With Dunkan H. Pritchard, Professor of Philosophy, University of California
Explore how AI affects the ways we think, learn, and teach, and consider the implications for critical thinking and educational practice.

As part of the official side events around the UN Ocean Conference 2025, IAU, the University of Bergen, the University of the West Indies, the International Science Council and other partners organise an online event bringing together voices from higher education, science and other key partners for advancing SDG 14: Life Below Water.

In 2025, we face many environmental, social and economic challenges. Universities play a crucial role in appropriately educating leaders for today and tomorrow to address these challenges. Many educators, students, and leaders agree that sustainability needs to be a priority, but the how is not always the same. How do we educate and research? How do we integrate SDGs into the curriculum? How do we transform all activities on campus and take a strategic whole-institution approach for sustainability?

UN Women calls for more Rights. Equality. Empowerment on this IWD 2025. Therefore, EWORA and the IAU invited participants to discuss how higher education institutions can empower staff to take action in favour of Gender Equality – be it through Teaching and Learning, research, campus initiatives, or when engaging with the wider community. During the panel presentations, experts shared their perspectives on policies and institutional approaches, universal challenges and innovative approaches to foster collaboration, support for academics and staff, and interdisciplinary research and partnerships at the whole institution level.

For several years, EWORA and the IAU have been advocating jointly for gender equality and equity in higher education. Furthermore, the IAU created a network, the IAU HESD Global Cluster, in 2018 with the aim to connect universities and engage them with the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

Ideally, words should clearly identify a concept and allow for a clear understanding of it. However, there are cases of ill-defined concepts. Internationalization itself is such a case, as its meaning and interpretation vary in different parts of the world. Then there are extreme cases, in which the same words have completely different meanings. This is the case of Responsible Internationalization.

This webinar discussed such different meanings of the concept of Responsible internationalization. It is composed of two parts: a general introduction on the concept of Responsible Internationalization and a panel with experts from different regions of the world debating the different interpretations of the concept.

There is now an intense focus on the purpose and role of education in times of unprecedented uncertainty, instability and existential crises. UNESCO states that society globally faces a stark choice between “continuing on an unsustainable path or radically changing course". Education is crucial to such transformative change, says UNESCO, but only if education can itself be transformed. In other words, for higher education to be an agent of change, it needs to be a subject of change itself.

Drawing on his new book Learning and Sustainability in Dangerous Times Stephen Sterling, Emeritus Professor of Sustainability Education at the University of Plymouth, outlined ten issues which restrict the ability of ESD (education for sustainable development) and parallel movements to fulfil their potential, and ten keys which could unlock the potential of education to help secure a safe and liveable future.

The IAU Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 3 Cluster, spearheaded by the eHealth Center at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC) in collaboration with the International Association of Universities (IAU), is organizing two webinars titled "Addressing Mental Health and Wellbeing in Universities" on the occasion of World Mental Health Day, celebrated on October 10th. These webinars, which will be conducted in English and Spanish, will focus on how universities are addressing the mental health and wellbeing of their staff and students.

The Middle East and North Africa (MENA) are among the youngest regions in the world. According to OECD data, more than half (55%) of the population across the MENA region, is under the age of 30. Such a young population demands access to higher education. In response to these dynamics, the MENA region’s tertiary education sector has dramatically expanded in recent years (as shown by World Bank data). Despite this expansion, overall enrollment remains low compared to other regions of the world.

The Asia-Pacific region boasts the largest higher education sector in the world, with over one-third of all higher education institutions (HEIs) located here. However, despite its size, the region’s voice in internationalization has yet to achieve the prominence it deserves on the global stage. This is evident from the low participation of HEIs from Asia Pacific in the 6th IAU Global Survey on internationalization. Understanding how internationalization is perceived and evolving in this diverse and dynamic region is crucial.

Internationalization of higher education as a concept and set of practices is subject to constant reform and re-definition. Having left behind the assumption of virtual delivery as an emergency adaptation, virtual approaches to internationalization have emerged as innovations that complement other approaches. While many practices and approaches, such as Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL) and Virtual Exchange, have flourished recently, a global dialogue across regions, perspectives and experiences is timely.

The IAU officially launched the 6th edition of the Global Survey on Internationalization of Higher Education: The Future of Internationalization of Higher Education in January 2023. The IAU accepted responses for the survey until June 2023. The survey report was published on 2 April 2024 via a live webinar. The webinar recording is available on the IAU Youtube page.

In honor of International Women’s Day 2024, the IAU and EWORA invited interested participants and experts in higher education to discuss the challenges that remain for gender equality in academic institutions, including invisible barriers and the notorious ’glass ceiling’ that prevents women from progressing to senior positions. University leaders have the responsibility to put in place policies that actively encourage and support staff in their career paths and professional development.

