students can trust and which meet their needs – and emphasised that, in the case of transnational education, it remains essential that "partnerships ensure credible qualifications and comparable learning support in every location".

Offering a detailed statistical analysis, she went on to explore examples whereby, in parts of the world which have seen significant increases in demand for higher education, UK TNE's contribution to local capacity-building has "evolved to deliver unmet domestic demand". She supposed that south Asia and southeast Asia will continue to witness major growth, while noting a significant decline in the population of university-age students in China after 2035 – leading China to open its own higher education provision to regional markets.

She said that "what is most likely to emerge is competition for talent" – both retaining domestic talent and attracting international talent (a trend "driven by declining demographics in east Asia") – and argued that "to be globally competitive one has to be where the students are".

Dr Ilieva's keynote address was followed by a discussion, chaired by QAA's Shannon Stowers, on the subject of what the UK Government's International Education Strategy's expectation of "high quality" looks like in the context of international student recruitment, led by a panel featuring Sanam Arora (Chair of the National Indian Students and Alumni Union UK), Chris Chang (Deputy Vice-Chancellor for Global Engagement and Student Life at the University of Portsmouth) and Charley Robinson (Head of Global Mobility at Universities UK International).

"Is quality something we look for in students when we recruit them, or something we owe to them?" Shannon asked.

Charley argued that the International Education Strategy's ambiguous emphasis on "high-quality international students" seems less focused on issues of educational quality and more calculated to underline selectivity in relation to immigration priorities.

Sanam underlined the "deep and severe offence" provoked by calling into question the quality of students themselves, and noted that this has been an approach increasingly exploited by activists on the extremes of the political spectrum. Stressing that there's "no such thing as a low-quality student" but that there is such a thing as a "low-quality system", she pointed out that "we are in an outcomes era" – and that this is crucial when we consider what quality is. There needs, she said, to be a baseline of careers support guaranteed to international students.

Charley agreed that it's not enough for providers to assume that the graduate work visa should represent the extent of their careers offers for international students, and highlighted the careers support opportunities provided by institutions across the UK – and the importance of developing global careers capabilities and professional networks for both international and domestic students.

"The international student experience is going to be key for the future," Chris said, in terms not only of the quality of outcomes but also of the quality of that experience itself, in relation to the range of skills and opportunities institutions offer international students as they prepare them for the world of work.

He emphasised that we need to consider the whole student journey, observing that the responsibilities of student recruitment don't end at the point when a student steps through an institution's door.

The conference's second day started with the Erasmus Student Network's Jude Waites and Niamh McCourt sharing insights from research on diversity and inclusion in student mobility and from their organisation's biennial student survey, charting students' perspectives of mobility experiences, barriers to participation and effective support mechanisms – as they explained how their work promotes participation, ensures and measures the impact of the Erasmus+ scheme, and supports efforts to "make sure the student experience is as positive as possible".

They discussed how Erasmus students from disadvantaged or "fewer opportunities" backgrounds might experience support differently, and noted, for example, that "non-binary students are 20 per cent more likely to value support in choosing a university", that "students from rural backgrounds are more likely to value support on courses offered or application processes", that "students with physical and learning disabilities rated accommodation support significantly lower", and that mobility students from ethnic minority backgrounds found it more difficult to adapt. They also observed that only 58 per cent of institutions surveyed had targeted support for mobility students from low-income households.

They added that the most common problems encountered by mobility students include having insufficient funds to cover the cost of living, finding affordable accommodation, connecting with local people, and issues related to courses (including enrolment, schedules and exams).

They stressed the importance of pre-departure support, honesty and clarity in communications with students, peer-to-peer support, training for staff, and "seeing mobility through an inclusion lens". They also emphasised the value of including students who aren't necessarily obvious candidates for mobility programmes: "Erasmus is for more than just your modern languages students".

Also that day, QAA Quality Specialist Dr Sarah Hunter joined Campbell Powrie (Deputy Registrar & Head of Student Life at Heriot-Watt University) and Professor Margaret Topping (Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Global Engagement at Queen’s University Belfast) to introduce how QAA’s Global Insights networks provide a space for shared learning, collaboration and professional support tailored to specific aspects of international work – as the extant Executive Leaders (International) Networking Community is joined by our new Global Quality & Partnerships Networking Community (co-chaired by Margaret) and Global Experience & Mobility Networking Community (co-chaired by Campbell and Sarah). The former, Margaret explained, has a particular focus on ensuring that the quality assurance processes underpinning transnational provision are robust, agile and enabling, offering a supportive space for those managing quality and standards across global institutions and partnerships to share practical insights and discuss priorities and policy matters. The latter, Campbell and Sarah said, focuses on supporting and enhancing the experience of internationally mobile student populations through a community for sharing approaches to policy and practice.

Day three saw KCL's Dr Anja Harrison and Dr Mark Kennedy detailing how they have responded to the challenges of GenAI within the context of globally delivered large-scale online postgraduate provision, though the example of assessing around 2,500 students across two fully remote programmes serving cohorts based around the world and with six intakes each year. They talked us through the challenges they had faced as they addressed the impacts of the proliferation of AI-enabled information retrieval on the validity of online exams and multiple-choice quizzes. They had found that with the emergence of generative artificial intelligence some students were suddenly able to score very high marks answering 50 questions in as little as six minutes. They had therefore tested this learning by running more than 50 vivas – which had revealed a significant mismatch between the understanding shown in those vivas and the students' test results. Some high-scoring students, they discovered, struggled to explain their reasoning, justify their answers, discuss concepts in depth and transfer knowledge to new situations.

Their students would explain the reasoning behind their increasing use of this technology: "My peers are almost certainly using AI and, if I don't use it, I'm at a disadvantage."

"That temptation was just so ever-present for our students," they said.

Asking themselves what they were really assessing – and what was the point in assessing this way – they therefore looked to design authentic and scalable assessments which would protect academic integrity, remain accessible, measure and elevate learning, and reflect real-world practice. They focused on what graduates should be able to do: to interpret evidence, synthesise findings, critically evaluate, exercise judgement, communicate clearly and make recommendations. They are therefore now implementing a range of capability-based assessments, including policy briefs, research proposals, public engagement materials, evidence-based recommendations, evidence reviews and applied analyses, through assessment strategies co-produced with student panels. They emphasised that they want students to understand why they're doing what they've been asked to do and to take their agency into the completion of assessment tasks – to make their thinking processes visible.

AI, they stressed, has exposed existing weaknesses – vulnerabilities in assessment design which predated generative artificial intelligence. They underlined the importance of generating meaningful evidence of learning and of thinking about assessment at the programme level, balancing approaches across the entire student journey.

This, they said, is still a work in progress: "We're still learning what works."

Anja and Mark's session was followed by a presentation on supporting TNE students during geo-political crises from Professor Tenia Kyriazi (Deputy Director of Teaching & Learning at Middlesex University Dubai) and Simon Bradbury (Pro Vice-Chancellor International at De Montfort University), who considered key questions about crisis management and institutional preparedness raised by the impacts of recent events in the Middle East on delivery based in the UAE.

"What we do in the first hours and days shapes how safe, informed and supported students feel for as long at the crisis lasts," Tenia said.

Encouraging institutions to prepare in advance for such unexpected crisis, she shared five key lessons her campus had learnt from the events of spring 2026: decide small and cascade consistently; communicate through every channel available, constantly; be ready before permission arrives; support students wherever they are; and secure contingencies early, especially for accredited programmes. She explained how she and her colleagues had produced templates for staff to use to respond to students' questions, how they had moved to online delivery as soon as the authorities gave permission, and how they had set up online community-building events and town-hall-style meetings.

"Our experience with Covid proved to be a real asset," she said, as the essential online learning infrastructure had become standard. "Continuity of learning was our primary consideration and we assured the students that we would minimise disruption… wherever they were."

She recommended a series of measures that institutions should put in place: establish a small empowered decision-making group; prepare scripts before the crisis; maintain the use of every channel in parallel; be always ready to move online; approach professional bodies before you know you may need to run assessments online; and feed the lessons back into crisis plans while they are still fresh.

She articulated a series of questions which institutions can usefully ask themselves now: Does your crisis management plan cover branch campuses and transnational education, and who can make decisions quickly? How quickly could you reach every affected student directly, wherever they are? What existing infrastructure could you activate tomorrow, rather than build from scratch? Do you know what remote-assessment contingency your professional bodies would accept?

Simon explained how, within DMU's crisis management strategy, major incident planning was activated at the end of February. As Gold Command, their Dubai campus leadership met with senior management based in Leicester on a daily basis. Authority for urgent decision-making was delegated to SMU's Silver Command based in Dubai. Gold and Silver decision-making was informed by daily briefings which combined external and local intelligence, and included specialist commissioned briefings, government and embassy reporting, staff and professional networks, and coordination with other UK campuses in Dubai.