This webinar launched the book “Higher Education Leadership for Democracy, Sustainability and Social Justice“ published by the Council of Europe as part of its Higher Education Series. This publication is volume 26 of the series.

Latin America is currently witnessing a resurgence of interest in the different ways that higher education institutions can contribute to democratic development through stronger engagement with civil society. The purpose of this webinar is to share first-hand perspectives from Latin American countries so that the experience of Latin America can more strongly contribute to the global conversation around the democratic mission of the university and the way it may best engage with its local community and civil society. IAU Senior Fellow Marcelo Knobel presented on this MCO webinar, for which the IAU was a partner.

On 23 May 2023, the WHO announced that the COVID pandemic was no longer a health emergency. However, the emergency left in its wake many challenges that countries are now dealing with, one of them being the increase of mental health issues. Current health systems are having trouble matching the increase in demand related to mental health. Addressing mental health issues as they arise, and preventive measures are key to improving mental health at university and in society, and to avoiding more severe cases.

In times of geopolitical, social and economic upheaval, dialogue and collaborative aspects of public diplomacy are crucial. In the past, science and cultural diplomacy were seen as an important contribution of universities. More recently, the focus has shifted to knowledge diplomacy, emphasising education, research and innovation. In this vein, the development of relationships with diverse groups outside of the university sector and the use of collective resources to address needs has become increasingly important.

At the occasion of the review of SDG 6 (Clean Water and Sanitation) at the 2023 High-Level Political Forum (HLPF), on 18 July 2023, experts from the academic and professional sector addressed the above question, stressing how working with local communities and forming partnerships at the global level for capacity building and training/education are crucial for SDG 6 and all SDGs.

Generative AI has taken the world by storm since OpenAI launched ChatGPT-3 in November 2022. Generative AI is characterized by its capacity to generate human-like content based on deep learning models in response to prompts. There is a wealth of opinions about how this will impact higher education spanning from the need to limit the use in the protection of higher education to embracing the tool as a means to improve higher education.

On 5 June 2023, the UNESCO Institute for Lifelong Learning (UIL) and Shanghai Open University (SOU), in collaboration with the International Association of Universities, hosted a webinar to launch two publications on the vital role of higher education institutions in lifelong learning.

The world is in a continuous state of change. The recent geopolitical, economic and social transformations have an even more substantial impact on internationalization of higher education. This webinar marks the launch of the new issue of IAU Horizons and in particular zoom in on the In Focus section of Volume 28, Number 1, devoted to “The Future of Internationalization in a Changing World” that collects 25 opinion papers from internationalization experts from different regions of the world on how internationalization is evolving in such a changing context.

Innovative Doctoral Courses for Sustainability (IDOCOS) aims to enhance the quality of and increase access to doctoral courses through international co-creation and sharing. To support this objective, the main focus of the project has been to develop a methodology for international collaboration building on co-creation and sharing of doctoral courses.

This webinar explored the scientific, economic, political and social principles that inform or should inform HE financing. What are the actual driving forces that shape higher education funding policy? What are the tensions between funding mechanisms and academic freedom, autonomy, and governance? How can we strengthen public trust and maximise the universities’ intrinsic educational purpose and its civic mission in a way that acknowledges, supports and balances university autonomy with extrinsic national interests and labour demands? In short: what is a well-financed higher education system?

This year’s International Women’s Day 2023 (8 March) took place under the theme #EmbraceEquity: “Equality is the goal, and equity is the means to get there. Through the process of equity, we can reach equality.” One day before IWD, IAU and EWORA invited interested participants and experts from higher education to discuss how universities can be more diverse, equitable, and inclusive across their activities, and in particular when working with local communities. Amongst the speakers, we gave the floor to university leadership and other representatives of IAU and EWORA Member universities, presenting examples of good practices, and institutional and organisational perspectives.

In this webinar, IAU presented the key findings of the qualitative research project conducted as follow-up to the 2nd Global Survey on the impact of the pandemic on Higher Education. This follow-up project focuses on two aspects, namely, teaching & learning and internationalization. The aim of this qualitative research project is to investigate more into details the results and understand the reasons behind the trends emerging from the 2nd Global Survey.

This virtual meeting informed participants on the Innovative Doctoral Courses for Sustainability (IDOCOS) project and shared a first draft of the Handbook for co-creation and sharing of doctoral courses in an online and blended context.

The International Association of Universities (IAU) conducted its third survey on Higher Education and Research for Sustainable Development (HESD) in 2022. In total, 464 valid responses from higher education institutions in 120 countries were collected. As is discussed in this webinar, the findings show that higher education and partnerships are essential to address the global challenges identified in the UN Agenda 2030 and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and to build a more sustainable future together.

As we emerge from the height of the pandemic, new and old challenges risk forcing equity down the list of institutional and government priorities. How much can we expect inequalities in access and success to change if how we deliver higher education, admit students and make policy remains the same? Is more radical change needed?