Of 161 logged activities, he noted that 35 per cent comprised people-related actions (including bi-weekly staff pulse surveys and weekly staff briefings), and 28 per cent related to academic continuity, while 11 per cent related to infrastructure adjustments.

One of the most important areas of learning, he observed, was around how the campus built for recovery and resilience, ensuring that a focus on the future was built into thinking during the height of the crisis.

"It's strong teamwork that makes these things work," he said. "Everybody pulled together… It's often in times of crisis that our teams show their best sides."

The fourth and final day of our Global Insights Conference began with the Open University's Catherine Bland and Robyn Corcoran looking at building sustainable validation partnerships across complex international contexts to ensure effective approaches to the management of quality and standards.

Working in 15 countries with 39 partners currently serving around 65,000 students, the Open University has validated awards received by 210,000 students across more than 390 validated programmes.

Sustainable partnerships, they said, are not built on processes alone: they depend on shared purpose and relationships strong enough to support trust and transparency and to sustain challenge and improvement. They stressed that working in partnership can bring high value but also high risk – and that this risk is increased when working internationally and when working at scale, and "is dynamic, not something mitigated once through an initial approval". Risks, they added, include academic, operational, reputational and financial risks, as well as risks of non-compliance with regulatory requirements. They explained that exit strategies are discussed and agreed in the earliest stages of partnership development, at the point of initial due diligence and risk assessment – and that quality assurance is not simply at the point of validation or revalidation but is an ongoing process through a connected system which underpins holistic institutional oversight and which carefully balances that oversight with their partners' expectations of autonomy. They noted that sustainability requires responsiveness, and that having explicit processes and governance ensures accountability and both institutional and student protection.

"Our confidence comes with triangulating the evidence across the full quality cycle," they said – through cyclical processes of partnership (re)approval, programme validation, annual review, external scrutiny, award controls and ongoing engagement, risk management and enhancement – while maintaining an environment of open, honest and transparent dialogue which allows partnerships to raise and address challenges and to tackle any issues head on.

"Partnership is partnership," they emphasised. "It's not transactional."

The conference concluded with an exploration of international collaboration, partnership development and the role of global quality standards, from the perspectives of overseas institutions, with a panel featuring the Maldives National University's Dr Aminath Shiyama, Emirates College for Advanced Education's Amanda Forte, and Dr Nathalie Bouldoukian from the American University of the Middle East – all of whose institutions have been awarded QAA accreditation.

Dr Bouldoukian said that, as an important aspect of her institution's journey, the American University of the Middle East's approach to international collaboration is founded on three pillars: mission-driven strategic partnerships focusing on transformative areas in higher education; global academic and research engagement and collaboration across diverse disciplines; and partnerships based in excellence creating opportunities for gaining international perspectives, exchanging best practices, exploring collaborations, and engaging with the wider global academic community.

Dr Shiyama stressed Maldives National University's emphasis on the importance of its global outlook. Explaining its ambitions to develop deeper international partnerships in mobility, joint research, curriculum development and knowledge exchange, she highlighted her institution's capacity as "a living laboratory for global challenges" in such areas as marine science, coral reef conservation, climate change, island resilience, disaster risk reduction, sustainability, education and community-based research.

Amanda Forte detailed Emirates College for Advanced Education's strategic focus on educational excellence and lifelong learning, research and innovation, and its "glocal footprint and impact" as "a heritage custodian committed to leaving its sustainable mark on global developments while deepening its roots in Emirati culture and values". She explained that her institution's strategy for international collaboration underlined the value of joint research and knowledge exchange, opportunities for international learning and student mobility, and the balance between Emeriti identity and global expertise, whereby "international partnership and benchmarking strengthen programme quality".

"It's really important to have accreditations," she added. "If we're going to partner with somebody, we need to know they have a quality product and they have confidence in us. We want to partner with people of the same mind."

"We need to look at compatibilities between institutions and what institutions can contribute to each other," Nathalie said.

QAA's Director of Contract Services Jennifer Taylor concluded the conference by thanking our speakers for their rich and interesting contributions.

"Huge thanks are due to our speakers and to everyone who took part in this fascinating and insightful conference," added organiser Max Jaede, Membership Quality Specialist at QAA. "We very much look forward to our Global Insights members continuing to engage with our work and joining us in our networks and events throughout this academic year."